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‘It took me three days to get over the orgy scene’: Muscle star Craig Fairbrass

The Londoner has spent years slogging away in hardman movies, but his latest film is a darkly funny exploration of masculinity. He discusses branching out – and the film’s unsimulated sex

Craig Fairbrass has made a career from giving a certain type of person exactly what they want. His films have titles such as Deranged and Hijacked and St George’s Day. There are gangsters. There are guns. There are posters that look like a recently divorced dad’s experiments with Photoshop.

His characters have nicknames that come in inverted commas, like Freddy “Dead Cert” Frankham and Malcolm “Mental Fists” Wickes. The films are usually released to little fanfare and lapped up by a small but dedicated crowd, unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Fairbrass’s new film, Muscle, is different. It is extraordinary: a black-and-white exploration of toxic masculinity that is as darkly funny as it is outright horrifying. Fairbrass is remarkable in it, playing a hulking personal trainer who sniffs out a lost loner at a squalid gym and immediately sets about exploiting him for everything he is worth. It is an incredible, committed performance that goes to some unthinkably gruesome places. Remember the shock of seeing Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler after his wilderness years? We are in that sort of territory.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3lg5sfM
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