Then I threw it all away and then I sort of concentrated on what was in the book and what was in the script. Have they seen it yet?įassbender: They haven’t, no, I haven’t seen it yet! I’m waiting for the premiere to have the nerves and just to experience it for the first time with an audience.ĬS: I don’t want to embarrass you but everyone I’ve talked to–men, women, gay, straight–they all have the hots for you after seeing this movie.ĬS: Even though you already were a sex symbol, I think this movie is going to put you over the top.ĬS: Rochester is almost as an iconic character as Jane Eyre herself, especially to the women who read the book who must have great expectations of what Rochester would be like.įassbender: Yeah, that’s the thing, and I did watch all the previous versions as well, a lot of them I could get my hands on.įassbender: Yeah, I watched that and at one point, I was supposed to be doing “Wuthering Heights,” about three years ago I think it was now, so I watched Laurence Olivier do his “Wuthering Heights,” and I was like, “Woah, it’s so overdramatic,” and the same with Orson Welles, it’s like (doing his impression of Welles) “Jaaane… Jaaaaaaaane…!” I think Toby Stephens was my favorite – he did it for ITV, one of the British channels, it was a six-parter for television. That was the reason why I wanted to do it, so they could take a look.ĬS: They must be thrilled. My sister and my mother were big fans when I was a child and when I was in my teens as well, they were always talking about it because my sister was reading it. I read that and I read “Jane Eyre” at the time, and obviously I read it again once they offered me Rochester this time around. It wasn’t Brontë who wrote it, but (Jean Rhys’) take of what would happen in Jamaica and Rochester as a young man and what happened with Bertha the wife and all that. Michael Fassbender: Yeah, I had read the book I think six years ago or so, because I was involved in perhaps doing this thing called “Wide Sargasso Sea,” which is the idea of what would have happened in Jamaica before the Brontë novel. Did you have any sort of connection to the book at all?
Having spoken with Fassbender just last year, we already had a fairly comfortable rapport when we sat down with him a few weeks back, making it much easier to get right into a fairly freeform chat about the movie as well as other things he has going on.Ĭ: Obviously, “Jane Eyre” is a classic piece of fiction so when somebody sent you the script, you must have known at least the title. Fukunaga has taken a far more realism-based approach to the material which has been adapted many times previously, this time with a cast that includes Jamie Bell, Dame Judi Dench and Sally Hawkins. This Jane Eyre is played by Mia Wasikowska, her second iconic literary character after starring in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, and for those who haven’t read the book, the movie follows the life of that title character, an impoverished young woman trying to find herself a life without love who ultimately becomes the governess for the troubled Rochester, who falls in love with her. In Cary ( Sin Nombre) Fukunaga’s take on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Fassbender gets to play the iconic literary role of Edward Rochester, a character previously played by the likes of Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, William Hurt and Timothy Dalton.