It wasn’t too long ago that Ashton Kutcher got deep inside the mind of Apple’s Steve Jobs for 2013’s Jobs. The movie didn’t fare too well and the man behind Punk’d was left out in the cold. Then just two years later in walks Michael Fassbender in Steve Jobs and he nabbed not only a Golden Globe nomination, but a chance to walk home with an Oscar. While he didn’t speak up about his portrayal of the late Jobs compared to Kutcher’s, he did talk to The Wall Street Journal about the movie, Jobs and Aaron Sorkin.
When asked about working with a script written by Sorkin, he admitted it wasn’t as hard as some may suspect, “It’s an absolute joy. I just had to work with it as much as I could so I could really let it sing. He’s written such other fantastic characters…I didn’t want to fail any of those elements. When everyone works hard and you find those rhythms together, it’s very exciting.”
As far as how meta he got with becoming Steve Jobs, he said it was more about reading over Sorkin’s words rather than research, “It really was me spending time with the script. Whether we were rehearsing together as an ensemble and with Danny [Boyle] or myself at home. That was it, just spending as much time as I could. When I wasn’t doing that, watching YouTube clips of Steve Jobs and living alongside it for the first four or five months when I got the script in December.”
“I don’t really spend much time on the moralistic judgments of a character. I felt a complex human being there, but a human being nonetheless,” he went on to say. “I always found there was something very endearing about the character. Just the vision and the passion and the energy to really drive that vision forward for 20 years before he returned with the iMac — it’s pretty incredible. He’s somebody that’s changed the way we live, work, play, listen to music, shop, watch movies. It’s such a seismic shift that he brought into all of our world. It’s worth investigating.”
