Carey Mulligan’s most pressing question for Michael Fassbender: How did he do those Killer push-ups?

It turns out that everybody was impressed by Fassbender's fingertip push-ups

By Sam Barsanti  |  December 10, 2023 | 5:49pm
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Carey Mulligan’s most pressing question for Michael Fassbender: How did he do those Killer push-ups?
The Killer Photo: Netflix

At the beginning of David Fincher’s The Killer, Michael Fassbender’s assassin character goes about his daily routine while waiting to line up a perfect sniper shot on his target, and in addition to eating McDonald’s and overhyping his own abilities in his supremely confident, omnipresent narration, Fassbender does some unbelievable yoga-posing and—more importantly, for the purposes of this news story—push-ups on his fingertips. Carey Mulligan recently sat down with Fassbender for Variety’s “Actors On Actors” series and, being just like us, the first thing she asked was “Can you do press-ups on your fingertips?”

(British people call push-ups “press-ups” for some reason, sort of like how they call ladybugs “ladybirds” even though they are clearly bugs and not birds, which is important context for this story.)

Mulligan’s question was more about finding the time to prep for a role like The Killer and less about how it’s humanly possible to have such powerful fingers, but that is ultimately what she was getting at anyway. Fassbender, who also seems like he was surprised he could do it, told Mulligan that he said that he thought he could do 100 before filming the scene, to which Mulligan responded: “100 press-ups!” Then he clarified and said he couldn’t do 100 in a row, but that he could do 10, to which she said: “You could do10?!” (There is something weirdly understandable about 10 push-ups being more shocking than 100. One is so absurd that you can’t even imagine it, the other is a stunning feat of human achievement.)

Fassbender told Mulligan that he’s “pretty sure” he did a total of 260, a nod to the fact that Fincher is a noted perfectionist who will do as many takes of a scene as he feels like he needs, but Fassbender also said he “can’t remember” how many he did and later regretted saying he could do it at all. So it seems like he probably did too many, but at least his suffering made for a memorable… two seconds?

 
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