There are scheming supergeniuses and impossibly ripped dudes in colorful tights, and then there are complex antagonists who make you reconsider even the good guys' positions. The uninitiated probably think of comic-book bad guys as the hypermuscular mustache-twirlers who must have all the money or rule the world, mwahhahaha, because they're so very, very evil.

And then there's Magneto. Until Bryan Singer's X-Men movies, most people who don't buy comics had probably never heard of him. Even Paul McCartney fans might not have been aware of who the heck his song Magneto and Titanium Man was about. But in the Marvel Universe, he's a major attraction.

"I suppose in some ways there are heroic elements within him. There is a decent individual at the core of it all.
There was so much history in the character, so much reference material, that I could definitely have a picture in mind - right from the first scene, I know what he's very strong, clear objective is. It's quite easy to make choices because of that."

"The fact that he is a Holocaust survivor, that he did try to live a normal life and there was the death of his child and his subsequent revenge and therefore, essentially, his mistrust of the human race; you can see where it's coming from. It's justified to some point. A lot of what he says makes sense. A lot of his dire predictions of human treatment of mutants happens. He's more of a realist than Charles, even if he is a cynic."

First Class has the cool factor for fans of an origin story featuring favorites not previously captured onscreen (the Hellfire Club, Banshee and Havok among them) and the cool factor for everyone else of its 1962 setting - the clothes, the Cold War and Cuban missile crisis.

"Definitely when you put on the clothes, you do feel it, whether you're in 300 or some sort of period piece, it always helps to be wearing some sort of garment that takes you to that era. But when we were talking about the actual voice of the character, when we decided not to go down the Ian McKellen route, he said what he liked about my voice was that it was a little bit, sort of off. And that's what he thought Connery had that was sort of interesting, and he wanted me to keep that flavor and just take the Irishness out of it."

Created by Marvel gods Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Magneto debuted in the first-ever appearance of the X-Men ( X-Men No. 1, 1963).
The unorthodox heroes were ahead of the curve from the start; they often served as a vehicle for social commentary then not common in the genre.

"By whatever means necessary,' yes, I do think that works," says Fassbender. "Erik is very much a Machiavellian character: 'The end justifies the means': Unless you cause some kind of financial disruption or take some offensive action, then you will never make progress. Charles is more of the belief that if you accentuate the positive and try as much as you can to help the other side, that is the way forward. You would have to say that Charles' is the long man's route, because that's not happening in the near future."


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