Sometimes you want a man who buys you flowers and takes you dancing. At other times you long for a man who’ll be good with the kids and not moan about wrestling a roof rack onto the car. And sometimes, just sometimes, you feel the insatiable desire for a man who’ll look you in the eyes with a demonic glare and lead you slowly up a mountain in a thunderstorm to sacrifice wild animals and do something so filthy to each other’s dark places that it cannot be printed in a family newspaper.
Erm, excuse me a minute, sorry — it’s just that I saw Macbeth last night, the new film starring Michael Fassbender that has been getting four-star reviews, and now I want this all the time. Oh God, help. The man is a simmering beast of fury and legend, and every woman I know wants to have sex with him, as do several of my male friends. In fact, we have decided that all men should be more Fassbender, as this is clearly the next stage in evolution for humankind.
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If you don’t know who he is, then this is exciting for you, because the pleasure and the darkness are all to come. Fassbender is a 38-year-old actor, with a German father and an Irish mother, who began the 21st century in TV dramas and is now a huge movie star. Once you know who he is, you will realise he’s that guy who is in everything, with his steely containment, his stare. The cruel slave master who whips Patsey in 12 Years a Slave; the compulsive sex addict at the heart of Shame; the soldier picked by Churchill to spy on the Germans in Inglourious Basterds; Rochester in Jane Eyre; Steve Jobs in the forthcoming biopic; something equally distressingly strong in X-Men, and I don’t even like the X-Men films. Oh, Fassy.
The time has come to forget Clooney suaveness — that was all a bit Tony Blair, a bit 2007. The Beckham nice guy/sporting dad vibes have been done to death, and the Cumberbatch geeky thing only inspires me to want a really good conversation with the chap. The current hot crush is Fassbender, who has nothing boyish about him. A rock, but also a river, who contains something dark and mysterious inside him. So what is it?
I did a poll of my friends to find out why they fancy him, and the results were so incriminating, I have had to remove their names, as they are all married. Let’s take Friend A, who lives near Fassy’s house. This friend used to see him in the park, where he was a regular. “I basically trained my dog to drop his ball between Fassy’s feet while he was working out,” she admits.
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Friend B says: “I can’t explain what it is, but I really could stare at that man all day. Those eyes should look shifty, but they’re hypnotic. Like when he plays Rochester, with all that repressed passion on the moors, the long, lingering looks and the eyes that reduce me to a gibbering idiot every time I watch it. Oh boy, I think I need a lie-down.”
Then there’s Friend C, who insists she even loved him in Frank, a film in which he plays a man with a papier-mâché mask over his head. She couldn’t even see him, for God’s sake.
And then there’s his penis. I’m sorry to spell it out like that, but it’s a big part of things. Literally. In fact, it was the first penis my daughter ever saw, as we walked in late to the mums-and-babies screening of Shame at our local cinema (it’s a very enlightened cinema) — there it was, sky high, close up on the screen, as we entered. I couldn’t help but stop and stare, with my few-month-old also trying her best to focus on the thing. If she ends up attracted to men like him — or simply with unrealistic expectations of size — I shall have only myself to blame. In that film, he played a sex addict with a tenderness and complexity that seemed to lock in one level behind the character’s self-obsession. His compassion towards his messed-up sister, played by Carey Mulligan, also felt complicated and real.
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And in Macbeth, in cinemas now, there is a scene where — I don’t want to reveal any spoilers, but this happens pretty early on, so it’s not going to ruin anything — Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard) and her husband (Fassbender) plot a murder while they are having sex. Standing up. In the back room of a feast. He’s thrusting stealthily into her while agreeing to betray King Duncan in his sleep. It’s one of the most arresting things I’ve seen in the cinema for some time. In another scene, he’s standing on the battlefield, stained in blood and mud and surrounded by rotting corpses, recently visited by witches and the stench of death, and you’re looking at him, thinking what power Shakespeare can bring to the big screen. All right, you’re looking at him thinking, “Yeah, yeah, I would.”
Why do we feel this way? Because he’s a man, not a boy racer, not a kidult, and not an action hero either. He’s muscular, damaged, confident, not traditionally attractive. He’s not particularly tall and he isn’t well dressed in the paparazzi shots you see of his everyday life. But he manages to contain both an agonising vulnerability and an almost scary alpha-male thing at the same time, which is mesmerising to watch. And then there’s his chopper.