As I mentioned earlier this week, Michael Fassbender is part of GQ Mag’s “Men of the Year” issue – Fassie was named the “Breakout of the Year”. Well deserved, and I imagine Fassie will be making lots of “best of” lists this year, and I imagine that he’s quickly becoming one of the leading contenders for a Best Actor Oscar nomination. Sigh… I love some Fassie in the morning. Even though I’m not totally crazy about these photos, I still kind of want to lick his face. Anyway, you can now read the full GQ interview online here – there are a lot of quotes from directors that have worked with him, all about how awesome he is. I’m just doing some of the highlights.
When he shows up for this interview on a sunny New York morning, it is not immediately clear what the fuss is about. He says hello, lights up a Camel, and dissolves sleepily into a deck chair on a terrace in Chelsea… He doesn’t look anything like he does on-screen, and this is not a roundabout way of implying that he is short. It’s a neutral fact.
Fassbender’s hair is close-cropped and gingery…his chin is blurred by whiskers and his forehead well lined. In person, wearing a faded T-shirt, leather jacket, and boots with the sort of white cotton socks your dad might buy, he’s manageably beautiful—the kind of man whose face warrants a pause, not a faint. When Fassbender claims that people still don’t recognize him on the street—that his favorite activity is to “observe, blend in, and disappear amongst the crowd”—it’s possible to believe him, because he can evidently molt skins.
“Michael’s got a working-class attitude, in a good way,” says David Cronenberg, and Fassbender’s approach does contain an element of manual labor. To prepare for a role, he’ll read a screenplay as many as 300 times in daily shifts of seven hours. What he first seeks in a project is literary merit: “I like a story that is challenging to me as a reader, and therefore as an audience, and therefore as a player.” Which often translates into parts he can disappear into.
When asked how he readied himself for [Shame’s] many nude scenes, he is characteristically proletarian: “You feel awkward and mortified, but you get on with it. I’m not easily embarrassed.”
If Shame fails to strip Fassbender of his cheerful anonymity, Prometheus will. Ridley Scott’s latest addition to the Alien franchise almost guarantees the actor will be ubiquitous before July. For his part, Scott doesn’t care whether his leading man is a household name by then. As he puts it simply, “Michael is the real thing.”
[From GQ]
The GQ piece is written by a woman, and I suspect she’s a Fassloonie, just because of the distinct lack of Fassie quotes. In my mind, she assessed him coolly, realized that although he didn’t look exactly like he does on screen, he’s still really, mind-blowingly sexy, and she promptly began humping his leg. What? That’s what I would have done, and that ends an interview fast. I like that she mentions how working class he is, and how that’s his approach to film-making too. He’s so sexy. He doesn’t need money. All he needs is that face. And that dong.
UPDATE: Crap, there’s video too.
Photos courtesy of Nathanial Goldberg/GQ.
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