Michael Fassbender Gives the Skinny on 'Hunger'
Source: AOL
Posted: 04/08/09 3:50PM
Filed Under: Film
Irish actor Michael Fassbender may have a smoker's voice and sun-damaged skin but he is still a strapping young man, standing 6 feet tall. It's hard to equate the 32-year-old sitting before me with the starving wisp of a man he plays in his latest film, Steve McQueen's Hunger.
McQueen won Cannes' Camera d’Or for his first feature about the hunger strike that sweeped Ireland's HM Prison Maze in 1981. Fassbender plays political prisoner Bobby Sands, the leader of the strike who died trying to get himself and fellow prisoners POW status.
“Obviously, everyone [in Ireland] knows who Bobby Sands is,” Fassbender says when asked if, as an Irishman, he felt more of a responsibility playing a national icon. “In a lot of circles there’s a mythical legend around the name and the person. So, yeah, I was s--ting it.”
Starving on Screen |
In Steve McQueen's Camera d'Or winning first feature Hunger, Michael Fassbender plays Bobby Sands, a real-life political prisoner who died after going on a hunger strike in the early '80s. The Irish actor dropped about 40 pounds (he went from 166 lbs. to 126 lbs.) while living on nuts and berries for 10 weeks. But don't worry, his diet was closely monitored by a health professional to make sure he didn't harm his body. |
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This was before Fassbender even knew he would have to lose 40 pounds to play the dying Sands. The latter half of the film is devoted to his starving body slowly breaking down before his inevitable demise. McQueen was irritated by the press focusing on Fassbender's dramatic weight loss, but Fassbender expected it.
“People are always going to take an interest in things like that, that's just sort of a side of acting,” he says. “For me it was just an integral part of the story. These people died of starvation, so I had to get that across physically, otherwise the illusion wouldn’t have been kept.”
Despite the fact that Fassbender's weight loss looked dangerous, he did not make the mistake of many actors (Matt Damon, Christian Bale) and follow his own diet. Instead, Fassbender visited a nutritionist who calculated his body-fat ratio to determine the parameters within which his weight could fluctuate.
“There was a certain weight I could get to and once I got below that, things would get dangerous,” he says. “I got to 64 kilo and things started to level out. I managed to get down to, I think, 59 kilos in the end.”
Fassbender seems fairly comfortable with his decision to drop the weight for Hunger. Perhaps it's because he is able to put it in a historical context.
“Back in the day people used to fast all the time. They’d go on pilgrimages etc.,” he says.
Fassbender proceeds to laugh and look somewhat concerned despite himself.
“Hopefully nothing’s been damaged, I suppose I won’t find out for a few years if anything’s seriously gone wrong.”
It's one thing to suffer for your art, it's another thing to die for it.
Hunger opens this weekend across Canada.
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