'Jane Eyre' star Michael Fassbender talks about the awesomely bizarro rock video in his past

With the release of Jane Eyre today and his upcoming star turn in X-Men: First Class, Michael Fassbender seems headed for the A-list. But like all once-struggling actors, he also has some skeletons in his closet. Namely, a shirtless TV spot he did for SAS Airlines, a Guinness beer ad, and best of all, an awesomely freaky music video he did years ago for the rock band The Cooper Temple Clause.

“I got the SAS Airlines commercial when I was in drama school,” Fassbender told EW recently. “They would have kicked me out if they found out. In the commercial, I wake up in bed and there’s a beautiful blonde next to me. I get up naked, walk to the kitchen, open the fridge, drink some milk, eat some eggs, and I look over my shoulder and her mother’s sitting there really stern, and there’s a plant strategically placed in front of my … you know. And the line was: ‘SAS Airlines — When you’d rather be somewhere else.’ I got 2,200 pounds for it.”

The Guinness ad came later, after Fassbender had landed several professional gigs. And it makes sense that he’d do it since Fassbender grew up in Ireland, and by all accounts, isn’t opposed to tipping the elbow. In the clip, he plays a guy who swims across the Atlantic to see his brother in New York City and apologize for some unnamed betrayal, which is then healed by hoisting a pint of Guinness together. Check it out.

Finally, there’s the Cooper Temple Clause “Blind Pilots” video, which Fassbender says he did simply because he had some down-time and he dug the tune. It also didn’t hurt that Fassbender spent his teenage years dreaming of playing guitar in a heavy-metal band before he caught the acting bug. In the video, he and some buddies go out for a night of messy drinking and bumper-car riding for what appears to be a bachelor party until things get … strange. “That was like 10 years ago,” he says when asked about the gig. “It was like 7 1/2 hours of work! It was quite a cool idea, and I thought it would be interesting to play a creature. I was, like, dancing on stilts, man. I was standing on these square crutches; it was hard to balance! There’s two versions of the strip club scene. There’s one where they keep the dancers keep their tops on and another … more late night MTV version.”