Archive for the ‘Interview’ Category

Michael Sheen says he jumped at the chance to star in the Manic Street Preachers’ new music video.

In the video for (Its Not War) Just The End Of Love, he plays a Russian chess legend Garry Kasparov type character opposite actress Anna Friel.

Michael explained he was friends with the band’s lead singer, saying: “We’re all from the same place in South Wales and I’ve known James Dean Bradfield for a little while.”

Speaking in LA as he promoted the release of children’s movie Tinker Bell And The Great Fairy Rescue onto DVD in the States, Michael confessed he hadn’t expected to be asked to work with the band.

“Why they wanted me to do it I have no idea!” he laughed.

He added: “The reason why I wanted to do it was because I’m a big fan of theirs and it was great to be a part of it.”

If you have not seen this video yet – you must! It is a fabulous song and the video is EPIC!

Film School Rejects have published an interview with Michael Sheen taken at Comic Con 2010 on the replica set of Tron Legacy’s End Of Line club. You can read the interview below, or on filmschoolrejects.com.

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For a brief moment in the latest Tron: Legacy trailer, you can catch a glimpse of Michael Sheen in a snow white jump suit taking things way over the top. He must have been the set designer’s worst nightmare, and the make-up department’s best friend.

On the second day of Comic-Con, already confused by a lack of sleep and a mysterious amount of whiskey missing from the $6 bottle in our hotel room, I stepped into a pitch-perfect re-creation of Flynn’s Arcade. Tron the Game stood like the dot on a dusty exclamation point at the top of the room, and plastic covered each game as if time wouldn’t get to them anyway.

I was led through a dark hallway, only lit by blue LED runners, and out into the open expanse of the bright white nightclub set from the new film. Clear bottles with blue liquid in them stood like soldiers in the back of the room, and I sat down next to Michael Sheen on a luxurious couch to talk about his beard, his best David Bowie impression, and his unsnobbish willingness to take his classical training into the genre world.

First off, I’d like to congratulate you on your beard and shoe choices.

Thank you very much indeed.

[Pointing to his beard] You’ve got a little bit more than I do.

Well, I’ve had it for a while, and I’m not trying to keep it as neat and tidy as yours. I’m just letting it go.

Are you growing it for any particular role?

No. It’s for a film that I just did. Until I know for definite that the next film doesn’t want me to have a beard, I don’t want to get rid of it because, you know, it takes minutes to get rid of and months to grow.

Absolutely. I noticed you were beardless in Tron: Legacy, and I wish I could have seen the movie before speaking with you so we could earnestly delve into your beardless character.

Me too.

But at least in the clip we saw, you definitely…I don’t know the words for it.

It’s a look, isn’t it?

It’s a look.

[Laughs]

It’s an albino David Bowie.

I was going for albino Ziggy. That was what we were going for.

Can you explain a little bit about the nature of that character?

The character’s name is Castor, and we’re in – at the moment – a re-creation of the night club set that he owns. He’s sort of like the owner, the host, and the entertainer in the nightclub. So he’s a very big, larger-than-life, over-the-top, grandstanding, showman character. But also, there’s something else going on there as well that I can’t really talk about.

There are layers to the character.

Yeah. There’s a kind of ambiguity to the character, which, again, I liked about the Ziggy/David Bowie thing.

Would you call it a sinister ambiguity?

There are murky depths. I enjoy murky depths. Also, I like the idea – because all the characters of the Tron world are programs – I like the idea of thinking about, ‘If my character was a program, what sort of program would he be?’ and I like the idea of someone who assimilates everything around him and, a bit like a chameleon, is able to change in order to survive. Because of that, he’s a survivor. As all true survivors need to do, their loyalties and affiliations need to be fluid.

So there’s that kind of ambiguity. I like the idea of a kind of character where you hear bits of pop culture, bits of other characters, all coming out of this one character. Again – the idea of someone who’s a shape-shifter like Bowie. It sort of made me think, ‘If he’s a person, he’d be a bit like that.’

There are a lot of characters like this one, and that showmanship is usually shallowness hiding something serious. Is there an anchor to your character? Something that doesn’t change? That’s not mercurial?

There’s definitely something. There’s an underlying…I don’t want to give too much away about it, but there’s something underneath everything that is very different than what appears on the surface.

[We're joined by another reporter who the publicist keeps pointing out is Canadian.]

So we’re going to double-team. We’re going to have a threesome, as it were.

Your words. Yes.

[Laughs]

With the history of this film at Comic-Con, and the actors from the first film returning, did you feel like you were joining a family when you hopped into this?

Well, it felt like Kevin Flynn, Jeff Bridges’ character from the first film, being sucked into the Tron world. It felt like that. That feeling that I’ve been literally transported into this world that I experienced as an audience member when I was 11 years old. It was such a transformative experience for me watching the film, so the idea of now being in it is – excuse my French – a real headfuck.

Yesterday I was doing interviews in Flynn’s Arcade. With Jeff. Sitting next to me. In between interviews, we’re playing Battlezone which was the game they used to play on the set of the first film, and I’m playing against Jeff. This is just really weird.

Every time I got sent a schedule or something like that with the Tron logo at the top…I can’t quite get past the 11 year old self that’s freaked out by this extraordinarily overwhelming experience. When I come to watch the film or at the premier, I think it’ll be complete for me. I think I’m going to disappear. I’ll get de-rezed at the premier, because that’s the only way to top off this experience.

You’re from the same town as Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins. Do have some favorite films that they’re in?

For Hopkins I would say there’s a few. Magic, which is still really weird. For Whom the Bell Tolls is really enjoyable as well, and I really like Nixon. I find his performance as Nixon is frightening and human and wonderful.

I imagine that came in handy.

It did, yeah. And Burton – Becket is a fantastic film. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1984, and one of my favorite things that Burton did is not a film. It’s “The War of the Worlds.”

He did a radio play?

It’s a concept album with Burton narrating.

Well, thank you so much for the interview and thank you for being unafraid to do genre films.

Oh! Of course. There is so much cultural sluggishness about what are called genre films. I love the fact that some people ask, ‘What are you doing in, you know, one of these films? You’re a serious actor,’ and all that. I take a perverse enjoyment in being able to shoot those people down for about half an hour. My one rule of thumb is that I want to be in things that I want to go and see. I as much want to go and see, if not more, the sci-fi and fantasy stuff as I want to go and see the real serious dramas.

So yes, I will never stop doing this.

Michael Sheen took a few minutes to talk to Fear.net while at Comic-Con this weekend.

It seems that he has been working on a future project with New Moon director, Chris Weitz about the Michael Moorcock character, Elric. Weitz told Elric artist, John Picacio, that he is developing a movie about the famed sword-and-sorcery character.

Elric, an albinistic anti-hero, is a legendary character from the world of graphic novels and fantasy comics and has been around since the early 70s.

Michael also mentioned that he will be playing the macabre gothic fiction writer, Edgar Allen Poe, in a film about the last few months of his life. The project is currently called ‘The Raven’, named after one of his most famous tales ‘The Raven‘.

You can read the article at Fear.net

The Guardian has posted an article where they talk to Michael Sheen about his role as Castor in Tron Legacy. You can read the article below or visit guardian.co.uk.

Michael Sheen has earned a reputation for specialising in the portrayal of ambitious men who know how to get what they want: in a 15-year film career, he has already played Brian Clough, David Frost and Tony Blair (three times).

But while the 41-year-old Welsh actor is leaving behind the serious-minded biopic for his latest film, he still modelled his performance on a real-life figure.

Speaking at Comic-Con, the film and comic-book convention in San Diego, Sheen revealed that his approach to playing the villainous Castor in Disney’s forthcoming blockbuster Tron: Legacy was informed by the master chameleon – David Bowie.

“I was going for a sort of albino Ziggy Stardust,” Sheen told the Guardian. “A one-man walking Andy Warhol Factory.”

The film, directed by first-time director Joseph Kosinski, is a belated sequel to the 1982 hit Tron, set within a deadly computer game in which players are forced into combat much in the manner of Roman gladiators.

Sheen is one of the new members of a cast that also includes Jeff Bridges, star of the original Tron. Eight minutes of 3D footage were unveiled at Comic-Con last Thursday to enthusiastic fans, who also learned that the French electro-pop band Daft Punk had composed the movie’s score.

“Joe wanted the character to look completely different to everyone else in the Tron world,” Sheen noted, “so whereas everyone is in black, he’s in white: white hair, no eyebrows. It’s a good choice, I think. Castor is a character who reflects and assimilates everything around him, then adapts to survive. I liked the idea of him as a shape-shifter who keeps reinventing himself, and the obvious reference there has to be Bowie.”

Sheen confessed that he also took inspiration from Frank-N-Furter, the “transvestite from transsexual Transylvania” played by Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as well as from Mae West.

“I wanted him to be a human pop-cultural jukebox.”

“Joe said he needed my character to bring a whole different kind of energy to this film, and that I had to be the biggest showman ever. Then I’m given that amazing nightclub set with hundreds of extras, that dazzling white costume, contact lenses and six-inch heels, and a cane that lights up, and I’ve got Daft Punk as my house-band … well, it was like a red rag to a bull.”

Sheen is the latest in a long line of British actors (including Alan Rickman in Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Alfred Molina in Spider-Man 2, and Sir Ian McKellen in the X-Men series) to bring some flamboyance to the role of baddie in a Hollywood blockbuster.

The actor, who lives in Los Angeles, is currently filming Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris alongside Marion Cotillard and Carla Bruni. He has already completed The Special Relationship, in which he plays Blair for the third time, with Dennis Quaid taking on Bill Clinton.

Tron: Legacy will be released in December.

MTV Movie Blog talk to Michael Sheen about his role in the upcoming block buster Tron Legacy

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Not much longer now. In six more months we’ll finally get to see the awe-inducing glory of Disney’s “Tron Legacy.” I have no reservations about expressing my unabashed excitement for this movie. The original is a childhood favorite and this new one, based on the trailer and everything else that I’ve seen, has me totally sold. Now I know there’s someone else who shares my excitement: actor Michael Sheen.

I spoke to Sheen recently about his role in the new HBO film “The Special Relationship,” which brings an end to his Tony Blair trilogy, and of course I had to ask for some info on “Tron.”

“I’ve only seen what everyone else has seen so far,” he said. “Everything I’ve said so far, in terms of giving away facts about the character and facts about the story, I’ve said everything that I’m allowed to say. So I can’t reveal anything more. They keep you on a very tight leash with stuff like this.” Fair enough. But what he can discuss is his excitement about being part of the movie, which runs pretty high.

“I’m a fan first and foremost,” he said. “That’s a big part of why I wanted to do it, because I was such a fan of the first film. I was like 11 when it came out and it just blew me away. I never thought– if someone could go up to that 11-year-old boy in the cinema, when my uncle Russell took me to see the film, and said ‘You’re going to be in the sequel to this.’ …It would just be incredible.”

Hearing Sheen go on about “Tron” from there is very endearing. He really does revert to that 11-year-old boy when talking about it and what a thrill for him it is to be involved. “I still felt like that a little bit when I walked onto the set on the first day, I still felt like that little 11-year-old boy going ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna get to be in this film!’ And the sets and there was new technology invented for the costumes and for the filming techniques… it was just amazing to be a part of it,” he gushed.

“And on top of all that to work with Jeff Bridges as well, who is one of my favorite actors of all time. So I’m just really excited about it… and to get crazy white hair, which I’ve always wanted.”

This kind of excitement is infectious, right? How much are you anticipating the release of “Tron Legacy”?

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