The rise, fall and very subtle resurrection of Michael Fassbender is one of Hollywood’s most curious modern mysteries. A fearless performer, two-time Oscar nominee and auteur magnet, then the star of some of the very worst films you saw in 2016 and 2017, Fassbender had a movie career that burnt bright, fizzled fast, and defied simple explanation. 12 Years a Slave. Shame. Steve Jobs. The Snowman? Less perplexing was the allure he had as a name-above-the-title film star: grit, danger, charisma; the scrappy, scruffy Irish roguishness that formed the blueprint for our present-day Mescals and Keoghans. Then, as if a trapdoor had opened up beneath him, he seemed to vanish without a trace.
And now, just as quietly as he left, Fassbender is back. Ish. Black Bag, a slight, slinky thriller from Steven Soderbergh, is in cinemas this week and stars Fassbender as one half of a pair of married spies. The other is played by Cate Blanchett, an actor who – much like her on-screen husband – has always embodied a chic, slightly distant elegance. For Fassbender, the role arrives on the heels of another slight, slinky thriller: David Fincher’s The Killer, a Netflix film that seemed to evaporate upon impact in 2023. Fassbender’s other new work has done much the same. The risible 2023 football comedy Next Goal Wins from director Taika Waititi, for one, and last year’s Paramount+ drama The Agency, a TV series about espionage that was about as anonymous as its title.
All have been roles that hinge on Fassbender’s cryptic chilliness. If not playing spies or assassins, he’s often now playing men who disappear or flee to parts unknown: the wounded football coach of Next Goal Wins, or the IRA member who fakes his own death in Kneecap, last year’s wonderfully unruly pseudo hip-hop biopic. He’s great at this kind of thing – men barely there – potentially because he feels so at home doing it. One foot in a place, the other elsewhere.
So where exactly did he go? Fassbender today lives in Lisbon with his wife, the actor Alicia Vikander, and their two children, while his hiatus from acting in 2018 led to several years as a race car driver – a slightly confusing career pivot, but one he’d been mulling for years. “I had a ferocious appetite and energy for [acting], and I went at it like a maniac,” he told Time Out in 2016. “But I’m going to take some downtime now.” He didn’t even rule out stopping entirely. “Part of me thinks you have a time as an actor when you’re at your best. There’s a journey to it, and then it’s downhill.”
You could see this happening even when Fassbender seemed to rule Hollywood. In the late Noughties, the actor had an irresistible run: as the Irish Republican Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen’s harrowing Hunger (2008), then as an abusive stepfather in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), and a British army officer in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009). Venturing to Hollywood, he reunited with McQueen to play a sex addict in the grimy, pungent Shame, and was a brilliantly haughty Magneto in the rebooted X-Men films. He was far and away the best thing in Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel Prometheus – his cyborg David coolly alternating between tender warmth and eerie menace. McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, where he played a terrifying plantation owner, earned him an Oscar nomination in 2014. Two years later he earned another for Danny Boyle’s ambitious Steve Jobs, Fassbender matching the film’s sleek, crisp, MacBook efficiency in the title role. David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, Justin Kurzel’s underrated adaptation of Macbeth, and Lenny Abrahamson’s funny, wry Frank added to a sensational CV.
Then the rot set in. Two baffling star vehicles stand out. Assassin’s Creed, in 2016, was a nonsensical video game adaptation far beneath him. Then 2017’s The Snowman, a psycho-thriller adapted from one of Jo Nesbø’s novels about the unfortunately named detective Harry Hole, seemed cut together by a lunatic; a baffling, partially unfinished and practically Lynchian mess of bad dubbing, Sigur Rós, and the worst sex scene in the world. To his credit, Fassbender was largely blameless for these failures. And during a moment of time in which Hollywood seemed to be experiencing a dearth of new and exciting leading men, Fassbender stood out as someone with range, magnetism and an appeal that crossed genders and sexualities. Hollywood really, really needed him. But may have ended up using him too much.
Fassbender and Vikander have largely kept schtum about their relationship – beyond cursory mentions of falling in love on the set of their little-seen 2016 drama The Light Between Oceans – but they have similar career timelines. Both were propelled to international stardom at the same time, earning Oscar attention simultaneously and navigating the absurdities of Hollywood together. They were among the last stars forged in a very different kind of American film industry, where Harvey Weinstein reigned supreme, money hadn’t entirely fallen out of independent filmmaking, boutique film companies devoted to dramas for adults still existed, and stars felt “made” instead of born. It had been decided by the industry that the pair were going to be massive, and they were relentlessly foisted upon us. Between the years of 2014 and 2018, Fassbender and Vikander appeared in a total of 25 films – an absurd rate of productivity that made them briefly inescapable. It’s no wonder they got exhausted, packed up their things and headed to the continent instead.
It may also explain why Fassbender’s return to acting has been relatively low-key. While he has dutifully promoted The Killer, Next Goal Wins, The Agency and Black Bag in short-form videos, he’s entirely avoided any kind of long-form magazine or newspaper interview. No Esquire. No Rolling Stone. No New York Times. It’s oddly unprecedented. Even Timothée Chalamet does an occasional GQ. Fassbender’s press silence may very well be because of the prurient treatment he received at the peak of his fame, where journalists would relentlessly interrogate him about his nude scenes in Shame and make crude jokes. Or it may be because he just doesn’t want to talk – a man once dubbed “Britain’s Brando” (despite his saying he doesn’t identify as British in the slightest) transformed into one of our most mysterious ex-movie stars.
The industry has changed radically since Fassbender’s heyday, exemplified by the fact that so much of his recent work has gone straight to streaming platforms. His kind of movie stardom is no longer in existence. But the question moving forward shouldn’t be whether he can regain his old status – more whether he’d even want to.
‘Black Bag’ is in cinemas
