By Joe Utichi
ACADEMY Award-nominated actor Michael Fassbender has enjoyed a whirlwind career since breaking through as the star of Hunger, director Steve McQueen’s haunting profile of Irish Republican Army hunger striker Bobby Sands. It was only his third feature role, but Fassbender won a British Independent Film Award for the part and began an ascendance as a movie star that shows little sign of slowing.
A trio of films in 2009 demonstrated
Fassbender’s extraordinary range. He starred in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Blood Creek from director Joel Schumacher and Andrea Arnold’s stirring Fish Tank, which won British Academy of Film and Television Arts’s Best British Film award. Since then, he’s been at the top of casting wish lists for directors, including David Cronenberg (A Dangerous Method), Steven Soderbergh (Haywire), Ridley Scott (Prometheus and The Counselor) and Cary Joji Fukunaga (Jane Eyre).
He’s also become a bona fide box-office star as part of the X-Men franchise. Fassbender plays Erik Lensherr, the mutant who goes by the name Magneto, in three films: X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse, alongside costars including James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult.
The year 2015 was a banner year for Fassbender, offering three lead roles that played to the actor’s extraordinary range. He played Silas Selleck in John Maclean’s indie Western Slow West, the enigmatic Apple founder in Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor; and Shakespeare’s Scottish king in Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth, alongside Marion Cotillard.
Fassbender is reunited with Kurzel and Cotillard, playing dual roles as Callum Lynch, a death-row convict spared execution by the Templars, as well as his 15th-century ancestor, Aguilar de Nehra, a Master Assassin who fought the Spanish Inquisition in his quest to keep a sacred artifact out of Templar hands. Based on the hit Ubisoft video-game series, Assassin’s Creed also stars Jeremy Irons and Brendan Gleeson. (20th Century Fox’s Assassin’s Creed is now in Philippine theaters.)
In the following Q&A, Fassbender explains his attraction to the role, and what it takes to become a Master Assassin.
What’s your history with the Assassin’s Creed franchise?
I met with Ubisoft Motion Pictures in 2011, and I didn’t really know much about the game at that point. I’d obviously heard about it and seen all the posters and adverts, but I really didn’t know the story or methodology behind it. When I met up with the guys, they told me the whole premise behind it: this idea of DNA memory and the war that was waging between the Templars and the Assassins, and the idea that Adam and Eve were the first Assassins. I thought all of that was really fascinating stuff.
Have you picked up the games since signing on?
Of course, I did, but I’m not very good. (Laughs) But I think that’s something we’ve been focusing on this, as well. We realize the fans really dig the historical accuracy and all the historical detail. Hopefully, we’re not going to let any fans of the games down because the great thing about gamers is that they have this passion for it. Their passion spurs you on, and you know you’re making it for an audience that’s critical and passionate and hungry for it. They’ll let you know if you don’t get it right.
And, hopefully, we’re going to bring extra things to it—our own things. We don’t want to make a video game, obviously. That’s sometimes where these types of films go wrong—when they try and do that. We definitely want to do something cinematic, and we’re introducing new characters and new regression time periods, so we can actually bring something to it. We’re hoping there’ll be parallels going back and forth—we use off the games and they’ll use off the movies in the future.
Is it interesting to play two characters in one movie who have this odd genetic connection?
It is because they’re very different people. Aguilar is part of a family and he believes very strongly in the Creed. He belongs to the Creed and he serves for the Creed. In contrast, Cal is somebody who’s much more of a drifter, really. He’s been in and out of correctional facilities for most of his life. He’s fairly underprivileged and doesn’t really believe in much. He’s certainly got no alliance to anything, because his family is taken away pretty early. It’s with his journey, through Aguilar, that he starts to learn where he comes from and that he does belong to something. He belongs to this bloodline and that’s something special. This discovery gives him a direction for the first time in his life.
Is this the most physical role you’ve had?
Yes, it was definitely physical. I did a lot of training in the gym and all that jazz. The stunt stuff was fun—trying to get it right was the most important thing, and trying to keep up with the stunt team was the challenge. Our stunt team was fantastic.
Did you spend a long time on Aguilar’s look?
There were discussions about how far to go with him and we didn’t want to go too far because we didn’t want to add something just for the sake of adding it on. It was all about keeping it as simple as possible with the differences between Aguilar and Cal. The costume designer, Sammy (Sheldon-Differ) did amazing work. With some of the costumes in the game, they look great but you couldn’t really translate them that well into film. They might look just a little off. That was a major part of it, the costume, and the look we discussed off the back of it. It was long hair, beard, all the classics. (Laughs) And just some contact lenses to give me brown eyes instead of blue. The eyes are funny because you’re like, “Something’s different,” but you don’t really know what.
Did the costume feel quite empowering?
It was the same as with everything—when you put on the uniform of the character, it gives you that extra element. It helped me remember the physicality from the game—which is why I kept playing the game, to get the physicality and the shapes, and that definitely is always a reminder. Putting on the costume I could see all of the different poses that I needed to take—different killing stances.