Whatever happened to Michael Fassbender?

Amidst the myriad sequels, reboots, re-imaginings and rehashes coming to cinemas for the rest of the year, one film stands out as being a thoroughly original, even subversive prospect. David Fincher – never a director to shy away from controversy – is returning to Netflix with his first crime film since Gone Girl, and has reunited with his Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker in the process. 

The thriller, entitled The Killer, is said to focus on a ruthless international assassin who finds himself developing a conscience, much to his horror. The ever-brilliant Tilda Swinton has been cast in the role of the killer’s handler, but the most interesting aspect of the film may be the actor appearing in the lead: none other than Michael Fassbender, in his first starring role since appearing in Tomas Alfredson’s disastrous 2017 adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman. 

Fassbender has not been completely absent from public life or our screens since then. He appeared in the little-seen X-Men: Dark Phoenix film in 2019, reprising his role of Magneto, and has been pursuing a second career as a racing driver for Porsche, amongst others, since 2016. In 2020, he commented that “Even before I started acting, I had a big dream to go racing”, and he has certainly lived up to that, appearing at Le Mans and at some of the world’s most prestigious motor-racing events. 

Not since Steve McQueen has an actor been so associated with the sport, and, unlike McQueen, Fassbender has pursued his enthusiasms in real life. Living in Portugal with his wife, the film star Alicia Vikander, and their son, Fassbender might seem to have an enviable existence. Yet why did he step away from cinema, and what has compelled him to return? 

Terry Gilliam commented in 2013 that what studios wanted from their actors was what he called “a hard-bender”, saying “A ‘hard-bender’ is [a film] with either Tom Hardy or Michael Fassbender and it never stops, it always astonishes me.” A decade ago, Fassbender had taken his place as one of the three most interesting leading men of his generation in Hollywood, along with Hardy and Ryan Gosling. 

All of them had similar interests in their careers: a willingness to explore unconventional roles and personae, a commitment to working with adventurous filmmakers and significant critical acclaim for their work. Each of them was able to skip nimbly between blockbuster and arthouse cinema, and built up a vast following in the process; it did not hurt that all three were exceptionally good looking. 

Yet as Hardy and Gosling continue to go from strength to strength, Fassbender’s career first stuttered, and now has been becalmed entirely for years. It is as if he wearied of film stardom, turned his back on an industry that he felt that he had achieved as much as he could from, and pursued a different, perhaps more fulfilling, way of life instead. 

Had anyone suggested around 2008 or 2009 that Michael Fassbender would be the next big thing, they would have been greeted with polite interest, but perhaps also some surprise. His breakthrough film – and the first of his three collaborations with the director Steve McQueen – had been Hunger, a 2007 biopic of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, and Fassbender had shown his dedication to his art by starving himself for ten weeks to reduce his hardly plump frame to the near-emaciated form of Sands. 

Although he described himself as “grateful” for the experience, and claimed that it made him strong, his immersion in the world of method acting was also an uncompromising one. As he said to the Daily Telegraph shortly after the film was released: “It is such a psychological prison. I had to calorie-count, and I'd catch myself every now and again picking things up in shops, reading the label and putting it back - and wonder what I looked like. You're totally focused on that, obsessing about numbers.”

This dedication to his craft paid handsome dividends. Although Fassbender was not yet appearing in leading roles in A-list movies, he attracted the attention of iconoclastic filmmakers including Andrea Arnold, Francois Ozon and, perhaps most notably of all, Quentin Tarantino, who cast Fassbender in the plum role of Lieutenant Archie Hicox in his revisionist Nazi war film Inglourious Basterds, replacing Simon Pegg. 

Watching the film now, it is impossible to imagine Pegg in the part. Fassbender entirely owns the character of a German-speaking film critic who, in the picture’s most memorable scene, finds himself facing off against suspicious Nazis in a basement bar while playing dangerous parlour games. It indicated that Fassbender could do suave, menacing and charismatic, all at once, and Hollywood producers took note. 

He was a memorably anguished Magneto in the first – and best – of the X-Men reboot films, fittingly named First Class, and found both an affecting rapport with James McAvoy’s Professor X and, when he needed to, echoes of Sean Connery’s Bond as he ruthlessly tracked down the Nazis who had murdered his family in the concentration camps. He acted for many of the best directors working today in fascinatingly varied roles: Steven Soderbergh, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott and Danny Boyle were just a few of those who eagerly cast him. 

He was a magnetic, quixotic Steve Jobs, a fierce and macho Macbeth, a tormented but exploitative slaveholder in 12 Years A Slave and even wore a papier-mache mask on his head throughout virtually the entirety of Lenny Abrahamson’s comedy Frank, disguising his famously handsome face. He played a sex addict for McQueen in Shame, a lovelorn Mr Rochester for Cary Fukunaga in Jane Eyre and a TE Lawrence-aping android in Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. It is hard to think of any contemporary actor who has built up such a wide, challenging and fascinating body of work in such a short time. 

That it then came to a pause – if not a halt – represents one of the most head-scratching developments in recent cinema. Yet there are possible explanations as to why Fassbender’s career took the directions it did. Even if one accepts that he wished to explore other avenues with his life -hence the motor racing – it is still undeniably the case that attempts to turn him into a conventional leading man never succeeded. 

He appeared in two films that should have been box office hits, The Snowman and the video game adaptation Assassin’s Creed, and neither was either critically or commercially successful. Apart from the X-Men pictures – which themselves gradually lost their audience, culminating in the flop of Dark Phoenix – he was never a bankable star, and so the roles that he might have wished to take ended up being picked by the likes of Hardy and Gosling. Faced with a choice between abandoning the industry altogether and appearing in inferior films, it is unsurprising that the former option may have been more appealing. 

There were also rumours around 2018, at the peak of the #MeToo and movement, that Fassbender’s private life had not been beyond reproach. His former girlfriend Sunawin Andrews accused him of abuse, claiming that she had incurred $24,000 in medical bills as the result of his violence towards her, and that, in 2010, she had had to take out a restraining order against him. 

Some of the unsavoury details revealed in a court petition that the Daily Beast obtained alleged that Fassbender had dragged her alongside a car after being jealous that she had spoken to an ex-boyfriend in a restaurant, and that this had caused significant injuries including a twisted left ankle, blown out left knee cap and bursted ovarian cyst, along with internal bleeding. Fassbender has never commented on the story either way, and none of the actor’s former partners have ever made similar allegations against him. Nonetheless, in an industry febrile with worry that its leading men will be toxic, one cannot imagine that the stories helped his career. 

However, 2023 may well represent a comeback year for Fassbender. In addition to The Killer, he has two other films awaiting release, Taiki Waititi’s sports comedy Next Goal Wins – its release delayed after scenes involving the decidedly cancelled Armie Hammer had to be reshot – and the martial arts spoof Kung Fury 2, which seems to be in release purgatory amidst post-production wranglings. 

Yet it’s Fincher’s film that is by far the most exciting prospect, and may well offer the actor the richest and most interesting role that he has taken since being Oscar-nominated for Steve Jobs. If it is a success, then perhaps it will represent a long overdue return for this great actor to cinema. And if not, there’s always the motor racing career. Hollywood’s significant loss would be Le Mans’s gain.