Michael Fassbender Talks Sexy New Roles

If you want to see Michael Fassbender nude, go see him in director Steve McQueen's Shame, in which Fassbender plays a sex addict trolling the streets of New York City. If you want to see Fassbender as psychoanalyst Carl Jung, go see him in director David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, which co-stars Viggo Mortensen as Jung's mentor, Sigmund Freud. Both films are now playing at the New York Film Festival.

Fassbender was at the festival Wednesday to promote Method, which also features actress Keira Knightley as a patient and love interest. On the red carpet at the U.S. premiere of the film, Fassbender hugged Cronenberg for pictures.

Fassbender has talked about the importance of Method as an investigation into central, human questions — and as a way to consider the history of our ways of thinking about sex and psychology. "In terms of Freud and Jung, we take for granted a lot of the teachings these guys are the forefathers of," Fassbender told Indiewire. "The idea that our bodies are responsible for so many things in childhood. How we relate to excrement, anus, parents, vagina, penis… Nobody was dealing with these sort of things in the early 1900s…. This is a language we understand very well now because it’s part and parcel with our everyday lives." Fassbender added that his character in the film also made lasting contributions to modern psychology: "The idea of an introverted personality or an extroverted personality comes from Jung."

Watch a trailer for A Dangerous Method here: