In a recent interview with our friends over at
The A.V. Club, the actor was quizzed on his role as Magneto in
X-Men: First Class and what follows are a few excerpts from that. To read the entire interview where the actor goes into even more detail about the movie and his other current projects, be sure to follow the link on over to the site by clicking below.
You were also in 300, and now you’re playing Magneto in X-Men: First Class, which has to require a high degree of stylization. You have to create a character who can wear that costume.
You have to go for it. If you’re caught in a middle ground, you’re lost. Like you say, if you put on a helmet, you kind of have to go for it. [Laughs.] That’s just part of those sort of fantasy things. If you’re not going to go for it, then you can’t expect the audience to go along with you. So you just have to commit to it.
It seems like one reason British actors so often get cast in those sorts of roles is that they tend to come from a more technically oriented background. Thinking about what Magneto’s motivation is in a given scene might not get you that far.
Well, no, the nuts and bolts remain the same. Otherwise, you are just doing a cardboard cutout. Definitely the character has got to be coming from somewhere and has to want to go somewhere, and all the characters have an objective, and then it just depends on how determined they are to get that objective, and what sort of moral things they’re willing to bend, and within that, that’s where you get the interesting things. With Magneto, there is a very specific history that’s happened to him in the comic books, which is pretty heavy. So you use all of that, and then their moral standpoint is formed from their history and their environment. That’s the interesting thing about Magneto. The way we were looking at it was that Charles [Xavier, a.k.a. Professor X] is like Martin Luther King and Magneto is more Malcolm X.
As far as the characters in X-Men go, Magneto has the most compelling backstory by far. He’s a Holocaust survivor, which makes his fear of persecution perfectly justifiable.
Human beings, he hasn’t had a very good relationship with them, and doesn’t have a lot of faith or any trust in them. That’s the difference between him and Charles. Charles has hope in human beings, and Magneto thinks they’re just standing in the way of evolution. They’re going to wipe us out if we don’t wipe them out.
On a set like that, where there’s so much more going on technically, in terms of green-screen and CG, do you concern yourselves with those aspects, or let that be the director’s business, and try and concentrate on what you’re doing on the set?
Yeah, that’s it, really. Everybody’s got their department to look after, and hopefully everybody’s doing that. I’ll be more, in terms of the script, trying to work out the different beats of the relationship with Charles, so James [McAvoy] and I sat down a lot with Matthew [Vaughn, director] and made sure that was tight. In terms of green-screen, it’s always great to learn new stuff, and to get technically more proficient as well. I had a lot of experience with the green screen, or blue screen, on 300 as well, so that was a good learning experience.
X-Men: First Class is set to be released on June 3, later this year!