3) Fish Tank
Fassbender in Fish Tank feels like one of those before-they-were-famous roles; it looks like Andrea Arnold, who prefers to work with untrained performers, had simply picked Fassbender up off the street and asked him to play himself. But the fact is that Fassbender had already been acting for the screen for close to a decade by this point, and Arnold just managed to tease a performance so shockingly natural and layered from Fassbender that it doesn’t even register as acting.
As Connor, Fassbender is charismatic, charming, and immensely likeable. None of those are words you’d typically associate with a man who cheats on his wife, hits teenage girls, and sleeps with the under-age daughter of his latest conquest – but such is the power of Fassbender.
Here his actions are wretched, but he’s also deeply human; Fassbender never allows us to doubt that this is more or less a regular bloke, just one that’s more flawed than most.