Actor Michael Fassbender

It was Steve McQueen’s directional debut Hunger that first brought Michael Fassbender into the limelight. His fearless performance won him the admiration of every film critic in the country, but didn’t quite throw him into the big time. Then came Fish Tank, the gritty 2009 film set in an Essex council estate that became an unexpected hit at the festivals. Big budget roles followed. This year saw him take on the role of a young Ian McKellen in X Men: First Class, and this summer he was the latest brooding hero to bring Bronte’s Mr Rochester to the big screen. It’s safe to say it’s been a pretty good year for the 34 year-old Irish/German actor. Type ‘Michael’ into Google, and his name is the first to come up – a sign, if ever there was one, that the world knows who you are.

If people are already sitting up and taking notice, interest in Fassbender is set to go stratospheric, with the release of Steve McQueen’s second feature, Shame. In a career-defining role, Fassbender plays Brandon, a 30-something office worker in the throes of sex addiction. His belief in McQueen was so strong, that Fassbender claims he agreed to the role before he’d even read the script. But once he had actually looked in more detail, surely there was some trepidation – was he scared?

‘Yes’ is the simple response.  Was it an embarrassing one to film? (Fassbender’s character spends a good chunk of the film completely naked. Calm down ladies.)

‘Of course. Unless you have exhibitionist tendencies, which I don’t – I’m not especially comfortable parading round naked in front of a room full of strangers, but it just had to get done. It was an essential part of getting inside the psyche, and that’s my job. You just have to roll up your sleeves. But I didn’t have any on… and just go for it.’

How on earth do you prepare for such a demanding role?

‘It’s a grey area, this idea of sexual addiction,’ he explains. ‘We’ve been introduced to the idea through celebrities, and there’s this perception that it’s an indulgence perhaps. What was interesting was discovering just how many people claimed to suffer from it, and how it wasn’t being treated officially as a mental illness.’

He says that the illness manifests itself in different ways, but that with his character, there is a central problem with ‘intimacy and an emotional content in any sort of relationship’ from which the whole story of the film stems.

He went on to research the role by speaking to a sex addict dealing with similar issues with intimacy. ‘I am very grateful to have met someone who was suffering from exactly that. Asking direct questions can put people on guard a bit, so I just asked him to tell me stories and from those stories I could get an idea of how certain motivations were born within a personality like that.’

The film, while brilliant, is pretty heavy viewing. Some might even find it unfeasibly bleak. Is there any hope at all for Brandon? ‘He is trying to deal with it. That’s the hope for me – he’s struggling with it, he’s trying. If there’s no hope, for me personally, what’s the fucking point – you might as well give up.’

Shame played at the BFI London Film Festival in association with American Express and will be in cinemas nationwide in January 2012.

Image by getty images