Thursday Thirteen - 205 - 13 Ways to Admire Michael Fassbender

Day 6 of the A to Z Challenge at A Piece of My Mind Falls on Thursday Thirteen day.

That means thirteen ways to explore or contemplate something - which, in this case, means thirteen fabulous facts about Michael Fassbender.





F is for Fassbender


















1 - Setting hearts afflutter as the latest incarnation of the brooding, gothic bad boy Mr. Rochester, Michael Fassbender didn't let the long line of illustrious predecessors put him off.

“I was like, holy crap, there are a lot of ‘Jane Eyres’ out there," said 33-year-old director Cary Fukunaga. “It’s like finding out your girlfriend had 50 boyfriends before you."

- Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe

















2 -

Michael Fassbender - currently appearing in theatres in Jane Eyre.

6'

Eyes - Blue/Green

Hair - Brown

Type - Athletic / Mid 30's

He works as an actor

Works in television / Film / Stage / Radio


















3 - Born in Germany, Michael grew up in Killarney, southwestern Ireland, the son of chef Josef Fassbender and restauranteur Adele.

"We moved to Ireland when I was two and we settled in Killarney, Co Kerry. Where we were living in Germany is very industrial and very grey and my parents wanted to have countryside around for my sister and I to grow up in." - Michael Fassbender

Here Michael appears in a Guinness commercial.























4 - No matter how delicious Mr. Fassbender may be, should he remain strictly eye candy, ladies?

Last year his former girlfriend put out a restraining order against him.

This doesn't seem to put off Zoe Kravitz, though. The two have been an item since the beginning of this year.












5 - Michael keeps in tiptop shape for the stunt fighting required of many of his roles, including his breakout role as Spartan warrior Stelios in 300.











6 - He was tapped with the ultimate in street cred when he was cast in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, playing an English soldier who poses as a German officer.















7 - Centurion gives me my sword-swinging Fassbender fix while setting it in one of my favorite time periods - Dark Age Britain.











8 - Remember my soft spot for a man in chains?

...well...

His role as Guy Fawkes in Gunpowder, Treason & Plot ensures a manacled Michael Fassbender. Although, it also ensures a tortured Michael Fassbender, which is highly disturbing.














9 - In fact, he somewhat specializes in roles where his character must face physical brutality and torture.

Including Irish political prisoner Bobby Sands in Hunger. He dropped considerable weight to play the hunger striker.
















10 - "It's the way I work, anyway. Look, there are no secrets to anything in life. Tiger Woods is Tiger Woods because he practised that swing 100 times a day. Why should acting be any different? It's just boring repetition, and through that, I find things start to break down, and you start to find the nuances, all the interesting little details." - Michael Fassbender
















11 - Perhaps one of the biggest draws for me with Michael Fassbender is his willingness to portray my favorite of all characters - The Gray Character.

In Fish Tank he plays the real-life version of the older man-teenage girl portion of An Education, stripped of any sentimentality. The sex scene in question is difficult to watch, not because it is graphic (it isn't), but because his character is stealing the remaining innocence from the already broken Mia, and this is heartbreaking to witness.

Fassbender's Connor is both creepy and charming at once, and in most of his life, Connor probably doesn't behave like a bad guy. Connor, and the other characters in Fish Tank, are good and bad at once, by both his design and that of director Andrea Arnold. Or more simply put, they are painfully human. - The Hollywood Interview



















12 - Up next for Michael:

Michael will play Carl Jung to Viggo Mortensen's Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method, releasing later this year.

He'll play the young Magneto to James McAvoy's Charles Xavier in X-Men: First Class, also releasing later this year.














13 - Toronto's Globe and Mail columnist Leah McLaren summed up my girlhood and my lifelong fascination with the Byronic hero when she wrote:

I read and re-read Jane Eyre as well as its more sexually implicit cousin, Wuthering Heights, and cursed my parents for furnishing me with an unforgivably dull suburban childhood, devoid of wind-whipped moors, itchy petticoats and brooding men on horseback.

I shall leave you with this trailer for Jane Eyre. Enjoy.