December 10, 2023
Variety (YouTube)
In their Actors on Actors conversation ‘Shame’ costars Carey Mulligan (‘Maestro‘) and Michael Fassbender (‘The Killer‘) reminisce on working with Steve McQueen and talk about the directors they worked with on their current projects, David Fincher and Bradley Cooper.
Variety Actors on Actors presented by AIR from Amazon Studios.
From ‘Shame’ to Netflix Films: Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan on Rejection and Being So in Character You Act Without Thinking
Kate Aurthur
Photographs by Alexi Lubomirski
December 10, 2023
Variety
In “Maestro” and “The Killer,” the characters played by Carey Mulligan and Michael Fassbender exist in different worlds. Mulligan’s Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, an up-and-coming actress who becomes conductor Leonard Bernstein’s wife and soul mate, breathes rarefied air among East Coast artists from the 1950s through the ’70s. Fassbender’s tightly coiled, mostly silent assassin, meanwhile, travels the world seeking vengeance, while keeping his focus by doing push-ups on his fingertips.
Twelve years ago, though, Fassbender and Mulligan inhabited the same toxic universe, as dysfunctional siblings in 2011’s “Shame.” The film was writer-director Steve McQueen’s bleak, sexually explicit examination of sex addiction through the eyes of Fassbender’s character, Brandon, a New York City executive brought low by his self-destructive desires. Mulligan’s Sissy, a lounge singer, was sorrowful and also boundary-less.
The Fincher Analyst 