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Marathon Man
June 13, 2007
By Jenelle Riley
Actor Michael Sheen can quote Hamlet, cross-reference E.M. Forster, and
dissect the history of a British icon in the same sentence. That's formidable
enough, but that he manages to make it sound natural is even more impressive.
The British icon in question is David Frost, the infamous interviewer who in
1977 landed a series of television interviews with disgraced former president
Richard Nixon. Regarded at the time as nothing more than a sycophantic talk-show
host, Frost risked his fortune and reputation in a quest to extract a confession
or apology from Nixon. The interviews, and the behind-the-scenes maneuvering
that made them possible, are the focus of Peter Morgan's Tony-nominated play
Frost/Nixon, currently playing through Aug. 19 at the Bernard B. Jacobs
Theatre in New York City.
In the show, Sheen plays Frost to Tony winner Frank Langella's Nixon. And though
he was only 8 when the interviews took place, the actor makes for an uncanny
doppelgänger. To prepare for the role, Sheen watched as much footage of Frost as
possible. "But I didn't want anything post the interviews," he notes. "I was
familiar with him since then but not with the Frost who was cutting-edge and a
formidable interviewer. In the 1980s and '90s, he became sort of a louche,
laidback kind of guy. So I watched all the very early stuff. I wanted to see
that sparkier, harder, steelier stuff."
It's a role Sheen originated at London's Donmar Warehouse in August 2006 and
will have played on and off for a year when the show closes in a few months.
Yet, at a recent show, Sheen's performance seemed as new and original as last
year. Asked how he keeps the part fresh when he's doing eight performances a
week, Sheen can't resist laughing. "It's a funny thing when people say, 'How do
you learn all those lines?' Learning the lines is the easy thing; anyone can do
that. You can teach a parrot to learn the lines. It's the acting that's hard,"
he says. "And it's what keeps it fresh and spontaneous and alive, a living thing
rather than a dead thing...that motivates what you do on the stage." Sheen adds
that when he first began acting — he attended the National Youth Theatre of
Wales at 16 and then trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art — he thought
acting was just about learning the lines and finding the best way to say them.
"Then you realize to ask the questions: First, what does the playwright want in
this scene? Why is this scene here? How does it serve the story?" he continues.
"Then you start looking into the motivation of the character and what the
character wants and all the obstacles that are stopping them. And if you
concentrate on that, what comes out of your mouth and how it comes out might be
exactly the same every night, but it will always seem fresh. Because it's not
about how you say the lines, it's about what is behind the lines."
Sheen says he learned to look for the hidden meaning in any script. "There's the
story and then there's the secret story," he elaborates. "It's the one that
doesn't get spoken but it gets communicated underneath somehow. And that is an
accumulate effect for an audience as well. And that's the exciting story; that's
when there's some kind of relationship between the audience and the actors that
is kind of invisible and unspoken. That's the kind of thing that excites an
actor, when you have this sort of invisible bond between each other. And that's
what's hard and great about acting and keeps it fresh and exciting."
Finding the Crux
Sheen is familiar with playing public figures. In addition to portraying Mozart
and Caligula on stage, British comic Kenneth Williams in the BBC's
Fantabulosa!, and critic Robert Ross in Wilde, Sheen won raves last
year as Prime Minister Tony Blair, opposite Helen Mirren in The Queen.
(He previously appeared as Blair in the TV movie The Deal, also penned by
Morgan and directed by Stephen Frears, the team behind The Queen.) But
Sheen says he doesn't worry about being typecast as the go-to actor for
portraying real-life people. "Each person is so uniquely different that it
completely stops you from being pigeonholed. As an actor, I can look at those
characters and feel quite comfortable that I'm not in any way repeating myself,"
he notes. "And I like playing real-life characters because it means you have to
do everything you would normally do with a character and more because you're
playing somebody people are familiar with. And it challenges me more."
Sheen acknowledges there is a certain degree of imitation required in playing
such roles. But that's only one element of creating a three-dimensional
character. "I in no way try to avoid impersonation; it's just that I wouldn't
call it impersonation," he says. "You obviously want to get who this person is,
and a lot of that is in how they express themselves. But it's like I was saying
with the secret story: There's what you want to try and put across to people,
and there's what actually comes across to people. And that's not just about how
you sound and look and your mannerisms. It's the choices you make; it's why you
choose to say this and do this, as opposed to something else."
Sheen adds that playing Frost in England was slightly more intimidating, because
most Americans don't know anything about the broadcaster. "Forty percent of my
performance just goes for nothing here because so much of it has to do with
playing a character so familiar to British audiences," he says. "Someone said to
me that to an American ear Frost's voice sounds cultured and sophisticated. To a
British ear, it does not. It tells a completely different story. So already it's
a different thing. In Britain I could kind of riff around the idea that people
have such preconceived ideas about David Frost — the same way they do about
Nixon here. There's a lot of stuff here that people don't find funny that in
Britain they find hilarious."
Sheen met Frost after the show opened. "He was very supportive," he says. "And
he's cunning; he knows it's good for him businesswise." But the actor has never
met the man he's portrayed twice: Tony Blair. "I'm glad," Sheen says. "I think
people in positions of authority and power shouldn't get too close to actors."
In Character
Perhaps because of Sheen's ability to disappear into a role, he's not yet a
household name in America. And the actor is fine with that. "It's funny, because
I've long realized that there are two paths you can go down with acting," he
says. "One is where you're quite obviously acting. The other is where you're
trying to hide all the acting. And what they get is the character and story. And
you have to kind of make a decision inside yourself as an actor what it is you
want to serve, because you can't serve two masters. You can either serve
yourself or you serve the story. If you serve the story, it's going to go
unnoticed. That's what I wanted to try and achieve myself."
However, Sheen believes that as his performances accumulate, people will take
notice. "Really nobody in America had seen me before The Queen. The sort
of audience watching The Queen are not the audience watching
Underworld," he says of the hit action franchise in which he played a
villainous werewolf. "I like the idea that as time goes on more people might be
able to appreciate what I do. I'd rather it be a slow build."
Sheen dismisses the idea of having a career plan. "A lot of actors have said to
me, 'You make such good choices with the work that you do,'" he says. "It
doesn't feel like I made good choices; it just feels like something comes along,
and I like it, and if they want me to do it, I will. There have been very few
things I've done for any other reason than I liked the idea of doing it for its
own sake. Not money or career or anything like that. Over time I realized I had
built up a body of work I was quite proud of. And everything else seems to take
care of itself." Case in point: The Queen, which turned out to be an
enormous opportunity for the actor. "But it could have just as easily been seen
only on British TV and never heard from again," he notes. "So sometimes things
will take off, and sometimes they won't. And I'm fine with that."
Sheen also continues to work with the finest artists in their respective fields.
He was filming The Deal and appearing in Caligula at the Donmar
Warehouse simultaneously when Morgan offered him Frost/Nixon. It turned
out Caligula director Michael Grandage — who is also the Donmar's
artistic director — was interested in helming the new play. "It just made
perfect sense," Sheen recalls. "It was the two strands of my career, in a way —
theatre at the Donmar with Michael and film/TV with Peter — coming together."
And he isn't finished; once the movie version of Frost/Nixon (directed by
Ron Howard) is completed, Sheen will reteam with Morgan and Frears on the story
of a British soccer manager in the 1970s. Playing a real person, again.
Asked the proverbial advice question — if there's anything he believes actors
starting out in the business should know — Sheen says, "People have to find out
stuff for themselves. There's no better advice than experience. But what I
always say is: Do things you connect with. If you make the right choices for the
right reasons, everything else will take care of itself. All those clichéd ideas
of 'Follow your heart' and 'Follow your bliss' are true." Which brings us back
to that famous English novelist. "E.M. Forster said, 'Only connect.' And that's
it," Sheen says. "You have to connect with what you're doing for it to have any
chance of connecting with other people. And the more honest you are about the
connection you have with the stuff you're working on, hopefully, the more honest
an audience can be about recognizing things and empathizing, and then slowly we
can all feel like we belong together. And that's it. But it has to begin with
each actor connecting with what they're doing."
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