Michael Fassbender thinks about his late relatives whenever he needs a little extra emotion for a film scene.
The 39-year-old actor, who was born in Germany and moved to Kerry with his family in 1979, is certain his relatives are watching over him in his life and says just thinking about them helps him get into the zone when filming difficult scenes.
"They're very much a part of who I am," he told Esquire magazine. "Somebody was asking me last night, when I do emotional scenes, how do I go about getting there? What I do more often than not is pray to relatives who are gone. I feel like they are there with me.
"There are times in life where I've just thought somebody was looking after me there. Somebody was looking out for me."
Fassbender is currently starring in new movie The Light Between Oceans, which also features his girlfriend Alicia Vikander. Director Derek Cianfrance recently opened up about how emotional it was for the actors while they were shooting the movie.
"When Michael cries early on in the movie, I thought to myself, 'Yeah, here we go!'" he told reporters at a London press conference last month.
"Eight weeks into it, we would be together for scenes, saying, 'Whatever we do, let's not cry... I don't want to cry anymore', but it was so ripe with emotion we couldn't stop crying... We couldn't help it."
He joked that he and his cast and crew spent the entire shoot "snotty crying", and he fears his decision to live on the remote peninsula where they were filming in New Zealand didn't help matters.
"I thought the isolation would play into it, be an X factor to us in making the movie and I think it was in some ways," Cianfranceadded.
"We had nowhere to go; we didn't have technology to escape to. We didn't have many distractions out there, we just had each other."
