Michael Sheen

Michael Sheen - Frost Interview

by Mark Shenton

30 August 2006

Michael Sheen

The 37-year-old chameleon-like actor Michael Sheen is adopting yet another guise (and disguise) as David Frost, the British TV talk show host in Peter Morgan’s new play Frost/Nixon that grippingly recreates the filming of the now-legendary TV interviews that took place three years after Nixon resigned the presidency. In a career that has spanned leading roles in the West End and on Broadway (starring as Mozart in Peter Hall’s revival of Amadeus in both places) to seasons with the RSC and National, as well as previous appearances at the Donmar Warehouse and Almeida, his major film and TV credits also include a BAFTA-nominated performance in Dirty Filthy Love, as well as The Deal (in which he played Prime Minister Tony Blair) and the forthcoming feature The Queen (in which he plays Blair once again). Formerly married to actress Kate Beckinsale, with whom he has a daughter, Lily, he divides his time between London and Los Angeles, where Lily lives with her mother

You were last here at the Donmar Warehouse in Caligula, for which you won both the Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Actor in 2003. But that wasn’t the first time you’ve worked here, was it? It seems to have become something of a theatrical home for you.
Yes, I’ve actually acted here three times now, but I’ve also directed here, and I’ve also produced a play here, so I have done almost everything. I just have to write something, and then I’ll have done it all! I first came here as an actor in a play called Don’t Fool with Love with Cheek by Jowl that ran here as part of a tour. I produced a play called A World of Our Own—where I believe Colin Farrell made his London stage debut—that was part of the Four Corner season that they used to do. I had a production company called Foundry—it was me, Robert Delamere and Helen McCrory—and we produced two plays, one of them here. And I directed a play called Bad Finger, which was part of a different Four Corner season, produced by a Welsh Theatre Company, Thin Language, that I was part of. So, I’ve had a long relationship here.

Now Frost/Nixon reunites you with Michael Grandage, who also directed Caligula.
I think he’s terrific. I’d be quite happy just to act here all the time and to work with him and [his design partner] Christopher Oram as well. It’s a great team and a lovely theatre to work in. Caligula was fantastic. I had a great time. It’s then that you wish the runs were a bit longer, because when you do something like that you just want to keep going."

Would you ever be tempted to direct some more? Michael Grandage, of course, also used to be an actor.
I really prefer acting for now. I’ve directed a few things, but I’ve got a different kind of mentality. I’m not patient enough to do it.

Frost/Nixon director Michael Grandage
and star Michael Sheen

Do you think it makes a difference in his directing style that Michael used to act himself?
I’m not sure. To his great credit, you never feel like Michael was an actor when he directs you, and I mean that as a compliment. He doesn’t give you line readings or anything like that. He can set balls rolling, and allow them to go where they are going to go. But I’m sure it helps that he’s been an actor, because he’s sympathetic to the actors and respects what the actor has to offer.

In the last few years your stage appearances seem to have become less frequent, though. Will theatre lose you?
Because my daughter is living in America, doing a long run of a play here would mean that I don’t get to see her, so I can’t really do that anymore. I go there all the time now to see her. That’s why the National Theatre is viable for me, because of the breaks you get when you’re in the rep. And here is viable because it’s short runs only. Anything else makes it too hard. She’s in school in L.A. It’s complicated enough for actors when their child is in school in the country that they live and work in, but when the child is in a school in another country, it’s very hard. So that’s part of the reason, but also, I can’t afford to live on theatre wages. If I’m doing a run at the Donmar or National, they pay nothing, so basically, it’s like you’re doing it for free. I can’t afford to do that too often. I rent a place in L.A. and a place here, so it’s just ridiculously expensive.

How old is your daughter now? Has she developed an American accent?
She’s seven and a half. But no, she’s not really got an American accent, not much; she’s still fairly posh, though she’s got a few Welsh-isms I’ve taught her.

Does going to L.A. regularly keep you in the loop for work over there?
I suppose, but it’s strange—all the actors I know who go out to L.A. for brief visits, go out there for work, whereas I don’t. It’s just where my daughter lives, and so I live half my time there, too. But I suppose I stay in the loop because when I’m there, I do go up for things.

Would you ever think of relocating permanently?
No, I couldn’t. My work is here. I have to go back and forth and it’s complicated and difficult, but there’s not enough work for me there. It’s not like I’m being offered loads of work there and choosing not to do it. The work I am offered comes from here. And apart from the most important person in my life—my daughter—everyone else important in my life is here. So it’s a bit of a juggling act.

You’ve also tended to juggle new and old work and different mediums. Do you have a preference?
It’s just whatever connects with me, and what I think will make exciting theatre or film or television. It doesn’t matter what medium the script is in if it’s something that I find exciting. It has to be challenging to me personally in terms of the part, but it also has to be in the context of a story that I find exciting and worthwhile. I’d like to more Shakespeare—there are more interesting parts as you get older. I hope there’s still time for Hamlet, too. I’d love to do that. As for film and television versus theatre, I find both fascinating to do. I just find acting fascinating and people fascinating. I don’t really mind where I am doing it for; it’s just nice to be able to do both because it gets boring doing only one. Of course, you get paid better on film and more people see it. One helps the other—in some ways you learn more about storytelling through doing theatre because as an actor you have much more control over the story that is being told, whereas on film or TV you have no control. But then on film and TV you can really be very forensic about stuff, which is really interesting. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with Stephen Frears a few times now, who is certainly the best actors’ director on film. It’s like having a great training to work with him.

There’s also a link to this play from Stephen Frears to the playwright Peter Morgan and yourself. Can you explain how you came to be doing Frost/Nixon?
Obviously there are two connections. One is through Michael Grandage and the Donmar, and the other is through Peter, the writer. This is the third time I’ve worked with him. We did The Deal originally a few years ago on TV, where I played Tony Blair, and more recently we also did a cinema film called The Queen, where I played Blair again and Helen Mirren plays the Queen, and it’s about the week after the death of Diana. Stephen directed both. But this is Peter’s first stage play, and he says he wrote Frost with me in mind. Maybe that’s just him trying to flatter me. [Laughs.] But certainly through the work we’ve done before, he wanted me to play Frost, and Michael wasn’t opposed to it, given that we’d worked together before. Peter told me about this play a long time ago now. Once he got Michael interested in doing it, we did a workshop of it here about a year ago. We did it on the stage and got up and sort of acted it. Nixon was played by Douglas Hodge, who had just opened in Michael’s production of Guys and Dolls.

As you mentioned, you’ve played Tony Blair twice now. Do you have a special affinity for him?
No, I don’t so. It’s just that both were written and directed by the same men, so it would have been incredibly insulting if they hadn’t asked me to do it.

What about an affinity for playing real-life characters then?
Peter is drawn to writing about real people, and I guess because we’ve got a good relationship, and I’m the right age for the sort of characters that he is interested in, he thinks of me, which is very nice. But for some reason, I’ve started playing a lot more real people. I did Kenneth Williams recently [in the TV film Fantabulosa, recently seen on BBC4 and soon to be shown again on BBC2], and I also played H.G. Wells. It seems to be happening a lot.

Is there a special challenge to playing someone who really exists?
If you’re playing someone recognisable like Williams, Blair or Frost, they’re so contemporary and recognisable, that you can’t just turn up and not be like them. So you have to do a lot of work. What is difficult and challenging about it is that you’ve always got the end result in front of you. When you’re playing a fictional

Michael Sheen in Frost/Nixon

character, you don’t know where you’re going to end up. You have the boundaries that the writer sets. But with a real person, you look at the footage and you know that’s what you have to end up like. That’s quite weird—you have to put everything into reverse—you already see what you’re trying to do, and then you have to work backwards and try to build it up from the inside and hope that eventually the inside and the external thing meet. So that’s a very particular challenge. But the plus thing is that it gives you very particular boundaries and parameters and a structure to work within, which can be quite comforting. It’s like something with lots of rules—once you know them, then you can slightly bend them. There are certain things with Frost that once I’d watched him and listened to him and read about him, I could then pick on. It’s not like caricature or doing an impersonation where you make things much more extreme, but there are certain things you just slightly lean on more, because they help in the context of this particular story that Peter has written.

Did you discuss this process with co-star Frank Langella?
Yes, Frank spoke in rehearsals about not being sure how far to go in terms of looking and sounding like Nixon. You have to do enough so it doesn’t get in the way. If you don’t look or sound or act like the person, then that can get in the way as well; but you don’t want to do it too much or that gets in the way of the story, too. You have to make people comfortable with the idea that they’re playing Frost or Nixon or Blair. I don’t personally think you should get into sticking things on. I do hair and make-up and that’s it. If you’re making too much of an effort, people will think how much you look or sound like him; but you want them to accept you as a character and watch the story and emotionally connect with what’s going on. It’s not a competition for how much you seem like the person.

I gather that’s something that your dad does—he has a sideline as a Jack Nicholson impersonator.
Yes, he does! But I wouldn’t really classify that as acting.

Did you watch the actual Frost/Nixon interview tapes a lot to prepare for this?
Because they only make up a small part of the play, I didn’t watch the interviews that much. They work on television, but we’re doing a play, so if we just very carefully recreated the interviews, it would be incredibly boring for the audience. You have to make it work theatrically. The difference with researching Kenneth Williams and Blair is that I was doing them for a camera, so I could absolutely painstakingly recreate certain interviews or TV appearances, whereas I couldn’t do that with this. For instance, when you watch the Frost interviews on TV they’re very conversational; but in the theatre, they get very, very heated because there’s no point in doing them in the same way. We’re still keeping the psychological truth of what was going on in the interviews, but we are just presenting it for a theatrical audience. I didn’t watch them too much in case I started to get the rhythm and pattern of them, which would not have been useful.

So what research did you do?
I just watched lots of footage of Frost, especially from earlier on in his career. Our impression of him today as an older man is a very particular one, and the

Michael Sheen & Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon

qualities that he had and still has are maybe a bit harder to see now but were so evident when he was much younger doing That Was The week That Was. That was that side I was more interested in looking at. I watched a lot of them and the Frost Report. He went from around 36 to 38 during the time that the play covers, so he’s about my age. I’m 37.

Have you met him?
He came to watch the play the night before last, and came around after. He had been heavily involved early on and had read it, but I’m sure he was quite nervous to watch himself being portrayed, even though he’d read the script.

What about you? Weren’t you nervous, too?
I didn’t know he was in. I only knew afterward. Like any character you play, you come to love the character, so I just hoped that he was OK about it. And he seemed to be. I think he was very relieved.

Have you ever met Tony Blair?
No. But I think Peter is very clever in his writing, and this is why The Deal now in retrospect gets called a seminal drama. I wasn’t aware till The Deal of anyone having written a drama about contemporary politicians that wasn’t satirical. There was humour in it and it was cheeky, but it wasn’t in any way satire—it was about human beings in all their complexity. Inevitably, the writer has some kind of agenda in how they are writing about the character, but as an actor you can’t, you just have to try to play them as complicated human beings like everyone is.

Politics has lately played a big part in your career.
That’s just the way it’s come about. I’ve always enjoyed playing very clever people, and I think Peter is interested in writing about very sharp minds and very difficult, complicated things going on in people’s heads. Politics is a very subtle, duplicitous, shadowy and self-delusional world that makes for great drama. It also makes for great areas to explore for an actor. Politicians, religious fanatics, actors and people with mental illness tends to be what I am most interested in playing, and they’ve all got similarities. That’s not being flippant, they really do—it’s the gap between what you think you are doing and what you are actually doing that is always the most interesting thing. As an actor, you think you’re consciously putting across one thing, but unconsciously you’re putting across something else. When they’re in conflict in some way, then that becomes interesting. We’re all doing that all the time, it’s just in those particular subjects I’ve mentioned they’re most heightened, and I think that’s always very interesting.

Do you find that theatre heightens things even more?
No, I would disagree. Funnily enough, all the biggest, most heightened characters I’ve played have been on film. You can’t get much bigger than Kenneth Williams or Dirty Filthy Love, about a guy with Tourette’s. Before I did much work in front of a camera, everyone said you’ve got to be quite small, you can’t be too big or too theatrical. But all those terms are misused. You can be as big as you want to be in front of a camera. It’s about whether it’s truthful and believable or not. Any performance is about being very specific to whom you’re presenting it to. The difference between acting in the Donmar or acting in the Olivier like I did last year [in The UN Inspector], is about knowing who you are performing it to. Here you are performing to an audience of 250 on three sides; in the Olivier, you are performing to over a thousand. And when you’re doing it in front of a camera, you’re doing it to the camera. It’s about being very specific about that—it’s got nothing to do with how big or small you are.

Talking of size and being larger than life, would you be tempted to do a musical?

No one has ever offered me one. There are musicals I’ve enjoyed watching, but there aren’t many parts in them that appeal to me. I’m a pretty good singer, though. Maybe someone needs to write a slightly more interesting musical. Probably the one thing I’d like to do is Frank ‘N’ Furter in The Rocky Horror Show— because I think that would be theatrically exciting to do.

(Yes, Michael! Please do the Rocky Horror Picture Show! - WebAdmin)