If you follow celebrities on social media for long enough, you’ll see plenty of stories of famous people being mistaken for other famous people. The human instinct of “Hey! I know that guy!” takes over and, even if the fan doesn’t actually know much about the actor, they’ll stop to ask for a selfie or something, making themselves look pretty sill in the process. It’s apparently something that has happened to X-Men and Alien franchise veteran Michael Fassbender…and apparently he’s just too polite to correct people’s mistakes, leading to a fun anecdote for him.
During an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Fassbender talked about the experience. Host Josh Horowitz asked him who he is most commonly mistaken for.
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“Ewan McGregor,” Fassbender told Happy Sad Confused. “I’ve signed pictures of him… That’s happened a couple of times.”
Unfortunately, he didn’t make clear whether he signed McGregor’s name, or his own, so if you have a picture that McGregor signed out in the world somewhere rather than at a convention…maybe go double check it.
Fassbender is in a pair of movies right now, hailing from two different acclaimed directors. He can currently be seen in David Fincher’s The Killer, a dark comedy about an assassin that premiered on Netflix last month. Also new is the theatrical release Next Goal Wins. From director Taika Waititi, the film stars Fassbender as a soccer coach whose team is on the receiving end of a historical beating, and who has to keep them motivated nevertheless.
“It’s the ultimate underdog story,” Waititi recently told Empire magazine. And telling it in a new form had personal resonance for the filmmaker. “It taking place in Polynesia is very important to me, because it’s my people. We stick together. It was like seeing myself up there, seeing my family up there, when I saw that documentary, which is so perfect in many ways. And to have a broader audiences have access to that story was one of my main goals. To bring our backyard to people, and to put brown faces on screen was a big deal for me. I just loved it.”
McGregor, who starred in Obi-Wan Kenobi earlier this year, will next appear in A Gentleman in Moscow, in which he stars opposite his real-life wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
