Michael Fassbender

Michael Fassbender may have first gained the attention of American audiences as a deadly Spartan soldier in Zack Snyder's stylized 300, but it was his charismatic turn in Quentin Tarantino's bloody Inglourious Basterds that cemented the German-Irish actor's status as one of Hollywood's most intriguing newcomers. With a penchant for playing hard-to-read, highly intelligent characters, Fassbender frequently embodies an uneasy contradiction; in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, he portrayed an artistic Army sergeant whose drawings revealed the horrors of D-Day, and he later won critical acclaim for his role as a charmingly duplicitous boyfriend in the stark English drama Fish Tank. After losing more than 50 pounds for his brutally challenging performance as controversial IRA leader Bobby Sands in the 2008 British indie film Hunger, Fassbender channeled a larger-than-life spirit for multilingual spy Lt. Archie Hicox in the revisionist Basterds, and brought an understated air of romantic danger to the iconic role of Rochester in Cary Fukunaga's streamlined adaptation of Jane Eyre. His complicated and vengeful Magneto is one of the few good things about Matthew Vaughn's retro-futuristic X-Men: First Class, and highlighted Fassbender's ability to ground even the most outrageous characters in reality.