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“I came across this play twice before I took this on. I came across it when I was 15 as part of the curriculum at school and then once again when I was in drama school,” Michael Fassbender recently said at Cannes. “But never did it occur to me that this character is suffering from PTSD. It was Justin that said that to me in one of our first conversations and that changed everything for me. It’s not only the killing of many people, or you have a soldier that is engaged in battle month-in-month-out day after day, but the fact that the battle takes place in his bare hands. The sword is a weapon of choice and what it takes to pierce someone’s skin, drive the sword through somebodies muscle, break through their bone and then take the sword out of them. If the sword fails pick up a rock and smash it over someone’s skull.”

One of our favorite films from Cannes, we now have the first trailer for Justin Kurzel‘s adaptation, also starring Marion Cotillard. We said in our review, “The director approaches the classic tale of murder and moral decline with the same level of visceral stylization that distinguished his debut, pulling off perhaps the fiercest cinematic translation of Shakespeare to date.” With virtually every shot in this trailer making our jaw drop, it looks like something to look forward to. In related news, Kurzel has also found another potential project after Assassin’s Creed as Deadline reports he’s attached to the new psychological thriller Haven, which is set in a mental facility, but no other plot details are known.

Check out the trailer below and for more on the film, see two clips here.

Macbeth is the story of a fearless warrior and inspiring leader brought low by ambition and desire. A thrilling interpretation of the dramatic realities of the times and a reimagining of what wartime must have been like for one of Shakespeare’s most famous and compelling characters, a story of all-consuming passion and ambition set in war torn 11th Century Scotland.

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Macbeth arrives on October 2nd in the U.K. and will be released by The Weinstein Company later this year.

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