Posts Tagged ‘Breaking Dawn’

Article from FilmCritic.com 6 June 2011

In Shawn Ku’s Beautiful Boy, a married couple learns of a violent school shooting at their only child’s college campus. The twist? Their son turns out to have been the shooter, and has taken his own life at the conclusion of the bloody melee. Maria Bello and Michael Sheen, who play the emotionally devastated parents, called FilmCritic.com to talk about what draws them to a script, how parenthood changes an actor’s perspective, and the next round of The Twilight Saga.

Q: This is the first time I’ve ever interviewed an actor who has played an O’Connell onscreen.

Maria Bello: When did I play an O’Connell?

Q: You played Evelyn O’Connell in the third Mummy movie, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

Article from LA Times 4 June 2011

These days, Michael Sheen seems likely to turn up anywhere — and everywhere.

The actor who gained attention and acclaim with a string of roles drawn from real-life characters in films such as The Queen, Frost/Nixon and The Damned United also has demonstrated a fondness for turning more commercial films on their heads — delivering joyously odd performances in vampire franchises such as Underworld and Twilight and sci-fi outings such as Tron: Legacy.

“I suppose it reflects my taste as an audience member,” said Sheen, 42, regarding his seemingly unlikely range of roles. “I’m as likely when I’m deciding what film I want to watch to go to the small art-house cinema as I am to go to the big multiplex. And I don’t see why my acting career shouldn’t reflect my taste as well. I do things that I would like to go see ultimately. They’re all things that I’d like to watch myself, and therefore I should like to be in them.”

Sheen’s latest round of projects is particularly eclectic. He had a recurring role on the sitcom “30 Rock” as Wesley Snipes, a mismatched love interest to Tina Fey . In April, he appeared in a 72-hour-long performance of “The Passion” in the small town in Wales where he grew up. And Sheen appears as a blowhard academic in Woody Allen’s new “Midnight in Paris,” turning in a bone-dry comedic performance as a know-it-all intellectual and romantic rival to Owen Wilson’s unmoored Gil.

“He’s a stock character in Woody’s films, someone who the Woody Allen character can feel both superior to and inferior to and complain about,” said Sheen, who’s been making a cameo appearance in the gossip pages thanks to his relationship with his “Midnight” costar Rachel McAdams. “If I’d ever thought about doing a Woody Allen film, I would have thought it would be in New York, not Paris. It was a surprising experience in a lot of ways.”

Then there is his powerful turn in “Beautiful Boy,” which opened in limited release on Friday after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival last year.

As Bill, the father of a college student who died committing a bloody campus shooting, Sheen, alongside Maria Bello as his wife, Kate, cycles through all the conflicting feelings and self-criminations one might expect from the emotional aftershocks of such a devastating event.

Like Lynne Ramsay’s upcoming “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” about a mother coping with the devastating consequences of a son’s violent, lethal outburst, “Beautiful Boy” tackles a hot-button subject matter. But for first-time feature writer-director Shawn Ku, the story was principally a portrait of a marriage in decline, watching two people forcefully thrown together at the very point they are most distant from one another.

“Initially we set out to write a story about a relationship, with two people who didn’t know each other as well as they thought they did,” Ku explained of the process with his co-writer Michael Armbruster. “And from that we came to this idea of having them be parents of a campus shooter. We’d never seen that before, even in press coverage. We tend to vilify these people when those things happen, so they’re not open. The Columbine kids, those parents didn’t speak for more than a decade.”

While the film touches on events with real-world echoes, Sheen said he didn’t prepare in the same way he did for his turns as Prime Minister Tony Blair in “The Queen” or TV personality David Frost in “Frost/Nixon.”

“There’s always something you can research, and I can do this as much as anyone, but you can start to do research for the sake of doing research. Almost for the sake of being able to say, ‘yes I did research’ in interviews to make you sound like a proper actor,” he said. “But sometimes it’s just not appropriate. It felt in a way that it would be more useful not to know anything because they have no idea what to do. They’re lost.”

“Beautiful Boy” was shot in just 18 days in late 2009 — “Basically Michael and I had to pay them in order to be in this movie,” joked Bello — and Ku acknowledged the difficulty of the low-budget production.

He mentioned that Sheen had to shoot one of his most emotional scenes, a poignant voicemail message Bill leaves on the phone of his dead son, in a rush at the tail end of Sheen’s first day of filming.

The production schedule also didn’t give Sheen and Bello much rehearsal time to build up the small shorthands that make them seem so much like an authentic couple in the film.

“We didn’t have a lot of time, but we got a lot done in that time,” said Sheen of his working relationship with Bello.

“It is rare, even when you connect with another actor, to have such a level of trust as we had. Because of what we worked on before shooting, talked about with Shawn, we were very honest with each other about our relationships and our own experiences and that connected us, I think. I’ve never felt more comfortable with another actor.”

Sheen and Bello determined that in the series of scenes featuring just the two of them together, each actor would always be at some differing point on the emotional scale in an effort to make the film more than just a one-note chamber piece on grieving.

“I read this book on grief beforehand because I had heard that the grief process when someone loses a child takes years,” Bello said. “Here we have to fit it into two weeks [of on-screen time] and go through grief, rage, denial, all the levels. Michael and I wanted to be sure we weren’t playing the same emotion at the same time in the same scene. So when he was in anger I was in denial, or I was in sadness when he was in rage. It was interesting to figure out how to get all these levels in there so you’re not just playing shock.”

Although his performance in “Beautiful Boy” shows off Sheen’s dramatic skills, it is his versatility that might be most notable about his work overall. In “Tron: Legacy,” for example, Sheen turned a small role as a duplicitous nightclub owner into a spectacular piece of showmanship that was purposefully drawn from David Bowie at his most chameleonic.

“All these things get put together and out of it comes this weird thing,” said Sheen of the self-aware playfulness he tends to bring to his roles in bigger-budget films. “And until someone says, ‘No, stop it,’ I’m just going to keep going. It was the same with Aro in ‘Twilight.’ There’s this character who is ultimately completely insane who was driven mad by being immortal and plays games with himself.”

He’ll reprise the role of the menacing vampire leader later this year with the release of the first installment in the franchise’s two-part finale “Breaking Dawn,” and Sheen noted that the majority of his time on the shoot was spent on a single battle sequence, which should promise to be a showstopper.

“People talk about the characters being camp, but there’s just a sense of self-conscious theatricality about them because they are playing games,” he said. “There’s a sense of joy there but also an anger and darkness as well.”

There is also a lovely new image attached to this article. A copy of which has been added to the Gallery.

Article from Collider.com 2 June 2011

Beautiful Boy is the story of how tragedy effects a family and all those around them, in every way. A married couple on the verge of separation suddenly find themselves having to turn to each other to overcome unimaginable heartbreak. Under intense media scrutiny following their son’s shocking act of violence that changes the lives of so many, Bill (Michael Sheen) and Kate (Maria Bello) see a chance for happiness again through their common grief.

At the film’s press day, actor Michael Sheen talked exclusively to Collider about baring himself emotionally for this role, playing the emotion of grief in such a naturalistic way, working with a director who established such an honest and collaborative set, and just being open and present in the moment. He also talked about why he loves playing Aro in The Twilight Saga, how he loves playing as many different characters, in as many different worlds as he possibly can, and why he wants to take on Hamlet next.

Throughout your career, your roles have been so varied and diverse. Is that something you’ve done intentionally?

MICHAEL SHEEN: What’s enjoyable for me, as an actor, is to do as many different things as possible. It challenges me, as an actor. You don’t want to get into doing the same thing, over and over again. I know I don’t. I’ve worked quite hard to give myself those options, I suppose. In terms of building a career and having longevity, that’s good. But, in terms of being more instantly recognizable and branding yourself in some way, that’s not so good. But, I enjoy it all, so that’s good.

In taking on a role like this, where you have to bare yourself emotionally, did you spend any time thinking about what kind of effects an event like this has on somebody?

SHEEN: Yeah, you do. It’s a combination of things. I found with this that the more that me and Maria immersed ourselves in the lives of these people previously, and the more we knew about what their experiences had been together and the journey that the relationship had gone on, up to the point where we meet them in the film, the more we could be in their lives then. Then, it’s about allowing yourself to be affected by what happens in the story, and not try to pre-judge what you’re going to do. You just have to allow things to happen. Part of their story is that they have no road map. They don’t know how to be. They don’t know what they’re supposed to do, or even what they’re supposed to feel about this situation.

Having too much foreknowledge, on our part, would have gotten in the way a little bit, so the most important thing was just to know who these people were and know how they worked and what their dynamic was with each other and what the things were that pressed each other’s buttons. And then, we had to go on the journey for real and see what happened. It’s a mixture of doing preparation and research and being appropriate about what that research is, and then allowing things to happen and trusting that the way you will react will be true to these people and this situation, rather than doing too much work and deciding how they will react ahead of time. It’s more about knowing who they are, and then see what happens in the situation.

Was it surprising to you that audiences never really get to see the events that this couple’s son caused, or was that the appeal of it for you?

SHEEN: Well, in a way, it’s not what the film is about. The film is about whether it’s possible for two people to overcome the huge obstacles that have grown up between them. Ultimately, that’s what the film is about. Even though the more headline aspect of the film is the school shooting, it’s not, in any way, a film about a school shooting. That’s the event that is the catalyst in the film, but the film is not interested in saying, “This is why it happened, and this is how it happened.” It’s a film about two people who have some sort of unanswerable thing that happens in their life and some terrible loss and a very interrupted grieving process.

On the one hand, they’ve lost someone that they love dearly, but that person did something incredibly destructive. There’s something that is impossible to deal with in isolation, that they have to deal with together, and yet it’s a relationship that has already come to an end, it seems, at the beginning of the film. And, through getting their hands dirty with the ultimate stuff of life, they somehow find their way back to each other again, at the end. I think that’s what the film is about. The aspect of the film that’s about who’s to blame and how their son ended up doing this, is a red herring in the film, in some ways. In Hitchcock, they called it a MacGuffin. It’s what allows the action to take place, but it’s not actually what the film is about.

That’s why I think it’s ultimately a very hopeful, positive film. It doesn’t shirk away from the difficult stuff of relationships, when you think, “If only that person stopped doing that. It’s them, who’s at fault. The only reason I’ve stayed in this relationship is because of him.” We mythologize relationships and ourselves, but through this film, they’re somehow able to blow all that out and miraculously get rid of all the lies they’ve told themselves and the stories they’ve made. That’s what was getting in the way. They somehow then are able to find their way back to each other. We end the film in an incredibly hopeful, positive place. It doesn’t seem positive because they’re crying and they’re all over the place, but from an objective point of view, it says that there is hope. You can overcome this stuff. No matter how difficult things are, and no matter how much grief and loss there is, you can turn it into something positive. There are positive things to come after that.

How was Shawn Ku to work with, as a director?

SHEEN: He did what I’ve always responded to the most really, with directors. It was similar with Stephen Frears, who I did The Queen and The Deal with. He starts the right conversations and gets you talking about the things that are very usual areas to talk about, and he beds you into the subject matter and gets you to connect it to your own life. Shawn was very honest about his life and his relationships, and encouraged us to be the same way, and then you’re looking out from inside these characters and their lives, rather than looking at them from outside. You’re suddenly connected with them.

He creates that sort of set. There’s a real feeling of honesty and sharing, and that creates a bond between you. And then, he just allowed us the freedom and was very respectful of what we were doing. He didn’t want to impose on anything. He created a way of working where the camera would just catch things, rather than regular set-ups. He just totally respected what we were doing, allowed us to work and allowed us to just be and inhabit these lives, and then he was there, almost like a documentarian, to capture what he captured. That was a very, very creative and exhilarating way of working.

You had some really beautiful moments in the film with Meat Loaf. What was he like to work with?

SHEEN: He was fantastic. I was blown away by how vulnerable he was and how emotionally receptive he was. I had never met Meat Loaf before, but you think of this big, operatic, theatrical energy that he has. He came in and he was just so humble and sensitive. I’ve seen him in Fight Club and various things, and have always been impressed by what he’s done on film, but there was a real sensitivity to what he was doing. The scene that we did, where Bill opens up to him a bit about what happened, and that phone call the night before, it was a really nicely written scene anyway, but there was a real sensitivity that he had, that really helped me in that scene. It reminded me that it doesn’t matter who’s got the lines in a scene. No matter what happens in a scene, listening is an active thing. There was just a quality that he brought to what he was doing that really affected me. I really enjoyed working with him.

Being a parent, what was it like to put yourself in the skin of somebody going through what these parents go through? Do you draw on your own emotions, or is that a dangerous thing to do, in this case?

SHEEN: That’s a good question because it goes to the heart of a fundamental problem for actors and acting. If you draw on your own experiences, certainly when it comes to being a parent, and you have to imagine your child dying, the danger is that you’ll get to the end of the day and go, “It’s not working for me anymore. I’m thinking about the death of my own child, and that’s not really doing it because I’ve gotten too used to thinking about it.” There’s a cost to that, as a person, to have to imagine the death of your own child. That’s not an area you really want to go into. And yet, at the same time, you’ve got to deal with it because otherwise it’s just acting and then it’s meaningless.

It’s a tricky area. Rather than having to try to dredge it out all the time, on your own. If you’re doing something where there’s a lot of scenes between just two actors and, for whatever reason, it’s not really happening and you’re not really connecting that well, you have to draw on stuff yourself and try to make it happen for yourself. But, in the case of two actors connecting with each other and trusting each other, our bodies have memories without us having to consciously think about it, so rather than think, “Oh, I must think about my daughter dying,” you just let that go and trust that you have all the emotions you need in there, and by losing yourself in the scene, that stuff kicks in without having to spend the day thinking about horrific things happening to your own child. And, it’s about how much the director allows you to do that, as well. If you’ve got a director who keeps jumping in and going, “Could you not do that? Could you do this?,” it stops that process from happening. On this, it felt like we were given just the right amount of freedom and the right amount of guidance.

Did you talk to any parents who have had experiences similar to this?

SHEEN: Obviously, this film is about a very specific set of parents. It’s the parents of the person who perpetrates the act. Even though any parents who are going through dealing with the loss of a child have certain things that are the same about that experience, there are a lot of very big differences for the parent of the child who did it. Personally, I felt very uncomfortable about the idea of trying to get in touch with the parents of someone who had gone through a similar experience. I asked myself, “What do I stand to gain, and is that worth what could possibly be lost?” Ultimately, I felt like our characters have no idea what they’re supposed to feel and no idea what the rules are. That’s part of their difficulty. I thought that feeling of not quite knowing what the rules are would be quite useful, rather than talking to someone and going, “Now, I know what happens.”

Did you carry this home with you every night, or were you able to leave these emotions on set?

SHEEN: In a way, you have to do all the work beforehand. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is. When you come to actually act, it’s a game. It may be a very serious game, but it’s still a game. If you lose that sense of play, the work suffers. The danger can be when you have a very heavy subject matter because you then feel like you have to come at it in a very heavy way and it just dies somehow. It’s just not quite right. It doesn’t live. In order for it to be alive, when you’re doing it, you have to approach it as play. So, that is about being in the right place and the right state of mind.

I just try to stay present and open, in between takes. We would chat. We never lost sight of what it was we were trying to do and the seriousness of it, but the biggest, heaviest things that actors work on are actually sometimes the most enjoyable experiences, and I certainly felt that on this. There was an exhilaration. It’s not often that you’re in a situation where you go, “I totally trust this person. I totally feel at ease with this person. I feel at ease in this situation. There’s no other agenda and there’s no ego. All we’re doing is wanting to do the best we can on this. It matters to us and we care about it, and nothing else is getting in the way.” That’s quite exhilarating, and there’s a joy to that. That’s really important. You don’t want to mess that up by going, “But, I mustn’t enjoy this to much because it’s all very heavy and serious.”

The emotion of grief is something that’s not often played in such a naturalistic way. Was it important for you to be real with that?

SHEEN: We see death constantly on film. In the back of your mind, spend a day going, “Let me see how many times I see people die today.” You will see hundreds upon hundreds of people die. And then, ask yourself how much you actually see the grief process, and the consequences and ramifications of death being played out in front of you, and it’s not much. There is something wrong there. 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.

As uncomfortable as it is and as uncommercial as it may be, as a society, it’s really important that we look at that and we look at the reality of it, given that we surround ourselves with the fantasy of it, constantly. 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. It’s scary. In a way, this is an extreme version of what happens to everybody, when they actually experience death, in some way where you suddenly feel alone and you feel like there are still people walking around in the street outside. You’re going through the worst experience of your life, and the world is carrying on. There is the awfulness of that and the feeling of, “I don’t know what to do. Where is the rule book for how you deal with this stuff?” Not everybody has to deal with a child having done something that they’ve done, but everyone has to go through that, and that’s frightening. So, I think it’s really important that we look at this kind of stuff.

Your character in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn is seen as the villain, but he’s really much more complicated, sinister and self-serving than that. How do you perceive that character?

SHEEN: Well, what I love about that character is that I think he’s totally insane. Immortality – living forever – has driven him completely insane, or certainly into an area of sanity that is not really accessible to most people, and yet, part of his insanity is that he thinks that he’s a sentimental, little old lady. He thinks he’s this cuddly grandmother, somehow. In a way, he keeps himself interested in life and people around him by playing this weird game with himself where he role plays and it amuses him to think of himself as being someone who just enjoys watching young people enjoying themselves. He’s like, “Oh, it’s so lovely. I cry at romantic films.” There’s that kind of persona that he has, when actually he just wants to kill people and eat them. It’s this weird game that he plays. So, I love that. There are a lot of places to explore with that. Underneath it is this insane animal, but on the surface is this very sophisticated, cultured, sentimental character. I just think he’s great. I love it!

Do you feel like he always has a personal agenda and that he doesn’t do anything unless it’s self-serving?

SHEEN: Yeah. He’s incredibly intelligent. The viewpoint that he has is from someone who has been alive for centuries upon centuries, and so he sees things in a very different way. He’s a great chess player, in that respect. He’s lots of moves ahead of everyone. It’s all a game that he plays and enjoys. He’s a fascinating character.

Because there’s not a lot of information on Aro, did you get any tips from Stephenie Meyer about playing him?

SHEEN: I took what Stephenie had written, and there was enough there to get my imagination going. There were enough things there to explore. And then, I wanted someone to tell me, “Actually, no, that’s not an area that’s appropriate for this character,” but on the whole, until that happened, I just kept going. Stephenie was always very supportive. I really enjoyed just letting it go and develop, and go further. Thankfully, no one told me to stop.

How fun is it for you to play these fantastical character and be a part of these big franchises, like The Twilight Saga and the Underworld films, or even something like Tron: Legacy, and then switch into playing real-life people?

SHEEN: What it is on the surface is just set dressing. They’re all stories about how we relate to each other, and what it is that resonates about these people’s lives and their journeys, and what’s going on for them. They’re not that dissimilar, under the surface. They just seem very different, on the surface. 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. That’s the great power of science fiction and fantasy. It purports to tell you stories about other worlds and other lives, but actually it’s about our world and our life. It’s just a different way of looking at it. So, I love being able to play as many different characters, in as many different worlds as I possibly can. That’s what I really enjoy.

Why take on Hamlet next?

SHEEN: Well, it’s a play that I’ve been asked to do a few times, and the circumstances, for whatever reason, weren’t quite right. It’s one of the greatest plays ever written. It’s one of the biggest challenges for an actor. I started working with a director (Ian Rickson) who I really liked and who I thought would be a good director for that project, and found the right theater (Young Vic), so I thought, “Well, I should probably do it now, before I get too old.” So, we’re going to have a go at it.

Empire Magazine have published a teaser poster for Breaking Dawn. There isnt a lot going on, but then as Empire rightly point out, none of the posters have been all that imaginative.

Michael Sheen revises his role as Volturi vampire leader, Aro, in Breaking Dawn which is due to be released November 18.

A copy has been added to the project page, and also to the Breaking Dawn Gallery. You can see a larger version by clicking on the thumbnail below.

Article from Collider.com 19 May 2011

In the romantic comedy Midnight in Paris, from writer/director Woody Allen, actor Michael Sheen plays Paul, an intellectual visiting Paris with his wife (Nina Arianda), while he lectures at the Sorbonne. At the same time, Inez (Rachel McAdams) is there with her fiancé Gil (Owen Wilson), who is taking time away from his successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter to pursue his aspirations to be a serious novelist, much to her dismay. When Inez unexpectedly runs into Paul, who she has had a crush on since college, she immediately finds him as charming as he is cerebral, while Gil finds him to be an insufferable know-it-all that he can’t stand to be around. As Gil is increasingly absent to focus on his writing, Paul and Inez find themselves growing increasingly closer.

At the film’s press day, Michael Sheen talked about how much he enjoyed working with Woody Allen, how amazing it was to have some of the film’s Paris locations all to themselves, how much fun his character was to play, and how he thought Owen Wilson found a really good balance between having the angst, anxiety and neurosis of a Woody Allen character. He also talked about what’s in store for his character Aro in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, and said that the talk of him doing Dark Shadows was a bit premature. Check out what he had to say after the jump:

Question: How was it to work with Woody Allen?

MICHAEL SHEEN: It was fantastic. He’s a director who has a lot of mystic, and myth and legend, and stories that surround him. Some of them are true, and some of them are not. I had been led to believe that he’s quite hands-off with the actors and lets the actors do whatever they want, but actually he was very hands-on with the actors, in my experience. His notes were really incisive and useful and helpful. I learned a lot from working with him, with the notes that he gave, so that was surprising. He’s very funny. He’s got a very dry, wry sense of humor. Now that he’s a bit older, he’s almost like a silent movie star, like Buster Keaton. He has a face that seems both funny and sad, at the same time. He always made me laugh. He’s obviously had a love affair with Paris and France for a long time, and this was an opportunity to write his love letter to the city, so to see him in the city and enjoying it so much was wonderful.

Since he’s known for not communicating with his actors, were you surprised that he did communicate with you?

SHEEN: I wasn’t aware of him not communicating. Maybe I just needed more direction than other people, but I found him very fascinating. The way he works with the actors, he just keeps wanting you to be simpler all the time, and not to try to do too much. He’s very un-modern, in a sense. He’s not interested in mining subtext and what’s actually going on underneath the surface. He wants you to play the surface, as much as possible. He wants you to constantly be reacting to what the other person is saying. He’s not interested in you improvising. He just wants you to literally go, “Oh, really? Yeah. Uh huh.” It’s quite liberating to do that and not have to worry about the inner life of the character and the subtext, and all of that. You just play the surface, and the story reveals itself. Maybe it’s the writer in him, that the thing that reveals story is writing, not acting.

What was it like to shoot in Paris?

SHEEN: It was amazing to be standing there in front of Monet’s “Water Lily” paintings. When I’ve been there before, you can barely see them because there’s so many people in the room, but it was just me, Rachel [McAdams], Owen [Wilson] and Nina [Arianda], standing there with the film crew up the other end. To have that room just to yourself is a huge privilege. You never get to do that. And then, a few days later, we were standing in front of the actual water lilies themselves that he painted. We went out to Giverny and stood on the Japanese bridge, just looking at those water lilies, and that was amazing, to keep turning up to these locations. My first scene was with Carla [Bruni], standing and looking at The Thinker in Rodin’s garden. You just can’t quite believe that you’re getting this access. It certainly wasn’t like work. It was wonderful to have that kind of access, be in these extraordinary places and have them all to yourself. We went to the Palace of Versailles and myself, Rachel and Nina were given a tour and we were shown secret corridors that Marie Antoinette had to get to her bedroom. It was just amazing to see it like that, and with such a fantastic group of people as well. The company was just wonderful. We would go out for dinners every night and go walking around the city at nighttime, singing and dancing and laughing. It was just great. For a city that is so sensual and full of romance, to be with a group of people that actually enjoyed that was the real joy of it. Rather than going back to your trailer or back to your hotel, and keeping yourself to yourself, there was a real feeling of being a company, which I think is part of a Woody Allen film experience that you don’t get with other films sometimes.

What was it like to work with Carla Bruni, the First Lady of France?

SHEEN: She was charming and wonderful. You get to spend a lot of downtime on a film set, so you end up chatting with the other actors, and it was extraordinary to be talking to the First Lady of France, in between takes. I think she’d just been on a state visit to China, so she was telling me about the places she’d seen. She’s also a singer/songwriter, so she’s an artist, a performer and this First Lady. It was extraordinary, being able to chat with her in between shooting. She was such a lovely host. She’s just wonderful, and I think she’s very good in the film.

Did you have to audition for this film?

SHEEN: It wasn’t an audition, so to speak. I think Woody likes to actually meet the person in the flesh, if he hasn’t met them before, before he casts them. So, I went to meet him. I was filming 30 Rock in New York, at the time, so I popped over to see him. And then, he just offered me the part, so that was great.

What did you like about this character?

SHEEN: I remember Woody wrote me a card and said, “This is the ultimate pedant. I think you could have fun with him.” I like to describe him as someone who’s very generous with the sharing of his knowledge. He thinks he knows a lot about everything, and he’s very happy to let you know that. Unfortunately, I didn’t have to scratch too far beneath the surface of myself to find my inner know-it-all and release it for the film. It was great to be able to play someone who’s just absolutely got no sense that he’s overstepping the mark or that he’s being a bore. It was good fun.

How much of Woody Allen is in Owen Wilson’s performance in the film?

SHEEN: I remember when we were doing Frost/Nixon, I was talking to Rebecca Hall about Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and she felt like she was Woody in that film. And, Ken Branagh played Woody (in Celebrity). Everyone who plays the main part in this kind of film, in some way, is playing an aspect of Woody. I thought Owen found a really good balance between having the kind of angst and anxiety and neurosis of a Woody character. At the same time, Owen has such a laid-back quality about him that I thought he had a really good mixture of that in it. He’s someone who you’re quite happy to go on a journey with, through the film, which he’s got to be. He’s very funny as well, and still scathing of people while seeming very likeable. Of all the people who have played Woody, I thought he was one of the most successful, in that respect.

What era would you like to go back to?

SHEEN: Well, there are many, many periods that I would go back to. I’d like to go back in a bubble of modern life as well ‘cause I wouldn’t like to die of some plague or something. But, it would be very exciting to go back to the Elizabethan era, to be around for the opening night of Hamlet. That would be great. And, there was all the intrigue of what was going on with the Secret Service in Elizabethan society and the Court of Elizabeth. But, I’d also love to be in Los Angeles in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s for the music scene and the hippie movement. 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. I’d love to go back to Greek times and see the birth of theater and performing, in that time. It would be so extraordinary to see the need that theater came out of, in the first place. I think we could probably all learn a bit from that. I’d have my work cut out. If there was time travel, I wouldn’t have time to do all the traveling I’d want to do.

Do you think this is a very un-Woody Allen film?

SHEEN: I was struck by similarities to other films, like Manhattan. The beginning of the film is almost exactly the same as Manhattan, but Paris rather than New York. There was a feeling of Zelig about it, with the idea of going through the screen and being part of the world of the film. There was a feeling of a few films that I’ve seen him do, but in some ways, it’s the most romantic of his films. It’s the most unbridled, romantic film, not just in terms of the love aspect of the romance, but the true romance of a love for the past and a love for a period of time. It’s such a romantic notion, the idea of all these artists being together and sharing their lives together. It’s the most romantic of his films, in that respect, and maybe a very personal film for that reason as well.

What can you say about what you’ll be doing in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn?

SHEEN: It’s the same part that I played before – Aro.

Was there anything you got to discover in playing him this time around, that you hadn’t learned the last time you played him?

SHEEN: He’s more of a presence in these films than he was in New Moon, so I got to explore the character a bit more and probably fleshed it out a bit more. I don’t think that there’s anything that I learned. I just was able to go into the insanity of the character a bit more. I got to show what’s under the surface a bit more this time, which was fun.

How was Bill Condon to work with, as a director?

SHEEN: Bill was wonderful. He was terrific. He’s a very, very friendly, warm person. He obviously has a very varied and interesting body of work, and brought that to bear. He made everyone feel very comfortable. It must be quite hard, coming onto a film where people have already been together for a long time. Each film is a different director and you think, “What’s this one going to be like?” But, everyone really warmed to him and thought he was terrific. I think he did a really good job. It was a huge organizational thing. We had something like 40 new characters being introduced in this film, and the big battle scene took about four or five weeks to film. It was a huge undertaking, and he handled it brilliantly.

When a new director comes on and you already know the characters from having done previous films, do you feel like you know the characters more than the director, or does each director really bring something new out of you?

SHEEN: Personally, I was only on New Moon for two weeks, so it’s not like I got used to it. But, for the other actors, there’s probably a wariness about, “Is this person going to come along and not really get what it is we’re doing, or are they going to try to change it too much?” For a director coming on board, I would imagine there’s the pressure of wanting to make your mark and be different to what other people have done, but at the same time, not wanting to go against the flow of the whole series. I would imagine it’s quite a difficult balance to strike, but everyone seemed very happy on it and seemed to enjoy working with Bill.

What are you going to be doing in Dark Shadows?

SHEEN: I’m not in Dark Shadows.

Was that just misinformation?

SHEEN: No, it was something that got talked about, but it’s not happening. It was a bit premature.

Have you recently completed any other projects, or are you going to be starting anything soon?

SHEEN: I’ve been working on a project for two years, that I just did over Easter, called The Passion of Port Talbot, which is my hometown. I did a non-stop, 72-hour performance of a modern-day version of The Passion of Christ, that took place in locations all over the town. I worked with the community of the town, so we had thousands of local people involved in it. It began at dawn on Good Friday morning, with 300 people watching the baptism of this character, and ended with 12,000 people and being crucified on the Sunday night. I played a character based on the character of Jesus, but not Jesus. It was a modern, contemporary story set in my hometown.

What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

SHEEN: I don’t know if it’s the best advice, but it’s something that has stuck with me. Someone once said, “Never, ever do anything, ever,” which I haven’t stuck to. I remember someone else said to me, “Never stand up when you can sit down, never sit down when you can lie down, never lie down when you can be asleep.” Those are bits of advice that I haven’t taken, really. I’ve done the opposite of them, but they have stayed with me.

Michael Sheen spoke to Collider, as part of his promotion of Midnight In Paris. This interview is to be published at a later date, but they took the opportunity to ask him about Breaking Dawn and about playing Aro once again.

He’s more of a presence in these films than he was in New Moon, so I got to explore the character a bit more and probably fleshed it out a bit more. I don’t think that there’s anything that I learned. I just was able to go into the insanity of the character a bit more. I got to show what’s under the surface a bit more this time, which was fun.

He was also asked again about Dark Shadows. When asked if he was doing it he replied

I’m not in Dark Shadows. It was something that got talked about, but it’s not happening. It was a bit premature.

As I said earlier, the rumour was around for several weeks before being confirmed by Michael himself. It seems that he did that a wee bit prematurely. Oh well. It would have been great. I wonder what he is going to do instead?

You can read the full Collider interview HERE.