Fassbender on Burke


Radio Free interviewed Michael about his role as second villain to Malkovich in Jonah Hex.

What can we expect from your character, and how did you go about creating him?

I had this idea about the character…He’s kind of psychotic–he gets
his kicks in kind of perverted ways. But I didn’t want to make it very obvious, like you’d seen it before. But I didn’t know where to go with it. And then we were doing wardrobe, and [costume designer] Michael Wilkinson, who I worked with before on 300, was doing the wardrobe, and he’s fantastic. And he had this three-piece suit pulled out for me, which actually was very green, and I’m playing this Irish guy, and I said, “Look, man, you’ve got to take the green down. I can’t go back home to Ireland–they’ll kill me.” [laughs] So it was this sort of green, faded-down three-piece suit. And then I was going through hats, and I picked up a bowler hat. And I put on the bowler hat, and I was looking in the mirror, and I just thought, “Oh, this is like Clockwork Orange.” So I thought I was going to go along that vein physically, and sort of take it from like “Clockwork Orange meets Frank Gorshin’s [1960s] Riddler, with a Carrey accent.” And then the guys at prosthetics and [makeup effects artist Christien
Tinsley created] this sort of tattoo thing, which sort of goes all the way down to the torso and on my arms. So really, the people around you that are doing all these things kind of do the work for you as well, if you’re just opened to it. So it became a really fun character, actually.

Clockwork was the approach Heath Ledger took with The Joker, the mentioning of Gorshin and Carrey’s bland portrayal of my favorite Batman villain is cringeworthy. My expectations dropped a little, the over the top performance never works.