Read the interview Michael has given to the Australian newspaper about the Fox production as it comes to the country by Foxtel:
In Prodigal Son, Michael Sheen plays Martin Whitly, a highly intelligent, charming and cultured medical practitioner. But he’s also a serial killer, kept under close surveillance in a prison where he is visited by profiler Malcolm Bright (Tom Payne), who comes seeking insights into a copycat killer using Whitly’s murderers as a template.
There’s an unmistakable echo in all this of The Silence of the Lambs, and not only because Sheen is, like Anthony Hopkins, who played Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 film, so proudly Welsh.
“One of the useful things about this story is that it touches tropes and little motifs from other shows and stories in the genre,” says Sheen, speaking via Zoom from his home in Port Talbot, Wales, where he is spending – and largely enjoying – lockdown with his partner and young child.
“Obviously, the relationship between Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and Lecter is a reference point, and it means you can move quite quickly because the audience has a sort of shorthand with you. But there’s a big difference in that Martin and Malcolm are father and son, so there’s the family bond that takes it into a whole other area.”
Originally planned as a 22-episode arc, season one of Prodigal Son is now, thanks to COVID-19, a 20-parter. But it doesn’t finish two episodes shy of where it was meant to, an entirely fluky by-product of the fact Sheen is in hot demand on both sides of the Atlantic.
The 51-year-old star of such diverse offerings as The Queen, Frost/Nixon and The Damned United on the big screen and Masters of Sex and Good Omens on the small had another project booked in the UK, and needed to leave the Prodigal Son shoot early. “So, in order to accommodate that, the producers said, ‘right, we’ll skip over a couple of episodes [in the shooting schedule] and go straight to the finale so that once you film that, you can leave’,” he explains.
The intention was to shoot the other episodes without him but, the week after he left, the industry began to shut down. “So then what they had to do was very cleverly film a few little bits so we could get to the finale,” he says. “Those build-up episodes had to be abridged a bit, but the finale itself was shot as it was supposed to be.”
Compared to so many other shows, they got off lightly. There are some series, Sheen notes, that were in their final seasons and simply had to stop short, presumably forever. “They just did not end,” he says, “which is very unsatisfying for the people working on them, and for the audiences as well.”
That thing he was meant to shoot in the UK? Well, that didn’t happen either. Not that he was too stressed. Despite his seeming ubiquity, Sheen insists he is not at all hungry to work.
“People assume I like to be doing things. I don’t. I hate being busy. I like to lie and watch TV all the time. It’s just I don’t get to do that,” he says. “If left to my own devices I would do literally nothing, but I kind of guard against that by pushing myself to say yes to things.”
Among the things he’s agreed to do recently is Staged, a six-part series he made for the BBC with his Good Omens co-star David Tennant.
“David got in touch and said, ‘Look, I’ve been approached about doing something like this and would you be up for it?’ And essentially we both felt the same way, which was that if each of us wanted to do it, then the other would do it. Because we liked the idea of being able to do something together again. I think both of us were a little wary of how much time it would cut into our domestic lives. So we did the first episode just as an experiment, and to see whether we enjoyed it and whether it worked. And then, on the basis of that, we were like, ‘yeah, sure, let’s keep doing more’.”
That fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach was possible because Staged is a low-production-value lockdown show made, he says, “using just a laptop and a phone”. There’s something liberating about that compared to the big machine that is a studio production but he’s not convinced it’s anything more than a novelty born of necessity.
“I think there’s a limit to how much people can watch stuff that looks like this,” he says. “There’s a tolerance level for that kind of thing.”
Prodigal Son, though, has clearly been made with the intention of a very long life. For a young actor just starting out, that’s an enticing prospect. But for Sheen, a man who has never been more in demand, it was more important to make sure the role didn’t become a millstone.
With the producers, he struck a deal that allowed him a fair degree of flexibility. “I had to guarantee a certain minimum number of episodes, but beyond that, I could be in and out of it as much as I want. But of course, once you start working on it, your natural actor’s instinct is, ‘I don’t want to come in and out, I want to be in it as much as possible’.”
Like many of Sheen’s roles – especially in America – Martin is what you might call a big character.
“I’m always interested in characters that have a performative aspect to them, characters that are on the edge of what people might believe,” he says. “The challenge of taking someone who is naturally larger than life, but to play that character in a way that feels very real and grounded at the same time – I find that quite exciting.”
You can see that in Good Omens, in which his angel Aziraphale bumbles his way through the end times. And you can especially see it in The Good Fight, in which his lawyer Roland Blum is a man of voracious appetites and dubious morality.
“He’s an absolutely despicable man, and yet there’s something about him, he’s so roguish and id-like that you can’t help but be drawn to him,” he says.
Martin Whitly is similar, “in that he’s a monster, he’s terrible, and yet it’s a great time when you’re with him.
“There’s a sort of spontaneity to those characters, and an ability to pull the rug out from under the audience at any moment as well,” he adds. “I find that really interesting.”