Last Wednesday on May 9th, @EricaFails tweeted a photo of an ad from the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile’s Action for Road Safety program.
“Today, 3,500 people will die on the road,” it says. “Check your vision…Michael Fassbender.”
And there he is, Oscar-nominated Irish actor known for intense, gripping performances in 12 Years a Slave and Steve Jobs, catapulted to worldwide fame through starring roles in the X-Men and Alien franchises, holding up an eye chart.
“Did he get a DUI? Why did he do this ad,” Erica wondered in the comments. “I seriously think this is a court ordered thing. I would put money on it.”
“Man, he really will do anything for a paycheck,” replied @BocoCgi.
If you didn’t know what Fassbender is up to outside of Hollywood, this ad would seem inexplicable, a celebrity endorsement more confusing than effective. Here’s the simple truth: Fassbender is a motorhead. So much so, the 41-year-old Formula One fan might just switch careers.
Fassbender got started when Ferrari approached him about training in their Corso Pilota driving school in the fall of 2016. Available only to Ferrari clients, the school offers four courses to “develop driving skills, confidence and ability,” according to their website.
Fassbender was not a Ferrari owner at the time (and hadn’t owned a car in 20 years), but had publicly expressed interest in motorsports and his idolization of his near namesake, Michael Schumacher, a famous F1 racer who raced for Ferrari most of his career. “I remember watching races when I was really small, but I didn’t get the spark until I was around 13,” Fassbender told The Times. “Through the whole Michael Schumacher era, he was my hero. I loved his driving style. So aggressive.”
Students of Corso Pilota can train in several locations, like Ferrari’s private Fiorano Circuit in Maranello, Italy, where Fassbender told Ferrari Magazine, “I started out quite stressed as I learned to adjust to the sheer speed and all the information to absorb, but once I was doing it and found my focus, it actually became very relaxing, in some ways quite meditative.”
“Relaxing” is not how most would characterize Fassbender’s hobby, leaving his mother “in pieces” and making Jimmy Fallon equally distressed. “You can’t do this! You’re Michael Fassbender, we need you!” he said during Fassbender’s Tonight Show appearance in May of 2017. Fassbender gently reassured him and the world that they’re safe cars. A couple guys went to the hospital over the weekend, but they’re really safe cars.
At the time of this appearance, Fassbender had completed training and could compete professionally in Ferrari Challenge Championship races, of which he competed in the 2017 488 Challenge series, making his racing debut at Leguna Seca as part of the Scuderia Corsa team. “I almost vomited! Thank God not in the helmet! The nerves, the adrenaline, the fear. That first race kind of slipped away from me, mentally. The second race I got it together more,” he said to Automobile Magazine. By his third, rainy race at Mosport Park in Canada, he scored well enough to take podium honors and, with a trademark toothy smile, spray the other winners with Veuve Clicquot Champagne.
Fassbender normally makes movies at the incredulous speed of a workaholic—26 in the past decade, sometimes hopping directly from one finished shoot to another and to another, but took a rare break in 2017 to focus on driving. “I thought, ‘Once I reach 40, I’ll start easing up,’” he told The Times. He’s serious about his ambitions, like the grueling 24-hour Le Mans endurance races, “that would be amazing. The ultimate goal, I just need to do less acting.”
So far Fassbender has competed in 16 races and now drives for team Ferrari North America for the 2018 season in the Coppa Shell category, of which he is currently in second place. If you’re interested to know that Fassbender has 115 points and an average of 7.18, you probably also know what that means. Frankly, this writer has only a tenuous grasp on what all these numbers and foreign words are or how significant it is that Fassbender can associate himself with them or why it’s tradition to waste so much drinkable champagne. If you’re not someone who devoutly reads Motor Sport Magazine, why should it mean anything to you that on Fassbender’s telemetry, “overlaying his best qualification lap with a randomly selected lap showed near-identical braking points and throttle inputs, post-apex”?
But maybe that’s the point — for an already private actor, exploring another passion within the small motorsport bubble affords the opportunity to have some semblance of anonymity. If a fan of Fassbender the Actor wants to follow his racing exploits, they must have some interest in sportscar racing themself to understand what draws their Hollywood star to this entirely new landscape.
“At 4 years old I was already itching for my driver’s license, at 7 I was driving tractors and at 12 my father’s car. I have to admit that my love of motorcycles came later, though it overtook me with total, devastating intensity,” he told Vogue Italia. “The speed has always been something that has attracted me. Trying to become one with the machine — I’m so far away from that, but that’s the goal. To sort of have that symmetry between you and the car.”
The motorcycle is how Fassbender got around London as a struggling actor in his early 20’s, hopping between theater performances, bartending, truck driving, commercial auditions, a role in Band of Brothers, and back to bartending. His father, also a motorhead, commandeered the bike not long before Fassbender wouldn’t need to drive himself around anymore.
In 2008, he starred in Hunger as Bobby Sands, the Irish Republican leader who lead a hunger strike in a Northern Ireland prison. Directed by Steve McQueen, the film was critically lauded, but three years later, their second collaboration, Shame, would be the one to get Fassbender’s name into conversation.
A movie about a sex-addicted man spiraling out of control might require full-frontal nudity. Which Fassbender did. And no one could stop talking about it.
At that year’s Golden Globes ceremony, George Clooney took time out of his own acceptance speech to joke that “Michael could play golf with his hands behind his back.” An interviewer at The Sunday Times kicked things off by asking him, “What’s it like to have such a big cock?” And when Fassbender sat down on Top Gear, the first thing Jeremy Clarkson asked him was, “Doing a full-frontal nude scene, was it hard?” Fassbender laughed along with the audience, but gave a quick and thorough no (and went on to score the show’s third highest lap time in the Star in Reasonably Priced Car segment, on an icy track).
He has expressed his distaste for the attention that Shame brought him, not for his talent as an actor but for happening to be biologically talented. Fassbender’s name was linked to sex itself, which possibly put him out of the race as an Oscar contender that year. This also meant that tabloids and the people who read them were, and still are, very interested in his romantic life, a subject he keeps as private as he can.
Take for instance his recent marriage to actress Alicia Vikander, a relationship that was barely acknowledged up to their secret wedding last October (still infiltrated by paparazzi) despite public urging to do so. The 2016 BAFTAs tried to get the two to kiss during a jokey kiss cam segment which resulted in a moment of such dead-stop awkwardness it had to be cut from the air.
“She understands that it makes me really happy,” he told Vanity Fair in one of the few recorded statements that exist about their relationship, but one of many about racing. “I think racing is something that she’d really get into, actually. Though I hope not, because she’ll probably end up being faster than me.”
It’s not exactly surprising that Fassbender would want to be taken seriously as an actor, to have the focus on his craft, not his love life. Who doesn’t want to be taken seriously at their job? Although even he has expressed some guilt over this newfound passion, that racing is pulling him away from the career he dedicated so much of himself to. “It’s a horrible weakness — a materialistic failing of mine. I used to go to the cinema all the time,” he admitted to Vogue UK. “Now I go karting or test drive motorcycles.”
But as an actor strives to become one with their character, can he become “one with the machine” in the same way? Is racing a medium more suited to his focus and drive? As he said to Automobile Magazine: “Honestly, if I had the choice I’d choose race driving over acting. Preparing for an acting role, you spend a lot of time on your own. It’s quite dull. But racing, I just love everything about it. Every time I’m sitting in the car, it’s such a wild reality.”
And when Fassbender sits in his car, we no longer see his face but his machine. The performance is still about the person behind the action, but when separated by a vehicle going 150 mph, we’re less concerned about who Fassbender is, what he likes in a woman, his favorite actors to work with, what he does all day. This would be a good time for him to step out of that spotlight and into a different one. After starring in The Snowman, a critically-pandered mess of a movie, and abuse allegations from his ex-girlfriend Sunawin Andrews, which took eight years and a global women’s movement to resurface, Fassbender is lying low.
But behind the wheel of the Ferrari 488 Challenge, he can find anonymity. “An excellent match, freedom and power,” as he said to L’Uomo Vogue. “Horses and horsepower.”