His father works as a Jack Nicholson lookalike, so maybe it’s no surprise that most of Michael Sheen’s film roles are interpretations of real people: Tony Blair, Kenneth Williams and now David Frost. The key to his success is resisting straight impersonations and instead hinting at the characters’ true personalities, he tells Donald Clarke
What’s going on? Why am I asking the questions? Ron Howard’s insidious, subtle Frost/Nixon, a big-screen adaptation of Peter Morgan’s hit play, dramatises David Frost’s famous interviews with Richard Nixon in 1977. Frank Langella brings surprising degrees of brown-voiced dignity to the disgraced president and Michael Sheen (who else?) goes some way towards rehabilitating the often-ridiculed satirist, interviewer and Through the Keyhole presenter.
Here we are sitting either side of a cocktail table and now I’m putting the questions to Sheen. Shouldn’t Frost/Sheen have the clipboard? “I just met Frost in the corridor,” Sheen says. “The last time I saw him he was on set with his family and they were all watching the action in those big headphones. He came up to me outside just now and asked how long I was in London and I said I was here for the week.” Sheen adopts Frost’s singular transatlantic burr.
“‘What a wonderful thing for the people of Britain,’ he said. You can’t beat him. He is always reliably Frostish.” In truth, Sheen could not be less like David Frost. Conspicuously Welsh, consistently modest and somewhat reticent, he will never be mistaken for that class of jet-setting, chequebook-brandishing showman. Indeed, over the last decade, Sheen has made his reputation by allowing his own reserved personality to be eaten up by more aggressive psyches, such as those of Kenneth Williams (in the BBC’s Fantabulosa!), Tony Blair (The Queen and The Deal) and – coming our way later this year – Brian Clough (The Damned United).
Somehow or other Sheen has become that bloke who plays real people. This is, you might argue, a surprising development. After all, Sheen does not go in for full-scale impersonations. His Blair and his Frost merely hint at the real personalities’ ticks and intonations without ever quite drifting into Mike Yarwood territory.
“There would be no point in going for impersonations,” he agrees. “That would only work for about a minute. There’s no journey in an impersonation. All the viewer sees is the outside. You don’t want them to focus on the outside. That’s a distraction. You want them to be drawn along by the story.” Sheen attributes this chapter in his career to Peter Morgan. It was, indeed, that writer’s The Deal – a dramatisation of the conflict between Blair and Gordon Brown – that propelled Sheen into the world of quasi- impersonation.
“But I realised I could do this sort of thing a few years before that,” he says. “When we started showing my daughter films, she would be upset at the end and would like them to carry on. I had to be the characters. If I got it wrong, she’d say: ‘That’s not him!’ So I had to learn to be every dwarf in Snow White and Donkey in Shrek. It’s the same thing. I have to improvise as Blair and I had to improvise as Donkey.”
Both Sheen’s parents worked in the untheatrical world of personnel management, but they enjoyed amateur drama and helped instil a taste for performance in their son. Sheen senior still finds occasional work as a Jack Nicholson lookalike.
“My dad would always like to have been an actor, I think,” he says. “The cliche is that the Welsh are all into song and they did like musical theatre. It did, maybe, go against the grain that I went into straight theatre.”
Yet, for all the warbling and intoning in the household, it was football that first threatened to drag young Michael away from south Wales and into the national spotlight. When he was just 12 years old, Sheen secured an offer to play in the Arsenal youth team. He must have been faced with a painful decision.
“The decision was made for me,” he says. “It would have meant moving away to London and my parents decided I was too young. If that had happened I would never have got into acting and – I’m 39 now – my career would now be over.”
Sheen drifted towards the National Theatre of Wales and then moved on to the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Following a role in the West End production of Martin Sherman’s When She Danced, he started his gradual (but consistent) march towards prominence.
By 2003, when he secured the role of Tony Blair in The Deal, Sheen had managed to get his face about, but had yet to make his name well known.
Good-looking, but somewhat slight, with sharp features, he didn’t quite fit the model of leading man. Yet he didn’t really seem like a character actor, either. Still, he had been charming as Robbie Ross in Wilde and was undeniably charismatic in the BBC’s version of Barbara Vine’s Gallowglass.
The Deal, made for Channel 4, changed things for Sheen. Arguably, it also changed things for Tony Blair. If Sheen had offered a savage caricature of the former prime minister then the film could have been dismissed as a broad, mean-spirited satire. But his version of Blair tempered the oiliness with a degree of vulnerability. The performance – repeated in The Queen and, all going well, soon to be revisited in a film examining Blair’s relationship with George Bush – still colours many observers’ views of that politician.
“I have only played him twice – and, hopefully, will one more time – but it does seem to have had an effect,” he says. “Rory Bremner said to me: ‘Before you played Blair, when I played him I had the real man in my head. Now when I do him I have you in my head.’ I suppose that’s a responsibility.”
In some senses, the role of David Frost offered greater dangers for an actor. Bits of Blair are, it is true, easily imitable, but Frost, like Frank Spencer or Tommy Cooper, is one of those odd 1970s icons that virtually everybody has impersonated at some point. It would have been very easy to turn him into a comic character.
“I suppose I watched as much as I could of Frost,” he says. “I listened to him and read about him. It is all to do with connecting with him. But the script is always the first thing. You have to think about him as a character. But one of the tools I have at my disposal in creating that character is to look at the real person.” But if he had watched the interviews too closely, he might have ended up using them for line readings.
“That’s right,” he says. “So I only watched them once, right at the beginning. If I had watched them all the time, I might have got hung up on the exact way the ‘lines’ were delivered. And that could have affected the story we were telling.”
Howard’s film – possibly his best since Apollo 13 – reminds us that many people regarded Frost as a brash dilettante in the 1970s. Having emerged from the world of comedy, this middle-class boy had toyed with chat-shows while cultivating a reputation as a blazer-wearing, Concorde-hogging playboy. Joining forces with producer John Birt (later director general of the BBC), he reached into his own pocket to finance the interviews with Nixon. Initially, the wily old politician danced around the subject of Watergate, but, after several hours of parrying, Frost eventually extracted something a little like an apology.
So what are Sheen’s views of Frost? This is the man of whom Kitty Muggeridge once famously remarked: “He rose without trace.”
“Look, you don’t have a career as long and various as that if you are an empty man,” Sheen says. “The film shows that he was an outsider. He was never in the cool club. Nor was Nixon. That’s what connected them.” Both were from humble stock and (understandably enough) tended to resent the posh blokes – Peter Cook, John F Kennedy – who looked down on them. Peter Cook was Frost’s colleague in the Cambridge Footlights comedy troupe.
“I think that it is true,” he says. “Cook once said his only regret in life was saving David Frost from drowning. The Footlights would send him off to do gigs that they couldn’t be bothered doing. And he resented not being in that cool crowd. There are underlying, psychological reasons why Frost’s office is still decorated with photos of him meeting famous people.” Interestingly, Frost seems to have been very supportive of Morgan’s play and Howard’s film. It is true that this version of the story eventually allows him a victory, but he is still shown to be vain, trivial and – at first, anyway – under-informed.
“It is certainly not an entirely flattering portrayal of him,” Sheen agrees. “But, yes, he has always been very supportive of the project. He told me that when he watches it he always thinks of my Frost as a character. There are certain things he recognises. There are certain things he doesn’t. If there are things that are not flattering he is able to tell himself they were made up to help the story work. That’s fair enough.”
Michael Sheen is a busy man. From today, should you have the urge, you can see him chase vampires around dungeons in the horror romp Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. Later this year, he turns up as Brian Clough, the notoriously mouthy manager of Nottingham Forest and Leeds United, in an adaptation of David Peace’s brilliant novel The Damned Utd. In between premieres, he maintains contact with the daughter he had with his former wife Kate Beckinsale (now, rather awkwardly, married to Les Wiseman, producer of the Underworld franchise).
Doesn’t he deserve a bit of a rest? “It’s busy, thank goodness, but, look, I would do this job even if nobody paid me,” he laughs. “If nobody cast me in a film, I would still be acting in my living room.”
- Frost/Nixon opens next Friday
Presidential candidates: why Dicky is a tricky character
As a kind of Californian amalgam of King Lear and Scrooge, Richard Nixon offers film-makers and TV producers any number of opportunities for mischief and drama. Appearing in the title role of Oliver Stone's characteristically broad Nixon, Anthony Hopkinssloped his shoulders, licked his lips and made the president into an angry, but rather pathetic lizard-thing.
Philip Baker Hallwas somewhat less broad in Robert Altman's undervalued Secret Honor. Taken from a wordy script by Donald Freed and Arnold M Stone, Altman's film, which finds Nixon pacing and boozing in his office, stands as one of cinema's great one-man shows.
You could argue that Baker Hall put in a better performance as Nixon than the president himself managed in Forrest Gump. Assisted by the computer boffins, Dicky seemed a little too perky in that film. He really needed to immerse himself in the role a tad more fully.
With his hooded eyes and collapsed face, Dan Hedayawas born to be Nixon and he finally got a chance to play the part in the fitful 1999 comedy Dick. Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, playing two kids accidentally tangled up in the Watergate burglary, offered lively support.
Perhaps the most convincing ever portrayal of Nixon – or, more accurately, a Nixon-type – remains hidden in the vaults. The superb 1977 mini-series Washington: Behind Closed Doors, based on a roman à clef by Nixon hood John Ehrlichman, featured Jason Robardsas a delightfully deranged president called Richard Monckton. Why on earth has it not been released on DVD?
