Michael Sheen

It's been a big year for Michael Sheen. After winning star-making reviews as Tony Blair in the Oscar-nominated feature film The Queen, the 38-year-old chameleon-like actor has arrived on Broadway in yet another guise and disguise, British talk show host David Frost in Frost/Nixon. Written by Peter Morgan who picked up an Oscar nod for his Queen screenplay, the play grippingly recreates the filming of the now-legendary TV interviews that took place three years after Richard Nixon played by Frank Langella resigned the presidency. Frost/Nixon became an instant hit at the Donmar Warehouse last summer and arrives at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre after a sold-out run in the West End. The Welsh-born Sheen first appeared on Broadway seven years ago as Mozart in Sir Peter Hall's revival of Amadeus and has juggled roles at London's top theater companies including an Olivier Award-winning performance in Caligula at the Donmar with films such as Blood Diamond, Underworld and Dirty Filthy Love plus two stints as Tony Blair, first in The Deal and then The Queen, both directed by Stephen Frears. Formerly involved with actress Kate Beckinsale, with whom he has a daughter, Lily, Sheen divides his time between London and Los Angeles, where Lily lives with her mother. Just before Frost/Nixon opened in London—and before the hoopla surrounding The Queen—Sheen spoke with Theatre.com's Mark Shenton about the challenge of playing real-life characters.

Let's start by talking about your history with London's Donmar Warehouse, which produced your award-winning performance in Caligula as well as Frost/Nixon.
I've actually acted [at the Donmar] three times now, but I've also directed there and produced a play there. I just have to write something, and then I'll have done it all! I first came as an actor in Don't Fool with Love, a play that ran as part of a Cheek by Jowl tour. I produced a play called A World of Our Own, where I believe Colin Farrell made his London stage debut. And I directed a play called Bad Finger produced by Thin Language, a Welsh theater company I was part of. So we've had a long relationship.

Would you be tempted to do more directing? Michael Grandage, who directed you in Frost/Nixon and Caligula, 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.

Does it makes a difference in his directing style that Michael used to act himself?
I'm not sure. 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 actors and respects what the actor has to offer.

Tell me about the web of connections that led you to do Frost/Nixon.
There are two connections: One is Michael Grandage and the Donmar, and the other is Peter Morgan, the writer. This is the third time I've worked with Peter. We did The Deal a few years ago on TV, where I played Tony Blair, and more recently The Queen, where I played Blair again. Stephen Frears directed both. 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 he wanted me to play Frost, and Michael wasn't opposed to it, given that we'd worked together. Peter told me about this play a long time ago. Once he got Michael interested, we did a workshop about a year ago. 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 [films] 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?
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 he is interested in, he thinks of me, which is very nice. For some reason, I've started playing a lot more real people. I did [1950s British comic actor] Kenneth Williams recently [in the TV film Fantabulosa], 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 recognizable like Williams, Blair or Frost, 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 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, try to build it from the inside and hope that eventually the inside and the external meet. That's a very particular challenge. The plus is that it gives you very particular boundaries and parameters and a structure to work within, which can be quite comforting.

You manage the difficult feat of capturing the person you're playing while maintaining your identity as an actor.
It's like something with lots of rules—once you know them, 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 lean on slightly more, because they help in the context of this particular story that Peter has written.

Did you discuss this process with Frank Langella, who plays Nixon?
Yes, Frank spoke in rehearsals about not being sure how far to go in terms of looking and sounding like Nixon. If you don't look or sound or act like the person, that can get in the way, 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 you're playing Frost or Nixon or Blair. I don't personally think you should get into sticking things on. I do hair and makeup 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.

Did you study the actual Frost/Nixon interview tapes to prepare for this?
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. And they make up only a small part of the play. They work on television, but we're doing a play, so if we just 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; in the theater, they get very, very heated because there's no point in doing them in the same way. We're keeping the psychological truth of what was going on in the interviews, but we are presenting it for a theatrical audience.

So what research did you do?
I 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 qualities he had—and still has—are a bit harder to see now, but were 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 those shows and the Frost Report. He went from around 36 to 38 during the time the play covers, so he's about my age.

Have you met David Frost?
He saw the play, and came around after. He had been heavily involved early on, 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 [the audience]. 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.

Politics has lately played a big part in your career.
I've always enjoyed playing 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 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 tend to be what I am most interested in playing, and they've all got similarities. That's not being flippant; they really do: The gap between what you think you are doing and what you are actually doing 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.

Do you find that theater 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, a film 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 specific to whom you're presenting it to. In the Donmar, you are performing to an audience of 250 on three sides; in the Olivier, you are performing to over a thousand people. And when you're 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.

In the last few years, your stage appearances seem to have become less frequent. Will theater lose you?
Because my daughter is living in America, doing a long run of a play [in London] would mean that I don't get to see her, so I can't really do that anymore. 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 another country, it's very hard. Also, I can't afford to live on theater 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 ridiculously expensive.

How old is your daughter now? Has she developed an American accent?
She's eight. And 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 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 the 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. 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.

Speaking of juggling, you've managed a mix of new and old work and roles in every medium. Do you have a preference?
It doesn't matter what medium a script is in if it's something 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 worthwhile. I'd like to do 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 theater, I find both fascinating to do. I don't really mind where I am acting, 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 theater 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 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 great training to work with him.

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.

See Michael Sheen in Frost/Nixon at the Jacobs Theatre.