For the longest time, Michael Fassbender was just another jobbing actor on the London circuit. He worked in advertisements and radio, played Michael Collins on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe, and landed supporting characters in television dramas. To make ends meet, he supplemented his income with jobs in bars, cafes and warehouses.
By his late twenties, when the global recession had hit the film business and work had become scarce, Fassbender was beginning to doubt his abilities as an actor. He wondered if he might be better suited to the catering industry, having spent his teenage years working in the family restaurant in Killarney. “Acting success didn’t happen overnight for Michael,” said Donal Courtney, his friend and former mentor. “He struggled along the way like any young actor.”
When Steve McQueen, a Turner prize-winning artist, cast him as IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands in the 2008 film Hunger, Fassbender’s career was transformed. Phil de Semlyen, a writer for the film magazine Empire, said: “Fassbender and McQueen created this amazing performance, which got the attention of the film-making and critical community. They found kindred spirits in each other and went on to make Shame [2011] and 12 Years a Slave [2013]”.
After Hunger, Fassbender quickly became one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars. Last year the box office takings for his films — which included Frank and X Men: Days of Future Past — amounted to $746m (€657m), according to Forbes magazine.
So far this year, he has appeared in the Sundance hit Slow West, which he co-produced, and an adaptation of Macbeth. This autumn we will see him as Steve Jobs in a biopic from Trainspotting director Danny Boyle. The film’s trailer is encouraging, according to critics, even though Fassbender doesn’t look like the Apple co-founder. “[The scriptwriter] Aaron Sorkin has written a very dense, almost Shakespearian, corporate melodrama with a family element thrown in,” said de Semlyen. “Fassbender has the charisma and magnetism needed to play Jobs.”
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Sorkin may have needed convincing, however. If last year’s Sony email leaks are to be believed, the scriptwriter questioned Fassbender’s suitability for the role. Like Jobs, however, Fassbender knows how to command an audience and has a relentless work ethic. At 16 Fassbender moved into the apartment above his family restaurant, the West End House, where his parents gave him autonomy in return for doing weekend shifts.
“Even starting out, he was driven and hardworking,” said Courtney, who was Fassbender’s first acting coach and now works at Dublin’s Gaiety School of Acting. “He’s the hardest-working actor I’ve ever come across and I’ve been teaching acting for the past 20 years. I assume his parents have a huge part in it — they are hard-working people. That work ethic was instilled in Michael from an early age.”
Throughout his career, Fassbender has excelled at playing repressed characters, including an amoral boyfriend in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), or psychiatrist Carl Jung exploring treatment of sexual dysfunction in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (2011).
By contrast his nude scenes in Shame, in which he played a sex addict, let audiences see an entirely different side to the actor. At the Golden Globes three years ago, George Clooney joked that Fassbender had taken over the “frontal nude responsibility” he had once held. The Killarney man shrugged off the jokes. “A proportion of us in the human race have penises and another proportion have seen them, whether they be mothers, girlfriends or partners, so I don’t know why it’s so unusual to show that in a movie,” he said.
While Fassbender has played tortured souls — whether in indie dramas such as Shame or blockbusters including the X-Men franchise, in which he depicts the sociopath Magneto — he leaves the misery at the studio door. The actor is renowned for his crocodile grin and love of a good party. In Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank, he played the enigmatic leader of an experimental art band. In reality, he prefers AC/DC, Metallica and Slayer. “He’s a great mimic, with great comedic qualities; a real extrovert,” Courtney said.
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“He’s so perky, it drives you crazy,” Cronenberg once said. “One day I found him out in the sun in his costume and make-up, with this big smile. I said, ‘Michael, why are you smiling like that?’ He said, ‘I don’t know . . . life.’ I said, ‘It’s so irritating that you’re happy all the time.’”
Fassbender was born in April 1977 in Heidelberg, Germany, to father Josef, a chef from Germany, and mother Adele, who hailed from Larne in Northern Ireland. In 1979 the family moved to Kerry and settled in Fossa, a village near Killarney. Fassbender’s German heritage helped inform his role in Quentin Tarantino’s war drama Inglourious Basterds, but Ireland was instrumental in his upbringing.
“People always say, ‘Do you consider yourself German or Irish?’” he once said. “I grew up in Ireland from two. That’s where I formed my personality and that’s where my friends are from. I have friends I hang out with who I’ve known since I was four. But then I think maybe my work discipline comes from my German side.”
He and sister Catherine attended Fossa National School. “Michael was a lovely, charming young boy,” said the school’s deputy principal Linda O’Donoghue. “He was bright, had an interest in the arts and history, and loved singing . . . He’d a very roguish smile, always. Many’s the time if he got into trouble, his roguish smile would get him out of it.”
The young Fassbender played with Fossa GAA club and served as altar boy in the local Catholic church. “That was my first experience, in a way, of being on stage, before an audience,” he has said. He discovered formal acting through Courtney’s workshops at St Brendan’s College in Killarney. “Michael was mature for a 17-year-old doing his first acting classes,” Courtney said. “He was focused and wanted to research and find out about drama schools. He had a clear map in his mind. He was driven and talented.”
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At 18, with friends, he organised a stage adaptation of Reservoir Dogs at Revelles nightclub in Killarney. After taking an acting course at Colaiste Stiofain Naofa in Cork, he moved to London to find his fortune. At 24 he was cast in Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers. This was the big time, he thought, but when he went back to London he returned to working behind a bar.
Hunger illustrated Fassbender’s fastidious approach to his craft. He lost 14kg to play Sands, and a 17-minute scene in which a priest, played by the Irish actor Liam Cunningham, attempts to talk Sands out of his protest was shot in a single take. He met American sex addicts for Shame, and steeped himself in Marvel comic books for the X-Men films.
Fassbender’s star ascended with Jane Eyre (2011) and Prometheus (2012), although there were mis-steps along the way. Two years ago The Counselor, a drug-trafficking thriller, was a critical and commercial flop, while Jonah Hex (2010) grossed only $10m on a $47m budget. But as the Bafta and Golden Globe nominations rolled in, alongside a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for his role in 12 Years a Slave, Fassbender became a leading man and pin-up.
The actor’s work ethic has not slowed; he is producing a film adaptation of the video game Assassin’s Creed and a film about Irish folk-hero Cúchulainn. He has also talked about his desire to direct. “He’s got everything,” said de Semlyen. “He’s handsome, a gifted actor with a good range, and charismatic. Guys who exude that movie-star quality don’t grow on trees. He’s smart, works hard and picks good roles.”
“He’s not someone who had a lucky break; he has a huge repertoire of skills so he’ll always work,” added Courtney. “A lot of my students don’t know about my connection to him, but mention him as the person they admire the most. People recognise he has developed a craft as an actor — he’s not just a film star.”
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Successful actors even use Fassbender’s career as a template for their own. Daniel Radcliffe applies what he calls the “Fassbender test” to every project he is offered: “If you’re ever being asked to do something, you ask the question, ‘Would Michael Fassbender do it?’”
It’s just as well, then, the Kerryman never did opt for a career in catering.