Michael Sheen
Michael Sheen
Michael Sheen, OBE is a Welsh actor. After training at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he worked mainly in theatre throughout the 1990s and made notable stage appearances in Romeo and Juliet, Don't Fool With Love, Peer Gynt, The Seagull, The Homecoming, and Henry V. His performances in Amadeus at the Old Vic and Look Back in Anger at the National Theatre were nominated for Olivier Awards in 1998 and 1999, respectively. In 2003, he was nominated for a...
NationalityWelsh
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth5 February 1969
CityNewport, Wales
I'd love to go back to Europe in the '20s and '30s, for the beginning of the Psychoanalytic Movement, and Freud and Jung, and all that was going on with discoveries in quantum physics. The whole nature of reality was changing and being challenged.
Hopefully, any character I play has an anchor in reality. The more fantastical characters, or fantastical worlds that they inhabit are really fun and allow you, in some ways, to tell stories and reveal things about our lives that would be harder to take, in a more realistic setting.
We live in a bubble of the fantasy of death, but the reality of it is something that we obviously all face and have to deal with, at some point.
Hopefully, any character I play has an anchor in reality.
For a culture that has such a problem with death, we seem to deal with it in a quite bizarre way. We see people shot, killed and blown up, and we find it funny and sexy and all those things. But, the reality of it is that every day people die, and people are really sad and they grieve and they go through a really difficult process with it.
The secret to acting is don't act. Be you, with add-ons.
I've always had an eye for what looks good on a man. But I've not always found it easy to find clothes that look good on me.
I've always found it hard to say sorry.
Sometimes you see things in a script, and it doesn't necessarily mean the director sees the same things. And if you think you're going to be making a different film, then that's not gonna work.
I would never use prosthetics. I don't like sticking things on. I don't really like wearing wigs, either.
You know, we're each the hero of our own story and we perceive what's going on around us, and especially in a relationship, from the kind of viewpoint of, 'Well, this is my story, and I'm the hero of that, and I justify what I do around it.'
I don't do the whole L.A. nightlife thing.
There are times in my career where I can see it would be helped by having a bit more of a profile, but it's not like I refuse to do interviews, no, not at all.
I'm always aware that there are, broadly speaking, two different ways to act: there is acting, and then there's being, and I'm always more interested in that.