Rise to Fame
His breakout wasn't X-Men. It was Hunger (2008), Steve McQueen's prison film where he played IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, losing 42 pounds for the role and filming a 17-minute single-take conversation that critics still cite. X-Men: First Class (2011) turned him into a franchise player, casting him as young Magneto with enough moral weight to make a Holocaust survivor's grief work inside a superhero movie. Two Oscar nominations followed, for 12 Years a Slave and Steve Jobs. The franchise got him famous. The films before it told the industry what he was.
In the Spotlight
After the X-Men run wrapped, Fassbender spent four years as a professional racing driver in Europe and wasn't seen in a film. The Killer (2023) with David Fincher was the return, followed by Black Bag (2025), a Steven Soderbergh spy thriller with Cate Blanchett that critics received well. The Agency on Paramount+ has been renewed for Season 2 and he has a Kennedy mini-series for Netflix lined up. He runs a quieter profile than his talent warrants, living in Lisbon with wife Alicia Vikander and two sons.
Side Notes
He grew up in Killarney, Ireland, though he was born in Heidelberg, Germany to a German father and an Irish mother. Family lore holds that his mother descends from Michael Collins, which makes his 2006 Edinburgh Fringe performance playing Collins feel less like a casting decision and more like something stranger. He also flew to Berlin specifically to audition for Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, only to arrive and find Christoph Waltz had just been cast. His surname is German for barrel-maker. He has a scar on his left ankle from a golf cart James McAvoy crashed.