Michael Sheen puts his heart and body into every role, even pilingon the pounds for his latest film, writes Michael Dwyer
When the director Damien O'Donnell was casting Heartlands, his new film, he met many actors put forward to play the central character, the naive and innocent Colin, who's blithely unaware that his wife is having an affair with his darts buddy. When the illicit lovers take off for a tournament in Blackpool, the crestfallen Colin impulsively follows them on his moped.
"I'd never heard of Michael Sheen when he came in to audition for it," says O'Donnell, "and he's a very good-looking actor, so I was bit sceptical. I asked him if he would guarantee that he would put on some weight. He threw himself into the part, and after a few weeks I forgot he was Welsh. He was working in this very particular dialect, a very specific Derbyshire-Staffordshire accent that he caught perfectly. He's a technically brilliant actor, and this was his first leading role. I think he's got a long career ahead of him."
Deglamorised with excess weight and a wig of frizzy hair, Sheen catches Colin in all his open naivety, good nature and human frailty.
He had just finished working in Morocco on The Four Feathers, with Wes Bentley and Djimon Hounsou, when his agent asked him to meet O'Donnell.
"I was in really great shape at the time," Sheen recalls. "I walked into the room, looking fit and tanned, and Damien told me afterwards that his first instinct was that I was completely wrong for this part. It's nice to be told that you look too good for a part, but then I had just two months to put on all this weight.
"It was frighteningly easy to put it on and frighteningly difficult to lose it again. I started drinking pints again and eating everything on the menu. For the first few weeks, that was fine, but then I began to feel terrible, but I had to keep going. Eventually, I had to be told to stop, because the costumes wouldn't fit any more."
O'Donnell was not the only film director who had never heard of Sheen, whose film experience at the time amounted to a few supporting roles - in the 1995 Othello, in Mary Reilly and, as Robbie Ross, in Wilde. Now, at 34, Sheen appears to be everywhere. On Wed-nesday, Albert Camus's play Caligula, featuring Sheen in the title role, opened at the Donmar Warehouse in London. Yesterday, Heartlands was released in Ireland and Britain, and Sheen has four other movies finished and set for release this year. Next up are film roles playing Tony Blair and Dylan Thomas.
"The town I come from, Port Talbot, has a real tradition of acting - Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins - so acting is considered a noble thing to do there," Sheen says. "To begin with, I liked it because I got off classes to do school plays. There was a fantastic youth theatre in our area, so I was doing classical plays and modern classics by the time I was 13 or 14, and I started to take it seriously."
He went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for three years, then straight into the West End of London for his first professional role, as a Greek pianist in When She Danced, starring Vanessa Redgrave as the dancer Isadora Duncan. He was 21.
"I went from being in class one day to doing a reading with Vanessa Redgrave the next, which was scary but exhilarating. It was an amazing experience to be so close up watching her at work. She is prepared to take so many risks."
In the 1990s, Sheen quickly built his reputation as one of the most gifted stage actors of his generation, playing Romeo, Peer Gynt, Henry V and Konstantin, in The Seagull. He cites working with the director Declan Donnellan on Alfred de Musset's Don't Fool With Love as a turning point. "Just in terms of process - how you explore and develop a character - I learned so much from working with him. I use everything he taught me on that now in every part I do."
Sheen is most proud of his stage performance as Jimmy Porter, the quintessential angry young man, in John Osborne's Look Back In Anger, a role made famous on screen by Burton in 1959. "Some people asked me why I was acting in such an old warhorse of a play when I told them I was doing it," he says, "but when they saw it they said it felt as fresh as watching a new play."
His performance earned him rave reviews. "The brilliant Michael Sheen detonates like a time bomb and howls to the moon like a wounded animal," said Michael Coveney in the Observer. When Sheen played Mozart opposite David Suchet's Salieri in Amadeus on Broadway, the reviews were similarly ecstatic. "Watching the white-hot performance of Michael Sheen, you start to appreciate the derivation of the term star," wrote Ben Brantley in the New York Times.
Sheen spent the best part of two years in Amadeus, in the UK and the US. "It was a great experience to do that on Broadway," he says, "although I don't know if I want to spend two years in the same play again." He decided it was time to pursue a film career, and he landed the role in The Four Feathers, Shekhar Kapur's meandering treatment of the much-filmed A. E. W. Mason novel, which belatedly opens here next month. "It was a tough shoot, working in the desert for three months, but it was such a relief to do just anything different after playing Mozart for so long."
After Heartlands, Sheen joined Paul Walker and Frances O'Connor in Timeline, Richard Donner's blockbuster based on Michael Crichton's story about archaeologists going back in time. "I play Lord Oliver, the evil English lord who imprisons our heroes," Sheen grins.
He went on to Budapest for the science-fiction film Underworld, about a war between werewolves and vampires. "It's a bit Matrix-y," he says. "I play the dark lord of the werewolves in that one." The leading actress is Kate Beckinsale, with whom Sheen lived for seven years before breaking up with earlier this year, and they have a four-year-old daughter, Lily.
Sheen also features in Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's first film as a director, based on the Evelyn Waugh novel. "The whole of British Equity turns up in the film: Peter O'Toole, Jim Broadbent, Richard E. Grant, Simon Callow and John Mills, who must be the oldest man in the world," Sheen says.
This month, Sheen takes on the role of Tony Blair in The Deal, a Channel 4 film directed by Stephen Frears and based on the first two chapters in the book The Rivals, by the BBC journalist James Naughtie. It deals with the now legendary 1994 dinner Blair had with Gordon Brown (to be played by David Morrissey) at the trendy Granita restaurant in north London.
Sheen will be playing Blair by day and Caligula by night. "I think they're going to slowly morph into the same character - the mad emperor and the prime minister," he jokes.
"It's a fascinating idea for a film. When Blair first won his seat, he seemed to be apolitical, whereas Brown was the great traditional Labour thinker and strategist. Supposedly, they promised each other they would never stand against each other in a leadership challenge if that ever arose. The deal they apparently made was that Blair would be prime minister and Brown would be chancellor for two terms, after which Blair would step down and Brown would become prime minister."
Playing someone so well known is a bit daunting, Sheen says, "but because it's Blair and because Stephen Frears is directing, it's a very attractive challenge".
So is the prospect of playing his fellow Welshman Dylan Thomas later this year, in Marc Evans's film Caitlin, named after the poet's wife. "Marc plans to shoot the scenes with the young Dylan and Caitlin - and then I've got to go away and put loads of weight on and carry on playing Dylan as an older man. I'm never going to put weight on for another film after that. The older I get, the harder it is to get rid of it."
As if that were not enough to have on his plate, Sheen is planning to direct a Welsh historical epic next year, and he's already immersed in writing it. It's set in the mid-13th century and deals with the last native Prince of Wales, Llewellyn II. "It's just before England tookover Wales," Sheen says, "just on the cusp of that time when Llewellyn united Wales and made it into this single entity, before it was all taken away from them. The fictional part of the story deals with seven boys who were brought to Llewellyn's court at the age of five and trained to become his bodyguards. Later, they are falsely accused of plotting against him, and they have to flee into the Welsh countryside before joining up again for one final mission."
He intends to take a role in it, along with all the other talented young Welsh actors collectively dubbed the Taff Pack: Matthew Rhys, Rhys Ifans, Ioan Gruffudd, Daniel Evans, Jason Hughes. "I'm writing parts specifically for each of them," Sheen says. "It's great, because we've always wanted to work together. It should be really exciting."
Heartlands was released yesterday