"Jonah Hex" Villain Michael Fassbender Likens His Role To The Riddler

In the upcoming DC Comics adaptation,"Jonah Hex", Fassbender plays Burke, a tattooed henchman at odds with Josh Brolin's titular gunslinger. He told MTV that when he was suited and booted in his characters costume, he knew exactly how to play the part...

"Burke on the page was a certain sort of character, but then when I arrived in New Orleans and met up with Michael Wilkinson and Christien Tinsley, who did the tattoo, they really gave me all of the information I needed," he said.

"I put on this three-piece suit, and then I was going through hats, and I just put on a bowler hat, and I was like, that reminds me of 'Clockwork Orange,' and that reminds me of Frank Gorshin's Riddler," he continued. "So that would be my physicality -- I wanted to try and make him quite angular and quite rakish, and I definitely got the inspiration through the hat. So I found it all in that bowler hat, to be honest."

So how does his character differ from the main villain of the piece played by John Malkovitch?

"I knew that [director Jimmy Hayward] wanted quite a sort of boisterous, colorful character to go against John Malkovich's," he explained. "So that's sort of why I thought of the Riddler in the 1970s -- I thought there was something kind of off the wall about that -- and then there's also something very sinister and dangerous about the 'Clockwork Orange' element. So I just sort of mashed them together."

Fassbender also feels that to play an effective villain, you need to find a balance between the fantasy world your in and how a real person would react in it..

"I kind of like wanted to keep the comic book style. But it always has to come from a real person," he said. "If you're doing fantasy, in order to take this person on that journey to a fantastical world which is already outside of the realms of reality, the people that occupy that world should be real or coming from some sort of reality."

You might remember Fassbender as Stēlios in "300". And some useless information...He is related on his mother's side to Michael Collins, one of the leaders of Ireland's war of independence!