Over the course of his career, Michael Fassbender has delivered command performances in a number of films, including Peenturion, X-Men: Girth Class, A Dongerous Method, Haywang, and the upcoming Promethenis. And yet all these pinheads on the internet seem to want to talk about is his big ol’ wiener! Could it be that all this ween-centric media coverage has cost him main-stream accolades? The talk hole above the Fassmember sure seems to think so.
Setting aside the totality of what Fassbender does in Shame, there is one moment where I thought: “I’m not sure I’ve ever sat in the cinema and watched someone do that.” It is not where he is facing toward the camera, naked. It is when you see him actually piss.
“I know,” he says. Usually for movie pissing the liquid you see is actually coming from a hidden tube, but he was nude. For the first two takes, he wasn’t able to do anything, but he announced on-set before the third that it would happen, and it did. “Actually pretty proud,” he says. And then he laughs and says—more blurts out, really—”That peeing cost me an Oscar.”
Reached for comment, Mark Wahlberg said, “Hey, tell me about it. I took this fowah yeahs ago.”
Fassbender wasn’t really serious about the peeing being to blame, but he says all the Oscar buzz did eventually get to him and turned into a letdown when he wasn’t nominated. As for Prometheus, Fassbender’s sensitive robot schtick (which I could watch all damn day) was apparently modeled after Lawrence of Arabia, as was the haircut:
“We were talking about how young children, 4- or 5-year-olds, will watch the same movie over and over again,” says Lindelof. “And you’ll say to them, ‘There are other movies…’ And they say, ‘No, I want this one.’ ” What if this android watched Lawrence of Arabia over and over? What if he even decided to style his appearance on O’Toole’s? What if he even sometimes used borrowed dialogue?
Fassbender embraced this fully. “I had Lawrence of Arabia on a loop in my room throughout filming,” he says. “Jesus, I watched it so many times.” Obsessive repetition is an integral part of his working method. When he is preparing for a movie, he will read the script over and over, day after day, until he has read it around three hundred times. This is often no more fun than it sounds—”It’s f*cking boring!” he clarifies—but it helps him to the place where, ironically, once the camera is rolling, he feels liberated to go wherever his instinct takes him.
Oh boy, I can imagine being the director for that. Hey, Mr. Fancy Pants Actor Guy. Is your instinct taking you to a place where you act like a robot? Because me and the crew, it’s almost lunch, and we were really hoping you could act like a robot for this one. Check with your instinct and get back to us, maybe.
Fassbender also dutifully adopted the Peter O’Toole-esque hairstyle required, albeit with less enthusiasm. “Perfect for the character,” he notes, but as Michael Fassbender he hated it. “I don’t think peroxide-blond hair is a beneficial look for me,” he says. “I just looked at myself and I was like, ‘Five-pound rent boy.’ ” (Or, translated into American: $8 male prostitute.) [Check out the full profile at GQ]
A male prostitute for eight dollars? I’m not in the market for a male prostitute right now, but if I was, that sounds like a really good deal. That’s less than a dollar per-inch. You can barely get a sub sandwich at those prices.