Michael Fassbender

• 1. Introduction

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  Michael Fassbender weighed just 125 lb when he played Bobby Sands, a Provisional Irish Republican Army prisoner, after living on 600 calories a day. That role, in the 2008 film Hunger, changed how the film world saw him. Fassbender is a German-Irish actor who has since played a comic-book mutant, a sinister android, a tech founder and a Scottish king. He is also a producer and a racing driver. How does someone raised between two countries end up with a career this varied? What was he doing before anyone noticed him? And why would an actor in demand choose, for a time, to stop acting and chase something at high speed?

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• 2. Two Homelands

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  Michael Fassbender was born on the 2nd of April 1977 in Heidelberg, a city in the West German state of Baden-Württemberg. His father, Josef, is German. His mother, Adele, comes from Larne in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. He has an elder sister, Catherine, who became a neuropsychologist. Family lore on his mother's side holds that Adele is a great-grandniece of Michael Collins, a leader of Ireland's War of Independence.

  When Fassbender was two years old, the family moved to Killarney in County Kerry. Josef and Adele opened a restaurant there called the West End House, and Josef cooked in its kitchen. They picked Killarney because they wanted their children to grow up in the countryside, far from the industrial surroundings they had left in Germany.

  The household was Catholic, and Fassbender served as an altar boy at the family's church. He and Catherine spent their summer holidays in Germany. He attended Fossa National School in Fossa and then St Brendan's College in Killarney.

  At 17, he was cast in a play and decided on the spot that acting would be his work. Two years later, at 19, he left home to study at the Drama Centre London. In 1999 he dropped out and toured with the Oxford Stage Company in the play Three Sisters. Steady acting work was slow to arrive. In the meantime he was a bartender, a postman and a manual labourer. He also did market research for Royal Mail and worked for Dell.

  His German passport shows how long he has lived between two identities. He has said he planned to get an Irish one "for years and just never got around to it".

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• 3. Goats, Guinness and Dracula

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  Pat Christenson, a soldier in the miniseries Band of Brothers, was Fassbender's first screen role in 2001. The series came from Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg and won major awards.

  He next took the part of Azazeal across both series of the Sky One fantasy drama Hex. He also starred in the music video for "Blind Pilots" by the British band The Cooper Temple Clause. There he played a man on a stag night with friends who gradually turns into a goat.

  In 2003, BBC Northern Ireland made a ten-part radio serial of Dracula for the Book at Bedtime slot, and Fassbender voiced Jonathan Harker. In early 2004 he appeared in a Guinness commercial called The Quarrel. His character swims across the ocean from Ireland to New York to apologise to his brother in person. The advert won a gold medal at the 2005 FAB Awards.

  At the 2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he played Michael Collins in Allegiance, a play by Mary Kenny. It imagines the meeting between Collins and Winston Churchill. Around the same time he produced, directed and starred in a stage version of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, working with his own production company.

  Film work was growing too. In Angel, a drama about an eccentric young British writer in the early 20th century, he played Esmé, a painter who becomes the love interest of the writer, played by Romola Garai. It was the first English-language film by the French director François Ozon, adapted from a novel by Elizabeth Taylor. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on the 17th of February 2007, and in Paris on the 14th of March 2007.

  Within the same stretch, he made a brief turn as Barney in Wedding Belles, written by Dean Cavanagh and Irvine Welsh, and gave the character a Scottish accent.

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• 4. Breakthrough Roles

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  "As Sands, Fassbender gives another ferociously convincing performance and his emaciated appearance is, finally, almost unwatchable." So wrote Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian about Hunger. The film was directed by Steve McQueen, and many regard it as Fassbender's breakthrough. It earned him the British Independent Film Award.

  Two years earlier, in 2006, he had played Stelios, a young Spartan warrior, in 300, a fantasy action film directed by Zack Snyder. That film was a commercial success.

  Quentin Tarantino cast him in 2009 in Inglourious Basterds, a revisionist World War II comedy-drama, as the British officer Archie Hicox. Eric Kohn of IndieWire went big on the film, writing, "Hell, it's one of the best films of the century. The cast is superb".

  That same year he appeared in Fish Tank, a British drama directed by Andrea Arnold. He played the boyfriend of a single mother of two, who was played by Kierston Wareing. Ray Bennett of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "Fassbender and Wareing give honest and open performances as the conflicted adults". Both films were mostly well received, according to the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

  Not every choice landed. In 2010 he played Burke in the Western Jonah Hex. At San Diego Comic-Con he described how he had pushed the character, calling him "kind of psychotic". The film drew mostly negative reviews. When asked about the criticism in 2011, he answered, "Pretty awful, was it? I haven't seen it myself."

  He also played Quintus Dias in Neil Marshall's Roman war film Centurion. In Joel Schumacher's Blood Creek, with Dominic Purcell, he played Richard Wirth. That film follows a West Virginia man who helps his brother destroy a family that had protected a Nazi occultist.

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• 5. Magneto and Beyond

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  X-Men: First Class reached cinemas on the 3rd of June 2011, with Fassbender as Erik Lehnsherr, who becomes Magneto. The film is set in 1962 and centres on the friendship between Charles Xavier, played by James McAvoy, and Magneto. It shows how their groups, the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants, began. It earned general acclaim and made money, and it turned Fassbender into more of a popular movie star.

  He came back as Magneto in X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014 and again in X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016.

  Ridley Scott's science fiction film Prometheus, in 2012, gave him a second franchise as the android David 8. Reviewers praised the film's visual design and the acting, and they singled out Fassbender. In May 2017 he reprised David in the sequel Alien: Covenant, where he also played another character.

  He moved into video-game territory with Assassin's Creed, which he co-produced through his DMC Film banner. Justin Kurzel directed, Marion Cotillard had a leading role, and it came out on the 21st of December 2016. In The Snowman, based on Jo Nesbø's novel and directed by Tomas Alfredson, he became the first actor to portray the detective Harry Hole. Rebecca Ferguson and Charlotte Gainsbourg co-starred, and the film was released in October 2017.

  In 2019 he put on Magneto's helmet once more for Dark Phoenix. The film drew unfavorable reviews and did poorly at the box office.

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• 6. Awards Season

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  The 2011 Venice Film Festival premiered two Fassbender films, A Dangerous Method and Shame. In David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method he played the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. In Shame he returned to Steve McQueen's direction as Brandon, a man in his thirties battling a sexual addiction. That performance won him the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, and earned nominations for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA.

  The Academy Award nomination never came. Various sources say the film's full-frontal nudity and its sexual scenes led voters "to fantasize, and not actually vote".

  That same year he played Edward Rochester in Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre, opposite Mia Wasikowska in the title role.

  The Academy did eventually recognise him. At the 86th Academy Awards he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for playing Edwin Epps in 12 Years a Slave, his third collaboration with McQueen.

  Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs began filming in San Francisco in January 2015 and premiered that September. It adapts Walter Isaacson's book, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. Fassbender joined the project after Christian Bale dropped out. Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that he "doesn't closely physically resemble the man" but "fully delivers the essentials of how we have come to perceive the man". The role earned him a Best Actor nomination at the 88th Academy Awards. He was also nominated for BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards in that category.

  In between, he took the title role in Justin Kurzel's Macbeth, with Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth and David Thewlis as King Duncan. Filming began in January 2014, and the film premiered at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

  His honours also include a Critics' Choice Movie Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award. He has four BAFTA nominations, three for the Golden Globes and two for the European Film Awards. In 2020, The Irish Times placed him ninth on its list of Ireland's greatest film actors.

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• 7. Racing and Return

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  "Even before I started acting, I had a big dream to go racing." Fassbender said this in 2020. He has been interested in motorsport since his youth and is a fan of Formula One and Scuderia Ferrari. In 2016 he joined the team's Corso Pilota training course.

  He began racing in May 2017 in the Coppa Shell class of the Ferrari Challenge. In his debut at Mugello Circuit he finished 15th. He also raced in the Challenge's North American series and took sixth at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. In 2018 he ran the full North American schedule, won the season opener at Daytona International Speedway and ended fifth in the standings.

  In 2019 he switched to Porsche and entered the Porsche Carrera Cup Germany with the German Porsche Racing Experience. Porsche made a YouTube series about him called Road to Le Mans.

  In 2020 he joined Proton Competition for the full European Le Mans Series. He shared a 2017 Porsche 911 RSR with Richard Lietz and Felipe Fernández Laser and scored 47 points. Later that year, as a guest driver in the Porsche Supercup at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, he was caught in a startline crash that ended his race within seconds.

  The 2021 season brought his best results. He and his co-drivers took fourth at the Red Bull Ring and at Spa-Francorchamps. At the final race in Portimão he scored his first podium and best finish with second place, behind the eventual LMGTE champion, the No. 80 Iron Lynx car. The season brought 61 points. In 2022 he scored 35 points and in 2023 he scored 22.

  After a four-year absence from acting, he came back with David Fincher's The Killer, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2023. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote, "Fassbender is perfect in the main role of a yoga-loving assassin". That year he also starred in Taika Waititi's Next Goal Wins. In addition, he helped produce The Kitchen, a dystopian drama for Netflix written by Daniel Kaluuya and Joe Murtagh.

  In 2024 he began starring in The Agency, an action-thriller series for Paramount+. He also played a supporting role in the Irish comedy-drama Kneecap. In 2025 he appeared opposite Cate Blanchett in Steven Soderbergh's spy thriller Black Bag, which received critical acclaim. He stars with Alicia Vikander and Taylor Russell in Na Hong-jin's thriller Hope.

  Kung Fury 2 is a martial arts comedy that also features Arnold Schwarzenegger and David Hasselhoff. Principal photography on it was completed by 2019, but legal issues have so far kept it from release.

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• 8. Private Life

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  In June 2012, Fassbender told GQ magazine that he was dating the American actress Nicole Beharie, whom he had met while making Shame. In December 2014 he began a relationship with the Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, who had worked with him on The Light Between Oceans. They married in Ibiza on the 14th of October 2017 and have two sons.

  The couple moved to Portugal in 2017 and bought a home in the Alfama district of Lisbon. Fassbender sold the property in the Hackney area of London where he had lived since 1996.

  He is known for keeping his personal life private. He has described himself as a lapsed Catholic who still goes to church to light candles. He supports the English football club Liverpool FC.

  He speaks German, though he said he needed to brush up on it before filming Inglourious Basterds.

  In 2010, an ex-girlfriend accused him of two incidents of domestic abuse that she said took place the previous year. News reports cited a court petition and a restraining order she had filed. Fassbender has not publicly addressed the allegations, which resurfaced during the #MeToo movement in 2017.

  He has also said he would like to perform in a German-language film or play.

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