"This play represented such a turning point for me as an actor. I'd just come out of drama school and I was playing opposite Geoffrey Rush. I had to leave my own baggage at the door and take on this character who would be understood by some and hated by others. Mamet has taken all the extraneous stuff away and left you with just this searing, polemic essential battle to the death. Geoffrey and I keep saying Oleanna is an inkblot test, because your reaction to it reveals to you your own sense of politics. It's so provocative — afterward, people were shouting at one another passionately. To see that happen in the theater lobby, which can be such a bourgeois, polite space, I just knew this is what I should be doing with my life."

"The story of Bobby Sands and the hunger strike he died from while imprisoned by the British government at the Maze prison in Northern Ireland in 1981 is not for the faint of heart. Michael Fassbender, as Sands, takes your heart nearly to the grave with him in a miraculously dedicated and brave performance. The politics of the strike, orchestrated to protest the unwillingness of Margaret Thatcher to recognize the IRA inmates as political prisoners, is a quiet backbeat to the action and is never demagogic. But like with all great films containing shattering performances, your feelings for the cause of the IRA at the hands of the British government circa 1981 cannot help but be brought into sharper focus. McQueen won the BAFTA Award for most promising new filmmaker for this film."