Getting to meet your heroes as an actor must be one hell of a job perk, though not as much as getting to work with said hero on a movie project. For Michael Fassbender, he was a little starstruck when he met fellow Irish star Brendan Gleeson on the set of ‘Trespass Against Us’.
Michael Fassbender and Brendan Gleeson star in ‘Trespass Against Us’
Of course, Michael Fassbender is more internationally well-known than Brendan Gleeson, and that fact wasn’t lost on the latter who was just as eager to work with the younger star. Little did he know that Michael had been following him for over twenty years.
‘He said, ‘I finally get to work with you’ and I said I’ve been waiting longer than he’s been waiting because I saw him when I was 16 in Ireland, he was doing ‘Juno and the Paycock”, he recalled. ‘I was just a fan from then on. Then he played Michael Collins in an Irish TV two-parter broadcast [‘The Treaty’] when I was about, again, 15-16. I tape-recorded that for my grandfather. So I’d been following him for ages, and then I saw him in ‘The General’. [I’m] just such a huge fan.’
Watch the trailer for ‘Trespass Against Us’ here:
The thing that Michael enjoys most about Brendan is the plenitude of his characterisation, that is both engaging to watch and to interact. ‘As a viewer watching his work I find him very generous, and as an actor absolutely the same’, he continued. ‘He’s always giving you plenty of stuff to work with, to bounce off of.’
Michael has now had the chance to work with two members of the gifted family, having also starred opposite Domhnall Gleeson on Lenny Abrahamson’s ‘Frank’ in 2014. ‘I worked with his son actually before I got a chance to work with him’, he added. ‘I worked with Domhnall on a film just about a year and a half ago. They’re a very talented family.’
Michael Fassbender has most recently been working on his next film ‘Alien: Covenant’, and he has also completed shooting on a forthcoming crime drama called ‘The Snowman’.
