Michael Fassbender

by Jim Maloney

  Jack O’Connell, who played gang leader Brett, was impressed by how much fun Michael was off set and how focused both he and Kelly Reilly were during filming. ‘Kelly and Mike were so professional and their experience really made Eden Lake sail along,’ he remembered.

  The critics loved the movie, despite its unsettling and violent nature. ‘This looks to me like the best British horror film in years,’ said the Guardian, which described Michael as ‘a young and fiercely charismatic Irish actor who is suddenly and justifiably ubiquitous on our screens’. The Times called it ‘an unexpectedly intelligent British horror film’, while the Daily Mail said it was ‘a first-rate British horror film that taps into our deepest fears’. The People agreed that it was ‘an exciting terror flick’.

  The critic from the Sun was one of the few who didn’t like it but still praised Michael and his antagonist for their performances, ‘Rising star Michael Fassbender as Steve and Jack O’Connell as Brett should be commended for maintaining the tension despite working from an implausible script.’

  The ‘rising star’ was about to soar to new heights in his next movie, which was to be the defining moment of his career as he went from promising actor to leading man and Hollywood opened its gates.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A NAKED HUNGER

  British film artist and director Steve McQueen first became known for his short films, which were projected onto one or more walls in art galleries. His early videos were shot in black and white, were silent and he often appeared in them himself. His first major film, Bear, in 1993, features him and another naked man in an ambiguous encounter that could be interpreted as either threatening or erotic. His later work includes Deadpan, a homage to Buster Keaton in which the sides of a building fall down around him. It is repeated time and time again from many angles, while he remains motionless and expressionless. In 1999 he won the prestigious Turner Prize, beating the front-runner and more widely known Tracey Emin.

  At the beginning of 2003 McQueen was approached by Jan Younghusband, head of drama and arts at Channel 4, who asked him if he would like to make a film for the their movie outlet, Film Four, which had produced such hits as Trainspotting, East is East, My Beautiful Laundrette, Shallow Grave and The Last King of Scotland.

  McQueen, who was born and brought up in London, came up with the idea of making a film on Bobby Sands, an IRA prisoner who famously died at Maze prison, Northern Ireland, in 1981, after staging a 66 day hunger strike in protest at the British government’s refusal to grant republican prisoners political status. He was just 27. Nine others went on to starve themselves to death and the protest – which included smearing his cell walls with his own excrement – gained much publicity at the time. McQueen remembered watching TV news reports about it when he was 11.

  ‘I asked my mother and father what was going on and they told me,’ he said. ‘At that age, it was very difficult to understand – someone who gave up eating food in order to be heard. Twenty-seven years later, that story was still baffling me and I really needed to go and look at it visually. It was like the whole thing had never happened – the twenty-fifth anniversary of Bobby Sands’ death, there was nothing in the papers, or hardly anything.’

  Michael was four when Sands died and, although too young to remember it, he did recall what he described as ‘the tension’ of the period whenever his family travelled to Northern Ireland to visit their relatives. Here they would routinely encounter watchtowers and armed British soldiers as they crossed the border but, as a young child, he never really understood what was happening. ‘We never really discussed politics at home,’ he explained. Even today he says that he is resistant to nationalism, due to ‘not being quite Irish, not quite German’.

  Michael got to meet McQueen and the co-writer of Hunger, Enda Walshe, after the casting director, Gary Davy – who had cast him in Band of Brothers – recommended him for the part of Bobby Sands. Michael thought Steve was different and had an honesty about him. Unfortunately for Michael, Steve took an instant dislike to him! ‘I thought, “Who is this geezer?” He came with a bit of a swagger, a bit of an attitude. I thought, “I don’t know if I like this guy,”’ he recalled. ‘He almost seemed like he couldn’t be bothered.’

  But Michael was later to explain his attitude as being a mix of bravado and concern over the subject matter. ‘I was defensive,’ Michael would later admit. ‘I was an actor trying to get work, dealing with a lot of rejection and there was a stern, inquisitive side of me that was like, “What do you want to do with this story?” I’ve got family from the North of Ireland. And there had been films in the past that, I think, have been insulting to the people up there. So I wanted to make sure that it was being handled right.’

  Michael went away thinking that his meeting with Steve had gone well but Gary Davy had to persuade Steve to see Michael again for auditions the following day. Steve actively did not want him for the part of Sands but agreed to ‘just put him in the mix’. The core of the film was to be a conversation between Sands and the parish priest halfway through, in which Sands tells him he is going on a hunger strike. For the audition, Michael read some of Sands’ lines while Steve filled in as the priest. To the director’s surprise, this completely changed his notion about Michael. ‘He was a totally different person: extraordinarily engaged and engaging. And I thought, “This guy could play Bobby Sands.”’

  Delighted as he was to get the part, Michael continued to have concerns about it. ‘I was worried because things are really on the mend in the North, and Belfast is a fantastic city. I didn’t want to spark off anything that would, in any way, reignite that,’ he explained. He was also far from confident that an audience would want to see prisoners smearing excrement on the walls or suffering. He discussed it with his parents, who were also wary of the potential dangers of the film, but they agreed it was a challenge that he should go for.

  Michael also felt instinctively that he would learn something from working with McQueen, although he had never directed a feature film before. Michael was right: McQueen would bring a very artistic, stylised approached to the film, leaning on his experiments with video. There would be no dialogue for the majority of the film, relying instead on visual impact.

  The experienced Irish actor, Liam Cunningham, was to play the Catholic priest, Father Dominic Moran, and the movie was to instigate a lasting friendship between the two actors. In September 2007, Michael left his London home for Belfast where filming was to take place and shooting began the following month on the crucial scene between convict and cleric. It is a long, powerful and engrossing dialogue as they spar verbally across a prison table about the rights and wrongs of a hunger strike which would likely lead to a self-imposed death – a mortal sin within the Catholic church.

  Michael was to admit that he was nervous about this pivotal scene, having to learn lines that ran for 28 pages. He first met Liam Cunningham in a Belfast pub with McQueen and the two bonded by nipping outside for a cigarette. But after they came back in they felt the need for another ‘calming’ cigarette after the director told them that he was thinking of shooting the 23-minute long scene in one shot. ‘My immediate reaction was, “Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?!”’ Cunningham recalled. ‘I looked at Michael and just said, “I’m going to have to move in with you.” He said, “Yeah, I think so.”’

  Michael was renting a waterfront apartment in Belfast and his co-star did indeed move into the spare room. Here they rehearsed the scene over and over, up to 15 times a day for 5 days, straight after breakfast. At 1pm a production assistant would arrive with lunch and after that they would carry on rehearsing until 6 or 7pm. Then McQueen would turn up to check on their progress and hand them some notes, and they would resume once more before going to the pub, exhausted, for a couple of pints each. ‘We knew it was essential to get it right,’ said Michael. ‘That conversation was the make or break. It was the beast that needed to be tamed.’

  Their hard work paid off. When they filmed the scene in
early October, they did four takes all the way through and the fourth take was used.

  Neither actor had ever worked with someone as unconventional as McQueen before. The director used a sporting metaphor to describe the confrontation between priest and prisoner. ‘I wanted to make it like a tennis match between Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe,’ he said. ‘Two titans battling it out in their completely different ways, yet sharing an intimacy and an understanding of each other’s position.’ And after one of the takes he remarked, ‘It’s getting a little bit like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. I want you to behave more like God.’

  ‘I looked at Liam and he was like, “Ooh fuck”,’ said Michael. ‘It sounds silly but we were maybe a third into the scene and I swear in Liam’s eye and in my mind we understood what he meant.’

  Seventeen minutes of the twenty-three-minute scene were filmed in a single take before the camera pulled away for a different angle and the remainder was concluded. The length of the scene also took its toll on the crew member who was holding the boom mic. ‘On take three he collapsed as he had been holding that thing up there for so long,’ Michael remembered.

  After the scene was shot, the production was closed down for 10 weeks while Michael went on a drastic weight-loss regime in order to authentically portray a man dying from hunger. Adele pleaded with her son not to do it because she was worried that he would do himself serious harm but in the end she reluctantly accepted that he had to, for the sake of realism.

  After consulting with a doctor and a nutritionist, Michael began by eating only 1,000 calories a day. ‘I just knew that I had to do it,’ he said. ‘All the stuff we had filmed before that was pretty special and I didn’t want the last part of the film to break the illusion. So I had to get super-thin.’

  Michael knew he could be a disciplined person when he set his mind to it. At the age of 7 he had given up everything sweet during the 40 days of Lent and, while many of his friends had given in during St Patrick’s Day, he refused to do so. But that was then. Did he still have that sort of will power – and more – aged 30?

  By week two, he noticed insomnia setting in because his body was telling him to eat but he got used to dealing with that. However, he found that he was being too distracted from his strict discipline by friends who would visit his London home. ‘If you are sitting down watching a film together, you can’t ask people not to eat around you,’ he said. So he told Maiko that he would not be seeing her for a while and rented house in Venice Beach, California, because he felt that somewhere nice and warm with clear blue skies would help. And it did. His diet consisted of blueberries and a few nuts in the morning, followed by a tin of sardines and a slice of bread for dinner.

  He also found that the more he busied himself during the day, the easier it was to forget about food. And he soon learned that it was a mistake to watch television. ‘I never realised how much food is on television! So I stopped watching adverts because I didn’t like seeing mouth-watering burgers every fifteen minutes.’

  For a few days, his sister Catherine came to stay with him. She had gained a PhD in neuropsychology and was now living in Sacramento, California, where she was working as a researcher at UC Davis University. But she soon left after he got ‘too grumpy’.

  After finding a 1993 Jerry Hall Yogacise DVD in the house he was renting, Michael got into a daily routine of doing 40 minutes of yoga in the morning, speed-walking for 4 miles a day and doing some rope skipping. To his surprise he found he had lots of energy and a focus and strength of mind he had never experienced before. However, halfway through his regime he was no longer losing weight at the same rate, so he dropped his calorie intake down to 600 for the last five weeks, cutting out the bread and having fewer nuts. He eventually lost just over 2 stone in all, dropping from 11.5 stone to reach his target weight of 9st 2lb (58 kg).

  ‘I became almost obsessive. I got to the point where I could walk around a supermarket and know the calorific content of virtually everything on the shelves. I was kind of monk-like. It was like the forty days and forty nights alone in the desert.’

  The regime affected him mentally as well as physically. ‘It was brutal. When you stop eating, your mind changes. I’d look in the mirror and think I’d gained weight. I had no scales near me or else I’d weigh myself three times a day. I lost my libido completely. I realised that starvation could make you crazy. There’s a thin line between control and madness.’

  But the discipline of refraining from something that his mind and body were demanding was also enlightening and almost spiritual. ‘We live in this society where nowadays if I want something, I take it, I eat it – it’s so easy and readily available. When you take all that away, you actually become more appreciative of the things around you.’

  Michael forwent his usual visit home to see his parents in Fossa at Christmas. Instead he returned in early January 2008 when the festive feasts and celebrating were over. His parents were shocked by how skinny he looked. ‘I remember he was sitting at the bar in the restaurant and I looked at his fingers and I said, “Michael, I think it’s enough,” Josef recalled. ‘After that he went away for another two weeks and what he did then I don’t know but he didn’t talk to anybody. He didn’t want to see anybody.’

  When Michael returned to Belfast to resume filming the hunger protest, the cast and crew were as shocked as his parents by his gaunt appearance. It had been Michael’s idea to lose so much weight, not the director’s, but everyone could now see how much more realistic he would look in playing a man dying from starvation.

  The film was structured like a traditional stage play, in three acts. ‘I came back with the structure after I went to Belfast for the first time,’ Steve explained. ‘I suppose I saw the thing as a river. In the first part you are floating on your back, taking in the environment. The second part is like a stretch of rapids – the environment fractures. The third part is like a waterfall – there is this terrible loss of gravity.’

  The opening scene shows a man having breakfast at his home in Belfast before going out to his car and checking underneath it for bombs before setting off to work. It is only after some ten minutes that we learn that he is a prison guard. When he enters the Maze, the audience enters with him and follows his working day routine. Dialogue is minimal as new IRA prisoners arrive and, in line with their colleagues, refuse to wear prison uniform in protest at the British government’s removal of what was known as Special Category Status for those convicted of political crimes. Knowing that their request to wear their own clothes will be refused, they go naked with just a blanket to cover them and embark on a ‘dirty protest’ – smearing their cells with their own faeces.

  Harrowing scenes of wardens beating inmates and of Michael as Sands being forcefully washed by the wardens and having his hair cut are intertwined with some close-up shots that are oddly beautiful and poetic amid this horror – a fly on a metal grill and even a prison officer’s bloodied knuckles as he stands outside in the cleansing snow.

  McQueen’s pictures paint a thousand words and it is not until the second act, with Michael and Liam Cunningham seated across a desk in the prison visiting room, that there is any real dialogue. The sparky, sometimes humorous, combative conversation comes as something of a relief to viewers who have watched grim, sombre and upsetting scenes of cruelty and endurance. After Sands tells Father Moran that he is intent on a hunger strike to attract more publicity, the final act follows him through his dying days as he gets weaker and starts to hallucinate. Dialogue is minimal once more as the audience is invited to watch his bleak demise. The time for talking is over and Sands is on course for death.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE GOOD LIFE

  After the filming for Hunger was completed, Michael had a final health check-up with his doctor to see that he had not harmed himself with the weight loss. ‘My doctor said, “Last time you came in here my assistant was outside and she saw you and said, ‘My God, that guy’s really ill, isn’t he?’ She thought you h
ad cancer.”’

  After being given the all clear, he headed to a sushi restaurant in Belfast with Steve McQueen for his first proper meal in months. The small bites suited his condition at a time when his body was not used to handling large amounts of food. But he was freezing cold in the restaurant and wore a thick, padded coat throughout the meal. He ate more sushi than he should have done because he found that he couldn’t stop. ‘They say your stomach contracts when you cut down on your food intake but I’m not sure I found that to be the case!’ he said. ‘I ate rather too much sushi than was good for me and, at the end of the meal, I was almost literally laid out cold. It was a weird sensation, like nothing I’d experienced before.’

  It took a month’s break with Maiko at her apartment in Australia to fully get over his Hunger pain. After two weeks he had regained all the weight he had lost and he thoroughly enjoyed the liberty to relax and enjoy himself. ‘I felt a huge sense of relief the day after we finished shooting,’ he remembered. ‘I just wanted to get completely away from Hunger, to shake off the role of Bobby Sands and try to get back to some kind of normal life. And I began to appreciate the good things in life more than ever.’

  Michael hadn’t seen much of Maiko during the filming of Hunger so he was pleased to spend some quality time with her in the Australian sunshine as she helped him to relax and get back to normal. ‘We ate, we slept, we went to the beach – and those terrible scenes in Hunger slowly started to disappear from my mind,’ he said.

  On 17 February, he and Maiko travelled to Dublin for the annual Irish Film and Television Awards at the Gaiety Theatre. Here he was to present a Best Actress in a Supporting Role Television award to Maria Doyle Kennedy, for her role as Queen Catherine of Aragon in the historical TV drama, The Tudors. She was unable to attend, however, so Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who played King Henry VIII, received it in her place. At the after-party revels at the Shelbourne Hotel, Michael was reunited with Liam Cunningham and they enjoyed the company of the likes of Rhys Meyers, Colin Farrell, Victoria Smurfit and Hollywood stars Mel Gibson – recognised with an IFTA award for his Contribution To World Cinema – Rene Russo and Bo Derek.