When portraying a real-life figure in a biopic — especially one that’s fresh in recent memory, such as Steve Jobs — how important is it for the actor playing that role to resemble the actual person? Apparently, that’s not an issue director Danny Boyle is concerned with for his upcoming movie about the Apple co-founder, titled Steve Jobs.
Michael Fassbender will be playing Jobs, and you might expect him to at least don a wig for the role. However, judging by a poster from a location of the film’s production (reported to be the San Francisco Opera House), there isn’t much of an attempt to make Fassbender look like Jobs, circa 1988. Here is an Instagram photo of the poster:
As a point of reference, here’s what Jobs actually looked like when he was promoting the NeXT Cube computer, a product and company he developed after leaving Apple in the late 1980s.
Based on Walter Isaacson’s biography on the tech innovator, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, the production of Steve Jobs has been bumpy up until this point. David Fincher was originally attached to direct and Christian Bale was in talks for the lead role. But Fincher eventually dropped out over contract issues, and Bale soon followed. Boyle took over as director, and it once appeared that Leonardo DiCaprio would play Jobs, but he eventually moved on. Boyle stayed, however, and Fassbender was soon cast.
Maybe looking like Jobs isn’t all that important. Ashton Kutcher resembled him closely in the 2013 movie Jobs, directed by Joshua Michael Stern, yet that project wasn’t viewed as a success. If Boyle’s film is better, no one’s going to be talking about Kutcher looking more like Jobs than Fassbender.
Steve Jobs is scheduled for an Oct. 9 release.
