Michael Fassbender, who was head altar boy while growing up in Kerry, has spoken about his parents' reaction to his work and to his role as a sex addict in Shame in particular.
Speaking to The West Australian newspaper he said of his German-born father and Northern Irish mother: "Well, they are pretty cool. My dad was there at the Venice premiere. It was the first time I saw the film as well, which could have been a mistake!
"My mother was going to come, funnily enough, but she couldn't make it in the end.
“That might have been a good thing. I told my dad there was going to be some pretty extreme stuff and to prepare himself. But he said 'Look, you are an artist and you have got to do your thing'.
"I enjoyed being honest with myself making the film and exploring those things that society has deemed to be shameful. I don't have the answers to a lot of the moral questions but it's important to pose them."
In David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, Fassbender plays Carl Jung alongside Viggo Mortensen's Sigmund Freud.
When asked what Jung have thought about his Shame character, Brandon, he said: "Maybe he would take a look at the sort of society that Brandon inhabits because Shame is very much a film of our time, about our access to excess
"The way Steve [McQueen, the director] puts it, we are living in an age where we are all communicating through technology but are still somehow disconnected."
