Michael Fassbender in Los Angeles, December 2008. Suit and shirt Burberry Tie Band of Outsiders

Though many actors have lost weight for a part, few have made their transformations look as excruciating as Michael Fassbender. For Hunger, the visceral debut feature by British artist Steve McQueen, the Irish-German actor shed more than 30 pounds to portray infamous I.R.A. prisoner Bobby Sands, who starved himself to death in protest in 1981. The hideously beautiful film depicts scenes of sadistic torture, point-blank murder, and massive quantities of urine and feces, but most disturbing of all is the physical change to Fassbender’s character as he morphs from fiery freedom fighter to quivering bundle of bones and lesion-covered skin. While Hunger isn’t a fun time at the movies, it’s a dazzling artistic achievement, with special resonance in light of the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.

Fassbender, 31, initially hesitated to take the role. “How many people want to sit through an hour and a half of people wiping shit on the wall and starving?” he recalls asking himself. “Did I really want to go and lose all that weight?” Fassbender, who grew up in Southern Ireland and was 4 when Sands made international headlines, was also concerned about tone, feeling that past films about the Troubles in Northern Ireland had been disrespectful. “Nobody can judge,” he says. “You can just show people a mirror, show them the way that we behave with one another.” His concerns evaporated once he met McQueen, who emphasized that the film was “a human story, not a political story.” After shooting the film’s first two acts, Fassbender spent ten weeks preparing his body for the brutal final scenes which wordlessly track Sands’s hunger strike, dropping the pounds with a diet of nuts, berries, and sardines. “I didn’t think about Bobby,” he says. “I thought about not going over 600 calories. I went really loopy.”

Now back to his old weight, Fassbender is looking ahead. His performance in Hunger, which earned a standing ovation at Cannes last year, has opened doors for an actor previously best known for a supporting role in the Spartan epic 300. He also recently starred in the controversial British thriller Eden Lake and in French director François Ozon’s English-language debut, Angel. And this summer, he will appear in Inglourious Basterds, the long-awaited war epic Quentin Tarantino, whose Reservoir Dogs Fassbender adapted for the stage when he was just starting out at 18. “I've come full circle,” he says.

GROOMING LISA HANSON (MAGNET)
PHOTO ASSISTANTS BEN FRANKEN AND KRISTINA WEINHOLD
RETOUCHING PRO VISION

HUNGER IS OUT IN MARCH FROM IFC FILMS