Michael Fassbender knows how to make an impact in screen.

He burst, or should that be faded, onto the scene playing hunger striker Bobby Sands in the film Hunger.

He held his own against Brad Pitt and an Oscar-winning Christoph Waltz as the German speaking British film critic/commando Archie Hicox (a role based on Graham Greene) in Inglourious Basterds.

Now in X-Men: First Class he steps into the shoes of the peerless Sir Ian McKellen, playing the young Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto in this prequel to the X-Men movies.

Eager to put his own stamp on the part, Michael decided against copying the moves of the acting knight.

“When I got the job I thought about perhaps getting my hands on anything where Ian McKellen was a young man on screen and just studying the physicality and voice and whatnot.

“Then Matthew [Vaughn – the director] and I discussed it and that wasn’t the way he wanted to go.

“So I ditched that idea totally and just used the comic book material. There was so much there in the character’s biography I could just draw from that.”

He had a slightly more basic approach when is came to perfecting Erik’s extreme concentration when first using his power to manipulate metal through willpower.

“I just thought ‘how can I represent constipation through my hands?’. That was kind of my inspiration. Obviously that manifests itself in various physical attributes.

“I didn’t really know what to do. Erik at this point in his life is not really sure how to harness these powers. It is a bit haphazard and random. You feel like a bit of an idiot as a grown man trying to bend metal.”

Michael, 33, gives a complex performance in dual languages switching between American/English (although his native Irish brogue occasionally creeps through) and German (which as the son of a German father, he is fluent in).

The film offers a back story of how the telepathic Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik came to discover and develop their powers, and how they first became friends before finding themselves on the opposite side of ideological fence in terms of mutant/human relations.

“Charles is someone Erik greatly respects and likes from the beginning though he (Erik) is a very untrusting person.

“Hopefully the audience will feel that loss when the relationship fractures and eventually breaks.

“But there’s always going to be that respect between them, between great leaders and enemies who’ll sit down and have a cup of coffee and discuss things on their downtime.”

While Charles thinks humans and mutants can live harmoniously, Erik believes they will always be treated with suspicion. It is a view shared by Sebastian Shaw, who is hell-bent on mutant domination and is ready to start a nuclear war to achieve it.

“This conflict is what interests me as an actor and audience member,” says Michael.

“Unfortunately nowadays, especially with big commercial films, the audience is spoon-fed the entire experience and doesn’t have to do any work.

“I believe if you go to see a film you should have to invest something yourself so when you leave the cinema you are having those conversations, either with yourself if you are crazy, like me, or with friends afterwards.”

Cleverly, Matthew Vaughn and scriptwriter Jane Goldman have used real life events to bring greater depth to their otherwise fantastical story.

Eric finds his powers as his parents are dragged off to Auschwitz in the Holocaust, while the film’s 60s-setting invites parallels between the experiences of the mutants and the race struggles of that era.

There is also the matter of Shaw trying to tip the Cuban Missile Crisis into full scale war

“I think there is a mystery around that which is definitely there to be exploited,” says Michael. “I wasn’t around then but my parents were and there was a real sense of anxiety. People were building bunkers outside their houses and stocking up with three year’s worth of canned goods.

“Nobody really knows how close we actually got to nuclear war at that point, what happened behind the scenes.”

As an action film X-Men: First Class has drawn flattering comparisons with James Bond, largely thanks to meglomaniacal villain plotting to take over the world from a submarine kitted out like a cocktail bar.

As the emotionally tortured, vengeance-seeking anti-hero with a ruthless streak, Michael has already been tipped as the next actor to play the iconic spy.

“It is very flattering. Matthew had sort of mentioned that this invoked a lot of memories for him of those earlier Bond films, so I thought, okay, he wants the rugged sophistication that Connery had.

“They dressed me up in clothes that were pretty cool, bespoke suites that harked back to those early films.

“In terms of what I expect or hope for the future. I never try and plan anything

“I think Daniel Craig is doing a fantastic job and let’s just deal with X-Men at the moment and see how that does.”