First Look at Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs

Posted on May 18, 2015

The first teaser trailer for Steve Jobs has been released and it looks like we might actually have a good movie about Steve Jobs to go see. Michael Fassbender stars as Jobs. The teaser starts with a view of Jobs from the back as he faces an empty auditorium before an important product launch that he says will be one of the two most significant events of the 20th century. By the end of the trailer the auditorium is packed with people hanging on Jobs' every word.

The screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin and the dialogue is fantastic from what we can tell from this small snippet. The film was directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire). Kate Winslet stars as Joanna Hoffman, an integral part of the Macintosh team and a co-founder of NeXT, the company Jobs created when he was fired from Apple. NeXT was later purchased by Apple and Jobs returned to right the foundering ship. Seth Rogen plays Steve Wozniak, better known as the Woz. Jeff Daniels plays John Scully.

We get to see some of these characters and hear them speak. The Woz asks Jobs, "You can't write code. You are not an engineer. What do you do?" Jobs explains his place in the world this way: "The musicians play the instruments. I play the orchestra. I sat in a garage and invented the future...Because artists lead and hacks ask for a show of hands."

The movie is based on the biography by Walter Isaacson, which had the full cooperation of Steve Jobs. Many of the words in the book were direct quotes from Jobs himself. It appears that we are going to get an unflinching look at the tech pioneer who brought us the Mac, the iPod and the iPhone and created the consumer computer industry.

Fassbender doesn't look much like Jobs and it looks like he's kept his hair blond. But he's nailed the attitude, the intonation and that underlying passion that Jobs always showed when talking about a subject that was important to him. Take a look: