‘Beauty and Beast’ lurk in portrait of sex researcher Masters

Is sex more important than music, war, sports and vampires? Is sex more important than Nixon?

Michael Sheen thinks so.

The nimble Welsh actor has played a royal flush of renowned men – Mozart, Tony Blair (three times), the English soccer manager Brian Clough, and David Frost in Frost/Nixon. He also starred as a villainous vampire in the Twilight movies.

Asked how he rates the importance of historical figures he has channelled, he places his current conjuring, William Masters in Showtime's mesmerizing Masters of Sex, on top.

“Sex, sexuality, is something every single person has to engage in, whether you’re actively pursuing, avoiding, enjoying in the moment or regretting later,” Sheen says over tea at Trump SoHo, looking sharp in a black Armani suit and black Prada tie. “So anyone who’s played a part in affecting that, I suppose it’s about as wide-ranging as it gets, really.”

Sheen contended that while the revolutionary research Masters did with his partner and later wife, Virginia Johnson, did not always lead them to correct conclusions – they claimed to have made some homosexuals straight and overstated how easily HIV could be contracted – at least they were trying to measure things scientifically, unlike Alfred Kinsey, whose research comprised interviews.

“All you have to do is talk to someone about their sex life to get a sense of how untrustworthy each of us might be about that,” Sheen said dryly.

In the show, Masters suggests to Johnson that they have research sex, noting that “we get the benefit of interpreting the data first hand”. Later, he tells her it’s a condition of her job. But Sheen and the alluring Lizzy Caplan, plus the writing, soften the nasty coercion on his part and cold-blooded careerism on hers with a subtext of mutual attraction.

Professional desire

Late in life, Johnson told the biographer Thomas Maier that she had never desired Masters, only the job.

“It is sexual harassment,” Sheen said, but “they both have different agendas. Conscious and unconscious motivations are something we’re playing with in the show.”

He also suggests that there may have been “a bit of revisionism” on Johnson’s part, coloured by the fact that Masters seemed to prefer his Doberman pinschers and left her after 22 years for a woman he’d had a crush on in college.

“While at the beginning he was quite intimidating and wasn’t an easily likable man and Virginia was the one people warmed to, by the end, it had completely reversed,” Sheen said.

He noted that there's a Beauty and the Beast undersong to their telling of the relationship of Masters and Johnson, a sexually free woman who had a stint as a country singer and three divorces behind her when she became his secretary in her early 30s.

“He’s drawn to the beauty but at the same time can’t accept that she might see him as anything else than a monster, which I think is also the story of intimacy – how do you cope with someone seeing the ugliest part of you?” Sheen said.

He said he chose to play Masters as “one of the hardest characters to ever like in a lead role”, knowing that it would make the arrogant gynaecologist’s rare displays of vulnerability more affecting. “I only ever play myself, with the volume turned up on certain aspects. If I was playing anyone else, I’d be acting and I hate acting.”

I note that the repellent Masters was the opposite of Blair and Frost, who tried to ingratiate.

“American audiences, at that time anyway, tended to go, ‘Oh, we love Blair and we love what you do because you make him so likable,’” he said. “People hate Blair in Britain and saw what I was doing as a kind of criticism of him, that he was false, opportunistic, ambitious. Same with Frost.”

Sheen is also in the spotlight for his romance with Sarah Silverman, who came to New York with him.

‘Lots of words’

When the 43-year-old Silverman won an Emmy for her HBO special, she made an affectionate reference to “Mr Fancypants Sheen”. At another red carpet event, the raunchy comedienne grabbed her proper boyfriend’s butt.

“She sort of makes a big deal of me doing Shakespeare and I know lots of words and it just makes me laugh,” said the 45-year-old Sheen, who, like Silverman, has never been married.

Not a fan of living in Los Angeles – he is there to raise his 15-year-old daughter, Lily, with ex-girlfriend Kate Beckinsale – Sheen said "one of the things I really appreciate about Sarah is that she's not concerned about a lot of things that a lot of people are concerned about in LA". She's "grounded," he said, yet "just as out there and quirky and eccentric as anyone in LA but in a lovely way". After they began dating last winter, she took a role in the Showtime show as a lesbian palm reader.

Wild side

He seems like the buttoned-up part of the twosome – a variation on the odd-couple romance he had with Tina Fey on

30 Rock

as Brit Wesley Snipes – but Sheen has a wild side, or at least a

Where the Wild Things Are

side.

His daughter gave him an adult Max suit for Christmas a couple years ago because he loves the Maurice Sendak character so much.

“What I actually want to do, if I can get the guts together eventually, is eschew clothes altogether and just wear that,” he says with a delighted grin.

“I just want to be the guy in the Max outfit.”