Michael Fassbender was playing the hero in 'Assassin's Creed' when he nabbed a SAG Award nomination

Suffice to say Michael Fassbender wasn’t in a Silicon Valley state of mind.

Reached Wednesday morning with the announcement that he has been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role for his turn in Steve Jobs, Fassbender had pretty much banished all thought of portraying the Apple co-founder in director Danny Boyle’s dramatic biopic from his mind.

Currently shooting a big budget adaptation of the Ubisoft video game Assassin’s Creed in Spain’s Balearic Islands, Fassbender was at the tail end of a long day on set. And he was more than a little consumed with his performance as Callum Lynch, a swashbuckling action hero descended from a long and illustrious line of professional killers, who travels back in time in a bid to gain the skills to combat a shadowy assassin sect called the Templars.

“I was on top of a horse when the news came through — we’ve been sort of hectic at the moment on the set,” Fassbender tells EW with a laugh. “It’s fantastic news. It is always very special when you get a nomination through your peers. So I’m very happy.”

RELATED: Fassbender on the ‘greater truths’ in Steve Jobs

To hear it from Boyle, Fassbender initially attempted to discourage his casting, pointing out he doesn’t physically resemble Jobs enough to take on the task of portraying the tech genius in Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s impressionistic bio-drama. But the Slumdog Millionaire director remained convinced Fassbender was the man for the, ahem, job. “I remember thinking there was something very uncompromising about Michael,” Boyle tells EW. “That is really Jobs-ian.”

Watch this space for an Assassin’s Creed First Look in Entertainment Weekly later this month.