"I believe that a united Ireland is right and just"

«He had his own reservations about Hunger, all the same - partly because he had to lose 14kg to play a man who took 66 days without food to die; partly because of taking on the role of Sands, an intimidating prospect for any Irishman. "You don't want to do that if you think it's not going to be a good film, or it's not going to tell a story in the right way, or do justice to the amount of effort and time and work you put into it. But once I met Steve and Enda [Walsh, the playwright who co-wrote the script], I was like, I have to do this, I have to work on this."

Fassbender was four when Sands died in May 1981. His father Josef, a chef, is German; his mother, Adele, is from Larne, near Belfast. The family moved from Heidelberg, where Michael was born, to Killarney when he was two. Having grown up at the opposite end of Ireland at around the same time, I mention that I don't remember the details of the hunger strikes and their aftermath, but have very clear, visceral memories of the tension that hung in the air.

"That's what I remember. That's exactly it. I remember the tension. This Bobby Sands character, I knew there was a big commotion about this guy, and the struggle in Northern Ireland. Because my mum's from the north, all my holidays were in the north - we never went abroad. What I remember is the difference between the south and the north, crossing the border. Soldiers with guns. Watchtowers, helicopters. But I didn't really know ... we never really discussed politics at home." 

(...)

"I just knew that I had to do it. I knew all the stuff we had filmed before that was pretty ... special, and I didn't want the last part of the film to break the illusion. I knew I had to get superthin." He is careful not to claim anything so crass as an insight into Bobby Sands' mind, though I mention that the lowest weight Fassbender reached, 58kg, is the weight at which, in my edition of Sands' diaries, the Republican made his last entry. "Wow. I didn't know that. I didn't know he stopped at 58. Shit."»

'The Guardian', Outubro de 2008