THE QUEEN has become one of the strongest Oscar contenders in the last few weeks, and as much as Helen Mirren seems to be a lock for a nomination for Best Actress, there’s another player you may see nominated, and that’s Michael Sheen, who plays Tony Blair. I’ll let Capone tell you more, though, in this great interview with the actor who put himself on the map with his portrayal of the real-life figure:
Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here. When the year is finally over, I have a feeling that my love and admiration for THE QUEEN will not have diminished even one iota. I said in my original review that I was convinced that Helen Mirren was destined for her first Oscar for her role as Elizabeth II, but I hastened to mention that another serious contender come awards season was Michael Sheen, who gives a remarkable performance as then-newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair. Sheen played Blair three years ago for director Stephen Frears in the made-for-British-television THE DEAL, which I would kill to get a copy of.
Sheen is probably best know to most of you as Lucian, the leader of the werewolf tribe, in the UNDERWORLD movies. I had to look it up to believe it was the same guy. QUEEN director Frears was in Chicago recently for a Chicago International Film Festival screening of his film, but a long-delayed flight made it impossible for the two of us to get together for an interview. By coincidence, my comments about Sheen’s performance caught somebody’s attention (I’m assuming at Miramax), and during his recent press tour of the U.S., I got a few minutes on the phone with him. He’s currently performing in a play in London called FROST/NIXON, in which he plays another real-life public figure, David Frost to Frank Langella’s Richard Nixon. The play is also written by QUEEN scribe Peter Morgan, and is schedule to hit these shores (on Broadway) in the spring, and once again, I’d kill to see it.
Sheen is a terrific man to talk to, and he’s surprisingly honest about his feelings toward Blair, especially in light of Blair’s continued support of his nation’s involvement in the Iraq War and his recent announcement that he’s stepping down soon. He also just loves talking about THE QUEEN, as do I. Enjoy…
Capone: Good morning, Michael.
Michael Sheen: Good morning. How are you?
Capone: Very well, thank you. I think the most obvious first question any American seeing THE QUEEN would have is: Where the hell do I get a copy of THE DEAL? I’ve been looking, and I can’t find it.
MS: (laughing) It’s sort of weird how they decide what gets released on DVD. THE DEAL won the BAFTA, won loads of awards, but it’s a one-off single drama. I’ve got a copy; I can get you a copy.
C: Yes, please. Why don’t you just drop that in the mail, and we’ll call it even.
MS: Anyone who wants to see it can come around my house, and I’ll gladly give them a cup of tea and a private viewing.
C: But honestly, that was my first thought after watching the film: I need to see this guy do this role in another movie, even though it was a few years earlier.
MS: There’s about four years in between the event in THE DEAL and the events in THE QUEEN, as well as the two productions. THE DEAL ends with Blair becoming leader of the Labour Party, and then there’s four years between the two general election, so THE QUEEN begins with him becoming Prime Minister.
C: Did you alter your portrayal at all between the two films?
MS: Kind of. One the really interesting and rare things an actor gets to do is play the same character later on in his life and career. So it gave me the opportunity to bring a few things into the performance that I couldn’t bring into the earlier one. THE DEAL is sort of the Jedi Master and Luke Skywalker, where Blair is Luke Skywalker who takes over from the Jedi Master Gordon Brown at the end. So in THE DEAL, he’s very bright-eyed and bushy tailed, and seems very naïve and innocent, whereas you realize as it goes on that there’s sort of a steeliness to Blair. By the time you get to THE QUEEN, he’s been leader for four years, he’s been in a position of real responsibility, power, and authority, and gone through this general election campaign, in which he was absolutely paranoid that they were going to lose again like they did in the one before. Even though everyone is telling him they’re going to win. So by the time we come to THE QUEEN, even though he’s still very youthful and fresh, there’s a kind of a weight to him and an internal thing going on. He’s much more wary of jumping into situations. And that’s why I think it takes so long for him in the film to turn his attention fully to what’s going on with the Queen and Diana’s funeral.
C: But in that first scene where Blair is meeting the Queen for the first time in Buckingham, you play that beautifully, because he seems like he’s still a little over his head in her presence. Blair still very much respects the monarchy.
MS: It’s a weird thing. You find out you’ve won the election in the early hours of the morning, and the first thing you have to do before you go to 10 Downing Street is you have to go see the Queen, and she has to ask you to form a government in your name. Blair goes in there as the most popular man in the country and the most popular prime minister since the Second World War, and yet this woman reduces him to feeling like a school boy in front of the headmistress. Because he’s not just meeting the Queen, he’s meeting the whole institution of royalty in Buckingham Palace, and it’s incredibly overwhelming, even for someone like Blair, especially for someone like him.
C: Was there any hesitation about playing him a second time?
MS: None whatsoever, no. Not so much hesitation, but I was slightly concerned that because I had played him once before that I might get a bit complacent about playing him again, because I’d done so much work and so much research the first time. I didn’t want to take anything for granted this time. I met up with Helen about a month or two before we started filming, and she was very nervous about playing the Queen and playing someone who was so familiar and recognizable, and I remember that’s exactly how I felt before we made THE DEAL. Having done THE DEAL, I had the confidence that I would be accepted in the part, but it reminded me not to take anything for granted. So I didn’t have any worries about doing it again. In fact, I was desperate to do it again and to work with Stephen and Peter again, and with Helen, obviously.
C: Did it strike you as bizarre to be making a film about Blair at his most popular and have it come out now when he’s just announced that he’s stepping down?
MS: It is extraordinary watching it now. It makes it seem like a lifetime ago. It’s not that long ago, but it seems like a lifetime ago. And you look at Blair now, and he looks completely different. It’s like the PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY but you’re seeing the actual Dorian Gray with the white hair and ravaged face. So it is quite poignant in some ways I suppose to think of this kind of battered man now and look back at the youthful man with such high expectations. The people had such high expectation after years under the conservatives in Britain. He and the new Labour Party were never going to be able to live up to it, regardless what’s happened with people divided over Iraq. There was an inevitable backlash because expectations were so high. So it is peculiar thing to be bringing out a film about a man when he was at his most popular at a time when he’s being heralded out of office.
C: And popular in his own country, but internationally thanks in large part to the events portrayed in this film, for doing what the royal family was not doing.
MS: Exactly. It’s been interesting traveling around America with the film just recently and seeing how popular Blair is over hear. It’s very different. And it seems in some ways that people who disagree with Bush and the Iraq War are still very favorable toward Blair. I hear people saying, At least he was very eloquent in explaining why they were doing what they were doing. It seems like there are a lot of Blair apologists over here, whereas in Britain, there’s none of that going on.
C: After I saw the film, I started to think about how would most Americans know Tony Blair, what has been our exposure to him over the years. And these events regarding Diana’s funeral would certainly be the first time many learned his name. I think he had even more comforting words than our own president after September 11. Have you met him before?
MS: No, I’ve never met him. And we’re hoping to maybe do a third film about him as well to cover the end period. But I’m hoping that in 20 years’ time when everything is done and dusty that we can sit down and have a meal and have a chat, but there’s been nothing like that so far. The closest I’ve come really was just a few days before we started filming THE QUEEN, I went back to my old drama school to talk to some of the students there, and afterwards one of the students came up to me and said that she had met a friend that night and coincidentally the friend was there. And she was wondering if she could say hello because I was going to be playing her dad next week. It was Kathryn Blair, Blair’s daughter, who in the film is only about five or six. But there she was, this 17-year-old girl. I’d just had a costume fitting that day, and we were trying to work out what I would wear in bed. And so the first thing I said to her was, “What does your dad wear in bed?” And then I proceeded to spend the next hour bombarding her with questions about every niche of her father’s life, embarrassing her completely in front of her other 17-year-old friends. I’m sure she went back to her dad and reported all that.
C: I’m equally fascinated by your recent theatre project FROST/NIXON. Let me pose two questions that are related: What about the live theatre experience to you enjoy more than film? And what about film is more interesting to you than the theatre?
MS: I think that acting on stage is more animalistic thing. When you strip it down to its bare essentials, it’s just a bunch of people in a room and one group of people--the actors--have to dominate the people that are watching. So it’s something quite predatory about it, something very visceral about it. I enjoy that, I enjoy being able to be in a room with a group of people and dominate and manipulate. That’s the only way I can describe it; it’s there in the room happening right then, and you can smell and feel how these people are reacting. It’s like a sheep dog having to round up sheep, and that’s really exciting and dangerous and unpredictable.
With film, you can be much for forensic about it. And obviously it has an innate freshness about it because you don’t have to keep repeating the same thing day after day after day. It’s very impermanent, delicate sense that you have to grasp something. You have to be totally relax because it’s so easy to miss, because you don’t have as much rehearsal obviously. It’s very easy to miss the moment on film, and anything that’s too forced or too prepared or too rehearsed, it becomes very clear on camera. You have be totally relaxed, totally spontaneous, and very trusting. And out of that comes something very precise and specific. And I’ve come to admire that and love that the more I’ve done in front of the camera. It never used to excite me, the prospect of working in front of the camera when I was much younger, but now I love it.
C: What about in your years playing a werewolf?
MS: (laughs) Oh no, I mean when I was much younger, growing up. I loved everything I’ve been doing, even playing a werewolf is great fun. You can’t be doing Shakespeare all your life.
C: I know people who have seen the film and they kind of recognize you but they never know from where exactly. I’m sure most of our readers know you from the UNDERWORLD movies. I think it throws people a bit.
MS: I’ve had that for a long time. People don’t tend to recognize me from the things I’ve done, which is great in a way. That’s what being an actor is all about, I suppose, to totally disappear into the character. But it doesn’t help you, I suppose, with things actors are supposed to do these days, like create a brand. I’ve never been very good at that. Certainly in Britain now, people are much more aware that it’s me playing all these characters. But maybe in American, not so much yet.
C: Well you certainly had the best facial hair in UNDERWORLD. Getting back to the David Frost role, do you feel you have a gift for mimicry, or is that something that comes naturally?
MS: Growing up, I was never the kid in school who pretended to be the teacher. I always had a fascination with people who could do it. It’s like watching someone doing card tricks, I just stood there open mouthed and slack jawed at the extraordinariness of it, but I was never able to do it. Doing THE DEAL was the first time I ever played a real-life character that I had to do research on and try to emulate in some way. And I think partly because of the success of THE DEAL, I started to be offered more of those kind of thing and partly because they are all written by the same person. FROST/NIXON was also written by Peter Morgan as well. But I’ve done a few other things playing real people that weren’t written by Peter. I’m terrible at doing impersonations; I can’t do them. I couldn’t now do Blair for you because it was such a long time ago for me, but I could do Frost because that’s who I’m doing at the moment. It’s all about working very hard and adapted to the moment. I was thinking about it the other day, and I realized when I first started to realize that I could potentially do it, it has to do with my daughter because she would watch all of these kids films and then want me to be all of the characters in the film when she’s having her bath. And because she’s totally un-judgmental, I’d have a go at it, and I would sound terrible, but slowly I would hone it a bit more and pick up on the voices of characters in SHREK or MONSTERS INC. or FINDING NEMO. I remember one memorable conversation where she wanted me to be all seven dwarves having a conversation with each other, and I think that’s where I honed my impersonation skills.
C: Are you still linked to the project CAITLIN, where you’d be playing Dylan Thomas?
MS: Hopefully we’re going to do that at some point. I don’t know when that’s going to be exactly because I’m fairly booked up for the next year. I’ve wanted to play him for years and years and years now, and it’s something that’s very close to my heart. I grew up very close to where Dylan Thomas grew up, so I’ve always been aware of his work and performed his poems and short stories, so I’d really love that. I really hope that that happens.
C: You actually have another high-profile film coming out this year, BLOOD DIAMOND. What is your role in that?
MS: I play a British diamond dealer. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is trying to find a buyer for the diamond that he’s become aware of, and he comes to Britain and I say I’ll buy it off you if you bring it. So I’m this slightly shady diamond dealer that instigates the events. I would call him a very good businessman.
C: And you’ve completed something called MUSIC WITHIN [starring Ron Livingston]?
MS: That’s right. That’s something I shot in Portland earlier this year, again playing another real-life character, a poet called Art Honeyman, who was born with severe cerebral palsy. But the great thing about this one was that I actually got to spend time with him because he still lives up in Portland, and that was a great experience and I had a great time with him.
C: I’d just read that FROST/NIXON will be opening on Broadway fairly soon. It sounds like I’ll need to book a trop to New York next year.
MS: I’ve got to go back to Britain at the end of this month to move into a larger theatre in the West End, and then in March we open on Broadway, and I won’t finish up that run until the end of August-beginning of September.
C: What are some of the traits--internal and mannerisms--about Tony Blair that you felt were essential in capturing who he was at that time?
MS: Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight now, which you have to be careful with because if you start to interpret everything in terms of what eventually happened, it can get a bit blurred. I found most interesting about Blair the ambiguity in him, in that people tend to fall into two camps about Blair. People who are negative about him, think he’s a ruthlessly ambitious opportunist who has no central core of beliefs and is all about giving people what they want and all about how he presents himself in the media and has no substance to him. Then on the other hand, there are other people who believe he has a very strong center core of beliefs—his religion, his Christianity, his strong moral and ethical view, believes in community, and has always tried to do the very best for the Labour Party first and through the Labour Party, the country.
So in terms of playing him, I had to make choices about how I felt about him, and it seems it’s a mixture of the two, and that manifests itself in his personality. In watching him, in watching footage of him, and reading about him, you see a man who is very at ease with people, he is very charming, and he wants people to like him. He doesn’t like the idea of leaving a meeting with someone in disagreement, even to the point of saying what needs to be said whether he believes it or is going to do anything, he wants people to feel good about themselves and him at the end of a meeting. That’s all very interesting.
What I say about hindsight, in retrospect, you look at his stance over Iraq, the fact that everybody disagreed with him and he still followed through what he believed was the right thing to do, even though everyone disagreed and he was being held in lower and lower esteem by the people. And yet he wouldn’t turn around and change. In retrospect that flies in the face of people who think that he’ll do whatever to make people like him. Taking that, looking back to the time when we’re playing him, it creates more of an ambiguity about that stuff. There are also little things, physical things that came up in doing research for THE DEAL. Obviously somebody told him, Look you’ve got a great smile, but sometimes it can make you look a little bit idiotic, and people may not take you seriously if you’re grinning like a Cheshire cat all the time. So you can see there’s a self-consciousness about his smile. He’s trying to be taken seriously when he’s much younger, and whenever he does that big smile, he tries to cover it over with his upper lip. There are lots of interesting things going on like that. And how he walks when he’s wearing a suit, because he’s used to wearing more informal clothes, or he’s happier in informal clothes. So when he wears a suit, he looks like he’s still got a hanger still in the suit. He seems a little bit stiff in the shoulders, and the arms are walking a bit weirdly. So you pick up on some of those things.
But the important thing is that you have to make an imaginative connection to the character. It’s not just watching all this stuff in order to mimic or copy it. You watch all this stuff to wait for the one moment where something just makes you make that imaginative connection. You suddenly think, Oh, I know what that feels like. I think I know what’s going on there when he does that. And slowly you build up from the inside. So when you do all those things, and try to work out why his voice sounds the way it is and why he walks the way he does and moves his hands the way he does that it’s actually coming from somewhere rooted in his psychological and emotional make up.
C: You mentioned the more casual aspects of him. I think some of my favorite scenes are of Blair at home with his family in the football jersey, and you can’t help but think, This guy is the prime minister and he looks just like a normal father at home with his family.
TB: Exactly. And thematically in the film it works really well because, on the one hand, you’ve got the total formality of the royal family and the starchiness of all that and the coldness and difficulty in terms of the family relationships between mother and son, father and son. And then you’ve got Blair, hands on, kids everywhere, toys everywhere. It creates a great opposition in the film.
C: Well, when I reviewed the film a few weeks ago, I thought your film was a real standout, so I’m glad we could do this. And hopefully next February when you make your trip to the Academy Awards, it won’t interfere with your theatre schedule.
TB: (laughing) I’ll have to come as Frost if that happens. Thanks you so much.
Capone
