The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 02:23 AM PDT

LOS ANGELES (Los Angeles Times/MCT): A couple of years ago, Kevin Bacon needed a few degrees of separation from his fame. He daydreamed of a crowded place where people didn't tug at his sleeve to gush about Footloose or quote Diner. Finally, he went to a Hollywood makeup specialist and invested in a custom-made disguise that was weirdly simple but completely effective.

He paid the US$500 and then, with an anxious glee, he took his new rubber face to the Grove shopping center in Los Angeles to experience an afternoon without autographs. "You wouldn't have recognized me if I was standing next to you," Bacon said with a faraway expression.

"It was really bizarre and I didn't really like it. I didn't like it at all. People cut in front of you and when you're at a check-out counter it's just ... different. People weren't all that nice to me. I'm just not used to it."

Sitting in a quiet corner of a Brentwood restaurant on the west side of L.A., the actor shook his head, perhaps surprised at his own candor and then laughed at himself. "I can't imagine life without it," he added, referring to fame.

The 52-year-old will be upping his recognition quotient with younger moviegoers Friday with the release of X-Men: First Class, the fifth installment in a Fox franchise that already has racked up US$1.5 billion in worldwide box office with its tales of mutant melodrama from Marvel Comics.

The film, set in the 1960s, is the story of three men, really, each with a genetic gift that invests them with so much power that they can change the course of history. One of them is Sebastian Shaw, played by Bacon, who is a world-class tycoon and a mutant able to absorb and then use any sort of unleashed energy (an exploding grenade or even a nuclear meltdown).

The other two men are familiar to fans of the franchise: there's the metal-controlling Magneto, played by Michael Fassbender, and the master telepath Professor X, portrayed by James McAvoy, who find themselves in a conflicted bromance as they team to stop Shaw's megalomaniacal plans.

McAvoy said the presence of Bacon on the set added a crackle to the production. "I don't use this term but it just seems right -- Kevin Bacon is just a cool cat. For me, as a moviegoer, if you tell me Kevin Bacon is playing a villain in a summer superhero movie, I'm there man. I'd be excited, too, to see a film that is bold enough to go with that unexpected choice."

For an actor with credits such as Mystic River, Apollo 13, The Woodsman, Frost/Nixon and A Few Good Men, stepping into a superhero film wasn't going to happen unless there was a compelling reason. He cited the presence of producer Bryan Singer and director Matthew Vaughn and the chance to play a dark character who wants the world to burn but rarely raises his voice as his reasons for joining the mutant franchise.

"I haven't been this guy before," said Bacon, who studied years of comic books after taking on the role. "He's a little bit Ted Turner, a little bit Hugh Hefner, a little bit Donald Trump. That's how I see him. I wasn't interested in him as scary evil. It was more about control. His power is a metaphor for who he is; he can be different things to different people and he also takes whatever energy you have and throws it back at you."

Shaw's background, as Bacon knows it, is a cruel soul who grew up in dead-end Pittsburgh but viewed the world as a chessboard and was able to amass his first billion by age 40. "I don't play him with a Pennsylvania accent, though," said the Philadelphia native who lives in New York. He's been renting recently in Santa Monica while his wife of 23 years, Kyra Sedgwick, has been here working on her TNT television series, The Closer.

Bacon is developing an HBO series now (he's reticent about the details) after years of ignoring television prospects because of the intense workload, the odds of failure and the locked-in issues that come with success. Frustrated by the lack of challenging adult drama projects in features -- and pleased, no doubt, by the Golden Globe trophy he picked up as the star of the 2009 HBO film Taking Chance -- he agreed to consider the small screen.

"The first two weeks I got three of the best scripts I had read in a long time -- amazing writing, amazing ideas, edgier work, more developed characters, worlds I hadn't seen," Bacon said. "I had a mind-blowing experience because I resisted and resisted it for so long. But TV is something different than film. When Kyra first had me read a script for The Closer, we still had kids in junior high and high school and we were living in New York. I said, 'Go out to L.A., you'll shoot the pilot and even if it gets picked up, how many of these shows actually work?' Seven years later ..."

Bacon rattled the ice in a near-empty glass of lemonade and explained how he was trying to find ways to change the rhythms of his career. He appeared in James Gunn's scrappy, subversive little movie called Super earlier this year ("A defiantly independent film," Bacon called it) and coming up, he'll be seen in July in Crazy, Stupid, Love, a comedy with Steve Carell and Julianne Moore.

He recently drove cross-country with his two dogs too, which was good for distancing himself from celebrity -- until he got a speeding ticket from an Oklahoma trooper who felt compelled to share a personal story about Footloose even as some passersby recorded the roadside scene on their cell phones. Still, Bacon said his world view is increasingly punctuated with a healthy question mark and he doesn't expect to need disguise that any time soon.

"I think when I started I thought I knew everything there was to know," he said. "You progressively learn that you know less and less. To me the greatest challenge is to get little more truthful, to get closer to the truth in a way. That's not to say I want to put me up there. I never play the character that is Kevin. I'm not interested in that and I don't think anyone else would be, either. I've got home movies for that. My thing is, use yourself but also lose yourself."

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Enjoying Fame

Posted: 02 Jun 2011 01:42 AM PDT

FLORIDA (The Orlando Sentinel/MCT): Michael Fassbender's name seems to pop up most any time a new film project is announced Prometheus, Ridley Scott's prequel to Alien? Jim Jarmusch's new vampire movie? Danny Boyle's Trance?

A film industry hungry for a hunky, young leading man with action-hero potential is taking a hard look at Fassbender. He was Rochester in the recent Jane Eyre, a Roman soldier on the run in ancient Britain in last year's Centurion. And this month, he is Erik Lehnsherr, the tormented Holocaust survivor who will become Magneto in X-Men: First Class.

At 34, born in Germany, raised in Ireland (thus the accent he shows off, out of character), the Drama Centre London-trained Fassbender has barely time to catch his breath between film jobs, meetings about film jobs and premieres.

"I haven't had time to sit back and sort of take stock," he says. "It is a dream come true for me. The way I got here, it took some time. Sometimes it takes a lot longer, sure. But I felt like I really took a journey to get to this point."

The journey began in earnest with a role in HBO's World War II series Band Of Brothers (2001) and continued with lots of British TV work. Eventually, he would be plucked to join the ensemble of Inglourious Basterds (2009). But the role that made him was 2008's Hunger, a little-seen but acclaimed drama about Irish Republican Army hunger strikers during the 1980s.

The film was "a remarkable cinematic experience, driven powerfully by Michael Fassbender's impressive performance as Bobby Sands," the most famous of those men who starved themselves to death in British prisons, raved the London Daily Mirror.

"It's been an incredible trip from Hunger," Fassbender says of the film, for which he lost much of his body weight in order to be convincingly starved and emaciated. "Hunger definitely changed my life, in terms of being recognized by filmmakers, since that was very much a filmmakers' film."

So everything afterward would have to be a breeze, right? Playing a comic-book villain, for instance? But Magneto has "a whole lot of complexity to him," Fassbender says. "Emotionally, he's coming from a very damaged place. I like the ambivalence of it. I want the audience leaving the theater wondering, asking the questions themselves rather than being spoon-fed (what to think) like a lot of these super-villain characters."

"Holocaust survivor" is, Fassbender notes, just "the first part of his makeup. ... He tries to live an honest life even after the concentration camps, in the comic books. But the human race lets him down. "So he's left alone. Every personal relationship he has gets damaged or torn away from him."

Fassbender might have tried to back-engineer the character, as he was played in the earlier X-Men films by the great Sir Ian McKellen. But director Matthew Vaughn (Stardust, Kick-Ass) wouldn't hear of it.

"He said, 'You know, there's something about this character that reminds me of an early Bond, a Sean Connery Bond from the '60s,'" Fassbender says. "Connery had this unusual accent and voice and Matthew heard similarities with my voice and we sort of went with that."

Fassbender is not new to comic-book adaptations, having played a heavy in the disastrous Jonah Hex adaptation of last summer. He doesn't concern himself with a film's success, resolving only to take each part seriously: "Just because it's a comic-book story or a fantasy, that doesn't mean I approach it with any less seriousness." And with X-Men, he had plenty to chew on.

"The great thing about X-Men is that within the philosophy and story of the saga, there are very real and relevant human issues -- alienation, being ostracized from society for whatever reasons -- ethnicity, religious beliefs or sexual orientation."

And the setting for much of this prequel is the early 1960s, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. "It's a great manipulation, isn't it? Dealing with a period in history that has a lot of mystery still surrounding it, a lot of frenzy around the world, the paranoia. ... There is room in there to play with that piece of history, which our scriptwriters have very cleverly done."

The Ridley Scott movie is on his plate, that Jarmusch vampire film is coming up. David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method has Fassbender playing Carl Jung to Viggo Mortensen's Sigmund Freud. But at some point, Fassbender will have to take a break, catch his breath, maybe spend some of his earnings on a castle in Ireland or something.

"You know, it's amazing. I don't even have a car, would you believe it? I had a motorbike and it got stolen. So I've got to buy another one of those, I suppose. I can treat myself to that."

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Kredit: www.thestar.com.my

Khamis, 2 Jun 2011

The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies

The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies

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