Irish actor Michael Fassbender brought his magnetic performance skills to a very different role last week, when he played the iconic stoner The Dude in a live table reading of the Coen Brothers’ beloved movie The Big Lebowski.
Organised by the Just for Laughs annual comedy festival in Montreal, the sold-out event saw 1,300 spectators see a number of actors from the forthcoming X-Men: Apocalypse movie, which is currently filming in the Quebec city, interpret the roles from the 1990s movie starring Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, and John Goodman. The table read included Oscar-winner Jennier Lawrence (as Moore’s character Maude), Olivia Munn (as Tara Reid’s Bunny), Patton Oswalt (as Walter Sobchak), TJ Miller (Brandt), Martin Starr (Jesus), Mike Judge (The Stranger), and Dennis Quaid as the wheelchair-bound Lebowski.
Mike Judge, Martin Starr, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Dennis Quaid, Patton Oswalt, Mae Whitman, Olivia Munn, T.J. Miller and Jason Reitman backstage at “The Big Lebowski” live reading at the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal [Dan Dion]
The table read proved so popular with the Montreal audience that it had to change venue to accommodate the crown, with spectators queuing for up to five hours to see some of the biggest talents in Hollywood take on the roles.
The whole event was organised by Academy-award nominated director Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air), who has been running a series of live table readings of scripts for a number of years on a monthly basis at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The director is able to attract A-list names to take on the roles in the script, while he reads the scene-setting descriptions. The readings of certain scripts have proven so popular that Reitman has restaged them with entirely new casts, and this marks the second time he put on The Big Lebowski, with Seth Rogen having previously taken on the role of The Dude.
Fassbender staked his claim on the Jeff Bridges’ character by walking onto the stage wearing a pair of boxer shorts and the worn bathroom the character wears in the movie, while also carrying a cocktail and smoking three “hand-rolled” jazz cigarettes during the performance.
