Michael Fassbender relaxing in the role of modern leading man

Michael Fassbender may not be in the Marlon Brando league just yet, but the comparisons make sense.

Michael Fassbender attends a special screening of Assassin’s Creed in New York last month. Picture: AFP

“Let’s take a look at this view,” says Michael Fassbender, striding over to the window of the swanky London hotel room. The lights of Mayfair wink beneath his feet. It’s a decent enough metaphor for how far the Irish-German actor has come since I first interviewed him in 2009.

Then Fassbender was still flushed from the reviews for his first big film role, as the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen’s Hunger. Now he’s on the A-list: Oscar nominations for playing the title role in Steve Jobs and a plantation owner in McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave; global fame as Magneto in the rebooted X-Men; comparisons with Marlon Brando; and a movie-star girlfriend, the Swedish actress Alicia Vikander.

Last time Fassbender arrived on his own and we spent two hours wandering between cafes in east London. This time we have 40 carefully allocated minutes at Claridge’s, and he is whisked in and out by a phalanx of publicists. Back then he spoke in awe of working with Brad Pitt on Inglourious Basterds. Now he’s arguably a bigger star than Pitt; certainly more critically acclaimed.

You’ve gone up in the world, I say. “Yeah, it’s nuts,” Fassbender says in an accent that’s still mostly Irish, but with a hint of London and perhaps a smidgen of Los Angeles. He’s 39 and has the sheen of celebrity: handsome and sharp-casual in blazer, shirt and jeans, his reddish hair and beard immaculately trimmed. He says he is happier than he was when we first met. “It takes a lot of energy to get to the position I was at in 2009, to come from obscurity. I feel like I’m a bit more relaxed perhaps.”

Relaxed? It’s not the first word you would use to describe a man whose commitment to his roles seems just as scary as it was when he limited himself to 600 calories a day to play Sands. His latest film is Assassin’s Creed, a surprisingly thought-provoking adaptation of the video game, which he starred in and produced (a stepping stone, he hopes, towards directing, which he would like to do in the next few years). The way he drops off his chair on to one knee as he is talking does not suggest relaxation.

Assassin’s Creed is his second film as producer after the modest indie flick Slow West, and with a budget close to $200 million was “a baptism of fire”, he says. Resident Evil, Mortal Combat, Tomb Raider: history isn’t stuffed with amazing films based on games. “The bar hasn’t been that high, has it?” he says with a laugh. “I just said, ‘It would be worse if they were all excellent and we made the one that was a dud.’ So in a way we had nothing to lose.”

On top of his duties as producer, Fassbender plays two roles in the film: Cal, a modern-day Irish criminal, and Aguilar, his distant ancestor, a masked Assassin in 15th-century Spain who is adept with fists, hidden blades and arrows, and at leaping between rooftops. “If I wasn’t in the gym I was working on the script, or doing fight choreography, or parkour, or talking about casting,” he says.

Marion Cotillard, Fassbender’s co-star in Macbeth (2015) and this film, claims to have heard him grunting on set. Guilty, he says. “I would turn up an hour and a half early before make-up call and she probably caught the tail end of my workout. And yeah, I am an extremely vocal worker-outer. I am the Monica Seles of the gym.”

Although he is not yet in the same league as Brando, I can see why he has been compared to him: the emotional intensity, the physicality, his ease with his (ripped) body. Fassbender had no problem appearing naked, simulating sex, urinating even, in McQueen’s Shame (2011), in which he played a sex addict, and he was bemused by the subsequent furore over the size of his penis. “It’s all about the cock for you, isn’t it?” he said to one interviewer.

Still, there are worse problems to have. How does he feel about his nickname, the Hackney unicorn, which refers to the infrequency with which he is sighted near his flat in east London and to his, er, generous endowment? “It’s hilarious. I like it!” he says, guffawing. And who wouldn’t?

He is just as charming as when we met before, only bristling when the conversation turns to Vikander, whom he has been dating on and off since meeting her two years ago on the set of The Light Between Oceans. That film, a weepie in which they play a couple in the 1920s, was a rare iffy entry on his CV. Reviewing for The Times, Kevin Maher gave it one star, citing the lack of chemistry between the leads and wondering if “they were so protective of their real relationship that they left nothing for the cameras”.

“I don’t agree. I think chemistry is chemistry: it’s either there or it’s not,” Fassbender says. “We just work really well together — she’s a fantastic actor and she brings it on the day of shooting and you have to try to keep up. It’s a sparring, dancing thing: you’re supporting each other, provoking each other.”

He is palpably relieved when we move from sex and love back to violence and Assassin’s Creed. There is certainly no shagging for Cal or Aguilar, the ancestor whose experiences he taps into by way of a gizmo called the animus. A theme of the film is genetic memory, in which a disposition towards violence is passed down through generations. “I thought that was absolutely plausible,” he says. “Survival tools that are embedded in our DNA.” Has he inherited any aggressive urges from Fassbenders gone by? “I don’t think I’m hugely aggressive, no. I can have moments when I have a temper ...”

Although he thinks America’s piousness about sex and permissiveness about violence is “bizarre”, he is interested in why violence holds such a fascination: in computer games, boxing, bullfighting. The most recent time he was in a proper fight was in Edinburgh in 2006. “I’ve still got the scar to show for it,” he says, pointing to his cheek. “Bouncer. I didn’t even get into the club.” His character in Shame had a similar experience, I say. “Yeah, that was a little bit of sense memory there.”

Another theme of Assassin’s Creed is the struggle between free will, as exemplified by the Assassins, and authoritarianism, represented by their enemies, the Knights Templar. That reminds me of something Fassbender said when we met previously. Talking about his dual heritage — his mother is from Northern Ireland and his father is from Germany — he said: “I suppose my German side wants to keep everything in control and my Irish side wants to wreak havoc”.

When I mention this he smiles. “Perhaps, yeah, half of me is Templar and half is Assassin.”

Born in Germany, Fassbender moved at the age of two to County Kerry in the Republic of Ireland, where his parents ran a restaurant. Being “a trustworthy young fellow”, he became head altar boy at the local Catholic church.

By his teens he knew he wanted to be an actor and left home at 19 to study at the Drama Centre London, where he was in the year below Russell Brand.

He later dropped out to join a touring production of The Three Sisters by the Oxford Stage Company, whose artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole, he would challenge to games of pool in exchange for parts.

“I hustled him for three lead roles,” he says. “I never got them, though.”

For all his arty sensuality, there is something of the lad about Fassbender. He peppers his talk with sporting references: Celtic and Rangers, the rugby player Brian O’Driscoll, the mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor.

He didn’t have to wait too long for his big break, winning his first screen role in 2001 in Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers.

He has been working ever since, building up bodies of work with McQueen, Justin Kurzel, who directed Macbeth and Assassin’s Creed, and Ridley Scott, who cast him as an android in Prometheus and its forthcoming sequel, Alien: Covenant.

“That’s what I always wanted,” says Fassbender. “It’s great when you find that common ground: someone who brings out the best and the worst in you.”

That “worst” is crucial. His most compelling characters, from Sands to Jobs, have been dark, disturbing — “off-centre”, as he puts it. Perhaps that’s what was wrong with The Light Between Oceans; he played a genuinely good man. If so, his slate is hearteningly full of flawed types.

He is playing an alcoholic detective in The Snowman, an adaptation of Jo Nesbo’s thriller, and a Lucifer-like character in Terrence Malick’s Weightless, a drama set against the music scene in Austin, Texas, in which he has scenes with Iggy Pop and John Lydon, with whom he got on “like a house on fire”.

Then there’s his long-cherished project to put Cu Chulainn, the hero of Irish myth, on the big screen. The film is close to happening, says Fassbender. Chulainn was “very similar to an Achilles, but with a Gaelic twist; very egocentric as well, and he would go into a berserker mode and take out 30 men.”

It sounds a perfect fit. Flawed. Physical. Anything but relaxed.

The Times