When speaking of Michael Fassbender's performance in Shame, Charlize Theron, his co-star in Ridley Scott's Alien prequel Prometheus, said what the rest of the world has been thinking for months. "The bottom line is," she said, "he should have an Oscar on his mantel right now."
Playing Brandon, a sex addict helplessly caught in a riptide of desire, Fassbender gave, quite simply, the performance of the year - haunted, unshowy and doing it all with a sparse script that left him to do all the heavy lifting. He did more than that. He carried the film on his back.
Perhaps it just wasn't the sort of Oscar-bait biopic the Academy so adores. Or perhaps - who knows? - it was just that we saw Fassbender's penis, and the Academy doesn't go for that sort of thing. Whichever, Shame may have been the high point, but the entire year was his alone. Explosive thriller Haywire showed he could he could do action as well as angst; David Cronenberg's period drama A Dangerous Method followed, in which he played psychoanalyst Carl Jung, a man repressing, rather than led by, his desire, but no less a slave to it; and, finally, there was summer event-moviePrometheus, in which he stole the show playing an android servant who had become obsessed with
Lawrence Of Arabia, meaning the performance was part robot, part Peter O'Toole, part Pinocchio and all Fassbender.
Humanising and creepy, pitiful yet alienating, it summed up what makes Fassbender special, and probably explains why the Academy never came calling. Most actors want you to love them. Michael Fassbender just wants you too gripped to look away.
Originally published in the October 2012 edition of British GQ.
