"Rochester’s a classic Byronic hero. The shady past, the intelligence, the passion and courage, the destructiveness and self-destructiveness.

He toys with Jane, because he’s trying to test her, figure her out. He’s intrigued by the purity of her. And the surety of her.

But there’s a real cruelty to him as well. Which I really enjoyed, to have as part of his character. People do that to each other.”

“But it was important for me to also convey his yearning and his utter fear of losing her,” he continued. “When she goes, that’s it, his life is over.”
The scene where Jane tells Rochester she’s leaving took seven hours to film.

“I remember looking into Mia’s eyes all that time,” Fassbender said, “and thinking, ‘Oh my God, that’s what it looked like.’ I recognized the look from breaking up with girlfriends. I could see all of that in her eyes. And that was when the camera was on me. So I tried to do the same for her. It’s those little moments where you go somewhere else, where acting is at its best. But they’re rare.”

Michael almost had a moment 10 years ago. Making the rounds in Los Angeles, he scored a part in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, and came close to landing the lead in Pearl Harbor. But Ben Affleck got that role, and Fassbender’s screen time in the miniseries was reduced. He slouched back to “working behind a bar [in London] and thinking, ‘I just want an opportunity to show what I know I can do.’ "

He got it when director Steve McQueen cast him as the martyred IRA leader Bobby Sands in 2008’s Hunger. His doctor’s secretary thought he was dying of cancer, but he burned through the screen. “I was waiting for that one,” Fassbender said. “That changed my life, definitely.”

Discussing Jane Eyre, Michael did a cheeky imitation of Orson Welles’s Rochester – “Jane! Jaaaane!” he wailed, in Welles’s booming tremolo – and admitted to feeling for Rochester’s mad wife. “Back in those days, she might have just been randy. You know: If she likes to have sex, she must have the devil in her.”

“I’d burn the effing house down, too, if I was locked up in that room.”

Then, just before my time was up Michael mentioned family. “My mum and my sister are big fans of the novel. That’s kind of the starting reason I wanted to do it. I wait until the premieres, to achieve maximum nervousness. But I’m keen to see what they think of it. They’ll be honest with me.”