10 Michael Fassbender Performances That Left Us Speechless

After years spent being one of the best male leads around, Michael Fassbender will finally saunter into the 2015/2016 awards season as a major contender. Up to now, the actor has wowed the critics with his typically profound character explorations and found fans with his forays into blockbuster territory - but this year, it looks promising that Fassbender might at last seal the deal with an Oscar. Most likely to bring him trophies this awards season is Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs, in which Fassbender plays the titular, revolutionary Apple founder. Still, no one should discount his next release before then from featuring at awards time either: Justin Kurzel's Macbeth. Based on Shakespeare's 'Scottish play,' Kurzel's film reimagines the Thane of Cawdor as a damaged soldier suffering from PTSD - and some critics are even saying Fassbender gives his greatest performances to date as the battle-weary lord. It's a bold claim, to be sure, as throughout his brief career as a leading man, Fassbender has given some of the most affecting, powerful performances in recent memory. And here are ten of his best to date. 10) Inglourious Basterds It's hard to imagine Quentin Tarantino's original choice for the part - Simon Pegg - playing Lt. Archie Hicox after you've seen Michael Fassbender in the role. Not that Pegg wouldn't have put a decent spin on it, it's just that Fassbender is so good in QT's WWII epic, you wish Hicox had been the star of his own film. Alas, he's a supporting character in a movie dominated by Brad Pitt and Christoph Waltz, but nevertheless, Fassbender walks casually away with his quarter of the picture. Going from stiff-upper-lipped Brit to suaveness personified, as an undercover English agent play-acting at being a German officer, Fassbender spends most of his time in Inglourious Basterds speaking German and sweating over the fact his cover might get blown. Of course it is, and he goes out in a blaze of glory, but not before he lights up a cigarette and takes a few Nazis down with him. Imagine an oh-so-English Steve McQueen - vaguely snooty, but devilishly cool. 9) The Counselor Given the general consensus, your take on The Counselor probably isn't all that kind. But though the film's not Ridley Scott's finest moment (it's hardly his worst, either; if nothing else it's possibly his best film set in the present day), Fassbender emerges confidently victorious from it. Playing a cliche of a hot-shot lawyer, one who one day suddenly decides to dip his toe into the murky waters of crime, Fassbender takes an underwritten lead and makes it into something valuable. Even when he's bawling his eyes out over the likely murder of his fiancee, there's something troublingly self-serving and reptilian about Fassbender in The Counselor. The actor's outward beauty is emphasized by aesthetic fetishist Scott, but Fassbender never allows you to escape from the off-putting hollowness within his unnamed counselor. If nothing else the film is proof that Fassbender can be compelling even when he's playing someone despicable. 8) X-Men: Days Of Future Past Sure, Fassbender brings the same character with him to Days of Future Past over from X-Men: First Class, but there are a couple of reasons why he trumps his First Class performance in the sequel. For one, you have Fassbender grown into the role in DOFP, seemingly more comfortable working within blockbuster constraints than he was in First Class. Second, and more important, is this: DOFP is the film that best displays Fassbender's unsung talents as a mimic. Whereas Fassbender in First Class puts his own (inconsistently-accented) spin on Erik Lensherr, in DOFP he's forced to recognize that the character will eventually grow into Ian McKellen's interpretation. So, in DOFP, you have Fassbender doing his glowering, quietly menacing thing, whilst ever-so-subtly adopting McKellen's accent and mannerisms, convincing as a younger version of the man despite the obvious vast physical dissimilarity between the two. 7) Macbeth There have been many differing interpretations of Macbeth over the years, but none quite like this. While previous incarnations occasionally beggared belief, with Macbeth descending into madness and cruelty as a result of nothing more than a guilty conscience, in Justin Kurzel's 2015 Macbeth, the title character is dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. Suddenly, the character makes sense; and in Michael Fassbender, you have an actor convincingly evolving across the film from already-unhinged warrior to a man in complete mental meltdown. Initially a vision of rage heading into battle, Macbeth emerges a changed man. With dazzled eyes and detached air, there's a sense with Fassbender's Macbeth that the 'tyrant' as king isn't really in control of his own actions. It keeps him curiously sympathetic - in this version of Shakespeare's play, Macbeth is a mere puppet of Lady Macbeth, a hollow figure who's ceased to be a person. And Fassbender's never been spookier than in the moment he declares, "full of scorpions is my mind," a manic grin on his blank face as he ponders his next bloody move. 6) Hunger He's been better since, but it's nonetheless obvious why Hunger was the film that brought Fassbender to mainstream attention. As IRA political prisoner and hunger striker Bobby Sands, Fassbender gives the very definition of a raw performance. It's not a technically perfect turn - in the centerpiece tete-a-tete between Sands and Liam Cunningham's priest, Fassbender can be overly-mannered, even stagy - but it's imbued with the power of an actor who's been waiting all his life for a moment to show what he's made of. The dedication is clear: not before or since has Fassbender gone to the lengths he goes to in Hunger, losing a staggering amount of weight, to the point of emaciation. Using his own accent in the film (there haven't been many opportunities for him to do the same since), the fact that Fassbender gets to speak with his native lilt here just adds to the sense that he's doing something real and summoned from within. 5) 12 Years A Slave If you want to be cynical about it, you could say Jared Leto had it easy winning that Supporting Actor Oscar for Dallas Buyer's Club. Leto, in playing a volatile transsexual with HIV, hit what Ricky Gervais' Extras character would call the Academy Award jackpot. Meanwhile, Michael Fassbender, up against Leto for playing a slave-owner in 12 Years A Slave, never stood a chance. Where Leto had an inspirational role to his name, Fassbender's part was too sadistic and too complicated to win. All the same, it was the performance that should have won Supporting Actor in 2013. For all the aforementioned reasons, Fassbender's had one of the most difficult acting jobs that year: taking the borderline evil slaver Edwin Epps and making him human. It was surely too uncomfortable for Academy voters that Fassbender made Epps sympathetic as well as frequently repulsive - but those who turned away from this repellent were only denying themselves the pleasure of seeing an actor at the top of his game, no matter how off-putting the material. 4) Prometheus How to play an android that wants to be human? That's the challenge Fassbender faced when he took the part of Prometheus' David, a machine that thinks (and schemes) like a person, but is fundamentally a piece of high-tech equipment. It's a part Fassbender went out of his way to prepare for - he learned to move like Greg Louganis, and act like Bowie, Bogarde, and O'Toole - and it resulted in one of his most paradoxically alive and vibrant performances. What's so brilliant about Fassbender's interpretation of David is how he brings a vanity, sadism, and Machiavellian craftiness to a part that isn't even defined particularly clearly on the page. Only rarely are actors praised for impressing in sci-fi movies, but critics went out of their way to laud Fassbender in Prometheus; maybe it's because he walked away with this one, still managing to stand out amidst all the film's big ideas and extraterrestrial mayhem. 3) Fish Tank Fassbender in Fish Tank feels like one of those before-they-were-famous roles; it looks like Andrea Arnold, who prefers to work with untrained performers, had simply picked Fassbender up off the street and asked him to play himself. But the fact is that Fassbender had already been acting for the screen for close to a decade by this point, and Arnold just managed to tease a performance so shockingly natural and layered from Fassbender that it doesn't even register as acting. As Connor, Fassbender is charismatic, charming, and immensely likeable. None of those are words you'd typically associate with a man who cheats on his wife, hits teenage girls, and sleeps with the under-age daughter of his latest conquest - but such is the power of Fassbender. Here his actions are wretched, but he's also deeply human; Fassbender never allows us to doubt that this is more or less a regular bloke, just one that's more flawed than most. 2) Frank It's an odd role for one of the best-looking men in Hollywood to take on, as he hides his face inside a giant papier mache head for the entire film. But before we finally get a glimpse of the real Frank at the end, Fassbender is indeed required to act without the help of facial expressions. And in this weird, amusing little film about mental illness and the pursuit of artistic perfection, the actor manages to steal the show. Perhaps most surprising, other than the fact that he reveals a uniquely impressive set of pipes as lead singer of The Soronprfbs, is how funny Fassbender turns out to be in Frank, giving a turn of deadpan delivery and oddball slapstick. When Frank finally emerges from the head, though, there's a performance of tragic sensitivity by Fassbender. He reveals Frank to be not quite a genius, but a normal guy who just doesn't know how to function in the real world. 1) Shame Of all the great Oscar injustices of recent times, the fact that Michael Fassbender wasn't even nominated for Best Actor in 2012 stung more than most. In his second collaboration with Hunger and 12 Years A Slave director Steve McQueen, Fassbender not only gave one of the best performances of that year, but one of the most by-turns compelling and difficult-to-watch portrayals of addiction ever. As Brandon, an anonymous office worker who also happens to be a sex addict, Fassbender is at his peak. Obviously seeing the potential after introducing him to the world with Hunger, McQueen puts Fassbender through his paces in Shame, requiring him to be alternately likable and detestable, charming and slimy, detached and passionate. It's the most complex role of Fassbender's career to date, and he's mesmerizing, playing the part like he's not even playing it at all. And despite the complexity of the part, it's the most natural the actor has ever been. In shocking flashes, he's at his most powerful here, too.