Greetings, reader!
Jyväskylä city council member, dear family friend and fellow movie buff Yannick Lahti recently requested that I post a ranking of my top 10 favorite Michael Fassbender performances. This was a nice call to action, as Fassbender is one of the best actors in his generation, and someone who always feels just a bit underrated and not-talked-about-enough despite the vast fame and acclaim that he has gotten. So here are the top 10 best Michael Fassbender performances!
10. Burton P. Christenson in Band of Brothers (2001)
While he appears in most episodes of HBO's masterful World War II miniseries, technical sergeant Burton "Pat" Christenson is never one of the more fleshed-out and high-focus characters of the series. But a young, undiscovered Fassbender is perfectly solid and believable in his role, and characters like this are important.
While larger-than-life characters like Richard "Dick" Winters (Damian Lewis) and Don Malarkey (Scott Grimes) are the most memorable, it's characters like Christenson who underscore the gripping point that it was regular young men, not fabled warrior legends, who were thrust into this war and all wars. Having only appeared in one short film and 3 episodes of a soap opera before this, Band of Brothers can be seen as a massive catalyst into greater things for Fassbender's career.
9. Stelios in 300 (2006)
One thing that I really appreciate about Fassbender is that he is the complete opposite of a typecast actor. While only some actors are really typecast and always stuck in playing similar roles, it seems that most of Hollywood's big names suffer from the phenomenon at least to some degree. But here's a testament to just how un-typecast Fassbender is: when I started laying the groundwork for this list, scrolling through his IMDB was quite mind-blowing as I hadn't remembered/realized that it's the same guy in 300, Band of Brothers and many of the other productions I've seen him in. He's able to play any sort of character with equal credibility, and he always disappears into roles so thoroughly, that you never really think that "Hey, this is the guy from all those other things!" when watching Fassbender in a movie.
If there's any common ground to be found in his roles, one could argue that his characters are almost always quite serious ones - even in a non-serious movie, his character is likely to be more serious than his fellow characters. But even that rule has an exception: in Zack Snyder's sword-and-sandal flick 300, Fassbender's character Stelios is one of the few non-serious characters, often cracking jokes with his Spartan warrior bros. We never go very deep into his character, but he's very charismatic in the role and is responsible for some of the film's more memorable moments.
8. Michael in Pitch Black Heist (2011)
This 13-minute short film can be found on YouTube, and is certainly worth watching for fans of heist films, short films, plot twists and/or Michael Fassbender. He plays half of a heist-pulling duo, completed by castmate Liam Cunningham. Both actors manage to showcase an impressive chunk of acting skill in the short runtime, with especially Fassbender's character (aptly named Michael) fleshing out likable and unlikable sides, a fairly rich backstory, and some interesting motivations all while planning the heist and having amusing conversations with Cunningham's character Liam.
7. Lt. Archie Hicox in Inglorious Basterds (2009)
We're still on the topic of managing to pull off an excellent and memorable performance in a short amount of time - sure, Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is a long-ass film, but Michael Fassbender really only appears in one sequence. Still, his character Lt. Hicox manages to be one of the film's most memorable characters, as he does so much with the time he's given.
Hicox is a British commando undercover with the Nazis in World War II Germany, and the scene where his cover is blown during an intense game night in a German pub is one of the film's best moments. The character's believability as a British lieutenant being equally believable as a supposed German officer (until his fingers give him away during a fateful order of three more beers), and his panic-on-the-inside-but-keeping-cool-on-the-outside as he struggles to maintain his composure in the tense aftermath is a real showcase of Fassbender's acting chops.
6. Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method (2011)
I was a fairly big psychology geek in high school, taking all the possible optional courses on the subject and choosing it as an extra subject for my matriculation exams despite having no obligation for it. I can't believe that this version of Veikko Hoffman was never informed of the existence of A Dangerous Method - a biopic of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, with the two infamous psychoanalysts being played by Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender. While my biggest 'psychology phase' was over by the time I found out about this film and got around to watching it, it was still a neat experience to follow the story of this famous partnership and subsequent falling-out on the silver screen.
Fassbender's take on Carl Jung is cold and distant, yet still somehow more humane and likable than Mortensen's calm and collected interpretation of Freud. The actors have an odd yet compelling chemistry, and Fassbender brings Jung's smart and revolutionary yet notoriously stubborn mind to life in a believable and well-executed manner. Playing a famous historical figure is never easy, but he sure gets the job done.
5. David in Prometheus (2012)
Prometheus is an intriguing film, as it was first drafted as a prequel to the Alien franchise, but ended up straying so far into the writers' imaginative visions that it ended up being more of a stand-alone sci-fi film that happens to take place in the same universe as Alien and has some neat connections. The film's most interesting character is undoubtedly the android David, and Fassbender was the perfect casting for the part.
Androids bringing their non-human perspective may have once been a groundbreaking narrative tool in science fiction, but by 2012, the trope had been a bit overused in various franchises, including the very franchise that Prometheus was a somewhat-prequel-ish-addition to. Therefore, a new twist was brought to the idea, with writer Damon Lindelof envisioning a whole new type of android narrative that takes a deep look at the relation between androids and humans, holding a mirror to humanity while also bringing to question just how human-like an android can get.
Fassbender's performance brings this vision to life with brilliance, as he plays David as a thoroughly believable non-human machine who was programmed for certain functions, yet he also evolves a sense of curiosity, as well as instances of superiority and greed throughout the film's plot. It's a tough role to play, but Fassbender sure was up for the challenge.
4. Edwin Epps in 12 Years a Slave (2013)
Actors often say that they enjoy playing villains more than heroes, as one can have so much fun bringing an evil character to life. But I'm guessing that there's a limit to that - playing a truly dark and twisted villain in a realistic manner must be very difficult assuming that the actor himself is a good person, as one must pull demons out of oneself and be believable as a truly horrible human being. So I'd imagine that Michael Fassbender didn't have too much fun when portraying sadistic and deeply racist slaveowner Edwin Epps in this Best Picture winner, but he sure does a great job with the role.
He has somehow only gotten two Oscar nominations in his career*, and it makes sense that one of them was for this gripping and powerful film. It can't be easy for such a nice-seeming guy to really give his everything into a role as a man representing humanity at its very worst - we also get to see Fassbender's charming side in the film, but in the context of this character, it just makes it extra-sickening to see such a rotten person cracking jokes and making light of the conditions his slaves were living in. It's the darkest performance of his career, and one of his best.
*He didn't win either time, but if his career continues on the same track, I'd be willing to bet money that ten years from now Fassbender will have at least one Academy Award on his resumé.
3. Macbeth in Macbeth (2015)
The task of ranking my top 10 all-time favorite actors is one that has eluded me to this day, but I'd say that Sir Patrick Stewart, Denzel Washington and Michael Fassbender would all have a very fair chance of making that top 10 once I finish it some day. So the fact that all three have played the title role in a film adaptation of William Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy is quite special, and saying which of those three performances is the best is extremely difficult. They all come out on top in some category: Sir Patrick did the best job at reciting Shakespearean dialogue and living up to the role's fabled grandeur out of the three, while Denzel conveyed the character's gradual corruption from sympathetic hero to horrid villain in the most tragic fashion - but it's Michael Fassbender who does the very best job conveying the character's ambitious, power-hungry and eventually unstable nature. And he does it with quite the twist.
This particular version of the story, directed by Justin Kurzel, stays mostly very loyal to the Bard's source material, but takes one bold viewpoint in its narrative: instead of simply being driven mad by lust for power, or being manipulated by his wife, as we've seen before, this iteration of Macbeth seems to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or something of the like. This gripping take makes for a fascinating backdrop that makes perfect sense: after years of fighting brutal wars, Macbeth is numb to violence and starts to lose his grip on his morals and sanity, which drives him into committing the character's notorious power grab and subsequent actions.
Fassbender was the perfect choice to play this version of the character, as his Macbeth doesn't start out as a heroic warrior and end up as a complete villain as is tradition: rather, he starts out as what I'd imagine to be a very realistic take on a medieval soldier who has been through too much for one man to handle, and his gripping character arch into full-on madness feels grim and real. It's a tough balance to bring a new side to an iconic character while also staying true to the original, but Fassbender walks that line beautifully, making for one of the best leading performances across all Shakespeare-based movies.
2. Erik Lensherr / Magneto in X-Men: First Class (2011), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)
First off: no, I didn't make a mistake, I simply chose not to include X-Men: Dark Phoenix in the list of appearances, because Fassbender deserves better than to be affiliated with that trainwreck that shamelessly dragged many of the franchise's greatest actors into it.
Anyways, while the X-Men films aren't quite as highly regarded overall in the superhero genre as the Dark Knight trilogy or the MCU at its greatest, it is hard to deny that they may very well be the best-acted superhero films ever made. Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen were so sublime in the original trilogy, blowing the world of cinema away with how good of an acting performance one can pull off in a comic book flick, that expectations were sky high for the actors chosen to play the young versions of Professor X and Magneto in the prequels. And against all odds, both James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender rose to the occasion, providing brilliant and powerful performances absolutely on par with the legends whose boots they were filling.
Fassbender is simply enthralling in the complex, villainous role of Erik Lensherr / Magneto. He plays the character's more evil side so well that you'll be equally frightened by and angry at this machiavellian megalomaniac who is so ruthlessly betraying his former friends - yet he manages to play the character's more fragile and humane side with such vulnerability, that you can't help but feel for him and understand where he's coming from to a degree.
The gripping nature of watching Lensherr and Xavier become friends in the first prequel X-Men: First Class (2011), knowing how badly they will eventually turn against each other, is made extra powerful by the fact that Fassbender's interpretation of the character is so damn humane and even likable at his best, so that the bond between the characters feels real. This makes it all the more heartbreaking when the actor portrays Lennsher's arch into fully-fledged villainy with emotion and gravitas. It takes a great actor to make you hate how much you care about a character.
1. Steve Jobs in Steve Jobs (2015)
It takes a talented actor to pull off a major performance, let alone a leading performance, in a film written by Aaron Sorkin - the scripts by the world-class screenwriter are so demanding, with their sense of stress and dramatic hurry, balancing of snappy fast-paced dialogue and powerful individual lines bordering on profound, and well-written and fleshed-out character archs. When the right actors are found, however, a Sorkin script can push an actor to pull off a performance of unforeseen greatness - one thing that great actors such as Martin Sheen, Rob Lowe, Kevin Bacon, Jesse Eisenberg and Eddie Redmayne all have in common is that their #1 finest performances all come from Aaron Sorkin movies/shows.
And joining that prestigious bunch is Michael Fassbender, as I see his title role in Sorkin's Steve Jobs biopic Steve Jobs as the greatest individual performance of his career thus far. He got nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of the infamous Apple co-founder, and a win would've been very much in the question if the film hadn't had the ill fate of being released in the same year when Leonardo DiCaprio defied the very limits of acting in order to finally win his Oscar for his work in The Revenant.
Here's the amazing thing about this performance: Michael Fassbender doesn't look like Steve Jobs all that much, nor is he made-up to share a particularly striking resemblance, and his way of speaking doesn't sound like the real-life Jobs all that much either (Sorkin has been known to prefer that the actors in his biopics focus on interpreting the character in the script, rather than imitating the real-life celebrity in all their mannerisms). But by the end of the film, you'll feel like you're watching the real Steve Jobs instead of an actor playing a role. That's largely thanks to the script where every line Jobs speaks is something you could imagine hearing from the real guy's mouth (I swear, I didn't intend for my Michael Fassbender list to turn into an Aaron Sorkin praise-fest), but also thanks to the actor being so believable in conveying Jobs' philosophy and behavior that there was no need to focus all that much on looking like him and imitating him.
In this movie, Fassbender is the wittiest, most riveting version of himself, and he delivers each line with dramatic perfection. He portrays the lead character as a true and believable antihero - someone who feels truly prickly and insincere for large chunks of the movie, yet is still very much human, so that you can see where he's coming from and root for him despite his more frustrating moments and actions. On one hand, it's a bit hard to believe that he could ever top this role, but on the other hand, I do feel like Fassbender has it in him to pull off an even greater and more career-defining performance in the next decade or two, and that will eventually win him his Oscar.
Thank you for reading! Tune in next week as I rank the top 10 TV shows that combine comedy and drama.
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