Acclaimed actor Michael Fassbender is going from Macbeth to Macintosh in his latest roles. He talks to Helen Barlow.
Michael Fassbender is all over the place. Medieval Scotland. Silicon Valley. Fifteenth century Spain. The Old West. Stuck on a rock in the Indian Ocean. He sure gets around. He's even shot two movies on location in New Zealand in the past couple of years.
There was Slow West, the arty indie cowboy flick released earlier this year, in which the Mackenzie Country doubled for Colorado.
And still to come is The Light Between Oceans, also starring Rachel Weisz and Fassbender's girlfriend, rising Swedish star Alicia Vikander, which was partly shot in the Marlborough Sounds and partly in Tasmania, doubling for a lonely lighthouse island off the coast of Western Australia.
For Oceans, American director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond The Pines) adapted Australian writer M.L. Stedman's 2012 novel about a lighthouse keeper and his wife, who raise a baby they rescue from a lifeboat.
"Tasmania was amazing," he says. "I didn't have my motorbike this time, though I did get my hands on one in New Zealand, courtesy of a friend. So I toured around the North Island, which was great."
He probably needed the time off, because by the looks of it Fassbender is the hardest-working man in multiple genres - Shakespearean epic, check. Greek god biopic, check. Videogame adaptation and return to superhero franchise, check and check.
The first is Macbeth, in which Fassbender makes his mark as the Thane of Cawdor with ambitions on the Scottish throne.
Michael Fassbender features on the cover of this week's TimeOut:
Early reviews suggest Fassbender may have created a classic screen portrayal - one that might sit alongside Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, Ian McKellen's Richard III, even Orson Welles' own Macbeth from 1948.
The take on the Scottish play by Australian director Justin Kurzel - who shot much of the film on location on the Isle of Skye in late winter - is a grandly cinematic one, something that is nearer to Game of Thrones than Globe Theatre.
Kurzel's take on the character, a veteran warrior, intrigued Fassbender
"Justin always had this idea of the audience watching intimately as this guy deals with post-traumatic stress disorder and loses his mind. I had never even seen it as that and it was so obvious when he said it to me."
"The PTSD thing I came to realise was actually in the script. When he is losing his mind in the banquet scene and he thinks Banquo is there confronting him, Lady Macbeth says 'we have seen this before, everyone stay calm ...' We know he has had these in the past, before we meet him in the play and also he is seeing things. That's classic PTSD, we know this from people who have come back from the Iraq conflict or Afghanistan.
"Once I had that, it was really key into the part. It really gave me a fantastic starting point."
Yes, the Scottish weather was a bit rough but he had bigger worries.
"It was scarier trying to interpret the genius of Shakespeare and dealing with such sacred material," he says, "What I really wanted is that you watch it and you don't realise you are listening to Shakespeare, that it doesn't become an issue. You're just following these characters and this story."
Shakespeare didn't grab the German-born Fassbender when he was growing up in Ireland. He really didn't get Macbeth until drama school and now he's likely to be come the defining screen Macbeth of his generation.
"It was just something I was doing at school and it seemed alien to me. With our version I really wanted kids to go in there and say, 'That was exciting. Maybe I'll go back and look at it in a different way'."
Fassbender and director, Kurzel, as well as Marion Cotillard, who plays Lady Macbeth, have reunited for another film of a similar period but much different source material - Assassin's Creed, a movie of the video game about an ancient society of hitmen working their way through history, their ancient memories accessible to future generations. Fassbender is producing.
"I felt so lucky to get both of them on board," Fassbender says of the Macbeth team reunion. "I think it's a fascinating concept, the idea of DNA memory alone. The world of Assassin's Creed is a very interesting one."
Did he ever play the game? "Badly and not many times."
In his forthcoming highest-profile role he's going from Macbeth to Macintosh. He plays Steve Jobs in Danny Boyle's biopic of the Apple co-founder, scripted by by Aaron Sorkin. The screenwriter was caught out in the Sony email hack, lamenting the actor's casting over higher-profile stars (he has since apologised).
Michael Fassbender appears in a scene from the film, Steve Jobs. Photo / AP
Fassbender has no hard feelings towards the rat-a-tat writer of The West Wing and The Social Network.
"Aaron Sorkin is kind of like a modern-day Shakespeare in my opinion, he really is. And he writes to his own rhythm too, has his own specific rhythm to writing."
So far as portraying Jobs goes, Fassbender came out still thinking highly of the guy.
"He was obviously a genius. Not only did Steve Jobs change the way we use phones, how we listen to music, the personal computer, he introduces that to make it a very intuitive thing. Before that, it was just hobbyists, people who were just nerds about computers. But it wasn't for the masses, He brought it to the masses."
Few have seen Jobs yet. But someone who has is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who has praised the film and its portrayal of his former partner.
"The acting was just so realistic," he told the BBC. "In some prior movies, I saw [the actors] simulating Steve Jobs, but they didn't really make me feel like I was in his head understanding what was going on inside of him - his personality. This movie absolutely accomplishes that, and it's due to great acting, which obviously comes from great directing."
