Michael Fassbender says Macbeth had post traumatic syndrome disorder

Judging by his attire – black jeans, green T-shirt and a navy suede jacket – Fassbender is relaxed. It’s not his first Cannes – he landed on the world stage when Steve McQueen’s Hunger premiered here in 2008, playing IRA prisoner Bobby Sands. A year later he was back in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. But it’s since then that the Irish star has moved onto Hollywood’s A-List, cemented by an Oscar nomination for his brutal master in McQueen’s Twelve Years A Slave.

Franchise-friendly, he’s appeared as the younger Magneto in the last two X-Men films (the role originated by Sir Ian McKellen) and was sublime as the android David in Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel, Prometheus. But there’s more to Fassbender than simply a studio go-to guy. A born risk-taker, whether it’s playing a sex addict in McQueen’s Shame, psychotherapist Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method or a mask-wearing musician in Frank, he’s at his best when he’s walking the proverbial tightrope.

This autumn sees Fassbender in his most daring high-wire act – a double-bill that required all his dexterity. From the murderous Macbeth, he went on to Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, playing the title role – the late co-founder of tech-pioneers Apple. Learning the Bard for Macbeth was one thing; he then had to contend with lines written by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, the “modern-day Shakespeare” who penned the Jobs script. “Shakespeare was tricky, but the Jobs movie was hard,” he says. “It was a lot of words!”

Early word is that the 38 year old Fassbender is a frontrunner at next year’s Oscars for Best Actor for his performance as Jobs. But don’t discount his marvellously muscular turn in Macbeth, which has its UK premiere in Edinburgh tomorrow. “With this movie he’ll show that he’s one of the greatest actors in the world,” the French actress Marion Cotillard told me, shortly after she’d finished filming her role as Lady Macbeth. It’s a powerful interpretation – worthy of comparison with earlier takes on the play, Roman Polanski’s Macbeth and Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood.

The influential trade paper Variety called it “scarcely improvable…a Shakespeare pic for the ages”, a wholly accurate comment, though it’s also very much a film for now. Fassbender talks of Macbeth, the general goaded by his scheming wife into killing his own king, Duncan, as suffering with PTSD. “When I arrived, Justin said: ‘This is a guy who is dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.’ I said, ‘Of course it is.’ Even when I was studying at drama school, it never occurred to me and it’s so obvious.”

Fassbender points out that Shakespeare pinpointed these physical reactions to wartime stress. “He had the foresight back then to describe what these soldiers must’ve gone through.” He points to the banquet scene in Act III. “Lady Macbeth says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve seen him have these fits before, it’ll pass.’ So we know that he’s suffered from bouts of rage, of madness, hallucinations – is he seeing the witches or not at the beginning? So that alone gave me a massive key into the character.”

His is a sympathetic portrait, of a wounded man, rather than an ambitious murderer.

“You know when you meet this guy, he’s already fractured. Already he’s unhinged. It’s almost in his killing that he finds his direction. The murder of Duncan invigorates him and puts him on a clear path, and then he knows he’s got to kill Macduff and then he knows he’s got to kill Banquo,” he says, “I suppose, as human beings, we get very familiar and comfortable with patterns of behaviour, and that’s his pattern of behaviour.”

Bloody, muddy, sodden and dank, this is a primal take on Macbeth, with Fassbender forced to endure a bleak winter shoot, both north and south of the border. “It was cold. It was wet. It was intense. When we were filming, it was literally gales and rain – it was relentless. Just outside of London, where we shot a large amount of it. And then when we went up to the isle of Skye…again, it was hailstorms, snow, ice. But we were like: ‘Hopefully it will look good on screen!’”

Fassbender pays credit to the Scottish weather for helping him get into character. “The one thing about this period of time,” he ponders aloud. “What was it like to be constantly wet and cold in these tent-like houses? That really drove me, that feeling. Hopefully for the audience as well. When you lie down in a blanket that’s soaking wet, you fall asleep in that – and what it does to your bones and your aches and your pains [is interesting]. The fact that people only lived half of our life span – all of those things helped.”

While Cotillard fell down a bog hole, Fassbender had to endure “freezing” temperatures for a scene where Macbeth is seen bathing outside. Fassbender, who has never been afraid to shed his clothes on screen, laughs off yet another top-off scene to add to his clip-reel. “That’s in my contract!” he chuckles. “I like to get naked!” He turns serious for a second, pointing out its just part of the character’s routine. “It’s in the script…there’s a lot of other stuff in the script too.”

At least he had a helping hand – in the shape of James McAvoy, Fassbender’s co-star in the X-Men films, who also played Macbeth on stage in London recently. “This was back on the last X-Men, when I knew I was going to do it…we discussed everything – the relationship, what the concepts were behind it, the loss of the child. Everything really.” McAvoy even gave Fassbender a miniature book of the Macbeth text as a present – “a little blue one,” he explains. “A mini-Macbeth.”

The experience of making Macbeth was evidently positive. He and Cotillard and their director are reteaming for Assassin’s Creed, adapted from the hugely popular historical action-adventure video game series. Has he played it? “I’ve played it – but very badly, and not that many times,” he says. “No, I have the same principle with video games as I have with television. I just got rid of it because I’d just end up flicking all day long, and into the night. So I don’t have games.”

While the Oscar nomination for his role as Steve Jobs seems a certainty, he’s been there before – under the belief that he’d be up for Shame, which had already won him Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival. He was overlooked, with suggestions the material was too incendiary for the conservative Academy. Did that upset him? “When I found out I wasn’t nominated, of course I was upset. You’re disappointed. But that’s my ego and my vanity.”

If he has an ego, he’s largely managed to keep it in check – doubtless aided by a relatively secluded and stable upbringing. Raised in Ireland, where his mother Adele hailed from, he was born in Heidelberg, in southwest Germany (his father Josef is German). “I still have relatives there. It’s a beautiful place. I was two when we left, but I went back and forth to visit my grandparents, when they were still alive, and my uncles and aunts.” Does he still speak German? “Natürlich,” he quips back. “On my CV, it says I’m fluent!”

He spent the bulk of his childhood in Killarney, County Kerry, where his parents ran a restaurant. What does he remember of it growing up? “Nice memories,” he says, softly. “I grew up in the countryside. So a lot of climbing trees and fishing…and running around.” In his early teens, “I wanted to be a guitar player, but I wasn’t good enough.” He turned to acting, enrolling in a drama class. “My grandmother was my first one to support me, and really think it was a good idea.”

Six months later he was directing a play of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in a nightclub in Killarney. He calls Tarantino an idol; little wonder, years later, when he got to play a suave British lieutenant in the director’s Second World War tale Inglorious Basterds, it was “a pretty special moment”.

Upon graduating from drama school in London, he was cast in the Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks produced Second World War mini-series Band of Brothers. And then? Unemployment. “That was a good lesson for me, because I was like, ‘OK, cool. This is it. The career is starting off here.’ And then nothing – for a year. That taught me not to spend all my money…you never know what’s going to happen next. Nothing is guaranteed.” Even at the end of that fallow patch, Fassbender had to pick up the pieces with TV bit-parts on shows like Poirot and Holby City.

Everything changed when he met Steve McQueen, and the former Turner prize-winning artist cast him in Hunger. Playing the hunger-striking Bobby Sands, Fassbender dropped to a dangerous 57 kilos; the performance was mesmerising. Roles followed in Fish Tank, as a predatory boyfriend, and 2011’s Jane Eyre, as Rochester. There was something invigorating about Fassbender, radiating vulnerability, masculinity, sex appeal and dysfunction. “There is no one like Michael out there right now,” said Ridley Scott. “And there hasn’t been, for me, since Marlon Brando.”

For Fassbender, he’s just trying to keep his head screwed on amid the high praise and hype. “The danger – in this industry, or I guess any industry – is when I’m not excited about [a film] or I don’t feel like I’m still learning,” he muses. “Then I’m just doing it for money and I’m complacent.” He has no need to do anything for the money – estimates put his fortune at $30 million. And Fassbender is hardly Hollywood flash, his expensive-looking wristwatch the only extravagance on show today. “I keep things pretty simple,” he nods.

Indeed, Fassbender is one of the fortunate ones. Recognisable enough to be on director’s wish-lists, he’s somehow able to keep a relatively low-profile. Compare the hysteria that greets, say, Benedict Cumberbatch, his co-star in Twelve Years A Slave; slip on a hoodie and Fassbender can get by quite easily. “It’s not insane,” he acknowledges. “I’ve been around people where it’s insane, and I’m lucky enough to not really have that.”

Then again, Fassbender hardly craves the limelight. He still lives in the same East London flat he’s lived in since his twenties, and you’re more likely to find him nursing a pint of Guinness in a local pub than falling out of Mayfair joints. “For sure, a certain lifestyle that can go hand-in-hand with fame can be quite seductive and so therefore difficult to live without,” he concedes. “Getting trapped by things – nice things – [is a danger]. They’re all over here.” He gestures behind him. “You see them all over Cannes.”

He loves motorcycles, and the freedom a road trip entails (doubtless that helmet helps maintain the anonymity). He just did a short trip, six days around Morocco, and he still plans to jaunt around South America. The only problem is he’s just given his bike to his Dad. “Whenever I go away, I take it back home to Ireland. He was riding it around and said, ‘Oh your bike is so much better than mine’ – and I was like, ‘Maybe you should take it!’ As soon as I said that, he sold the other one!”

According to the tabloids, he recently split with Alicia Vikander, after dating the Swedish actress (seen this year as Vera Brittain in Testament of Youth) for nine months. They met on The Light Between The Oceans, the forthcoming drama from Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance, playing a lighthouse keeper and his wife. Shortly after we meet, he and Vikander were glimpsed together at the Monaco Grand Prix, but any polite enquiry about her is met with a firm “next question” from the actor.

Vikander isn’t the first co-star he’s dated. After X-Men: First Class, he stepped out with Zoe Kravitz, daughter to musician Lenny, while he followed his time on Shame by seeing the lesser-known Nicole Beharie. He’s admitted in the past that landing in Hollywood makes genuine connections difficult. He once told GQ: “You become a lot more successful in terms of, like, talking to a girl. She’s all of a sudden more interested in me…I know that, like, three years ago, she would’ve walked away after two sentences left my mouth.”

In the past, he’s said he wants to settle down, but that can’t be easy when the studios keep courting him far more seductively than any member of the opposite sex. When we meet, he’s just come from Montreal, shooting his third outing as the mutant villain Magneto, in X-Men: Apocalypse. Under pain of death, he can’t “ reveal anything”, he says. “I’m terrified to say anything.” What would happen if he did? “You lose a finger,” he grins. “But you get to pick which one!”

He plays it all very casually, of course. “A lot of the times I find out what I’m doing on the internet – ‘Oh, so that’s when that film’s being released!’” – though you suspect he’s a little more in control than that. But life right now is a succession of pinch-me moments, a haze of Hollywood lights. “I feel like I’m in an incredibly privileged position,” he says. “That keeps me very humbled.” Unlike Macbeth, power has yet to go to his head.

Macbeth (15) opens on October 2. Steve Jobs (tbc) is released on November 13.