Michael Sheen visited the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky on Virgin Radio UK to promote Last Train To Christmas and talk about being a not-for-profit actor. Click here to find out how to listen to the full interview on Virgin Radio app.
Read below some of his quotes:
The Last Train To Christmas, which is available to watch on Sky Cinema from this Saturday (18th December), sees Michael’s character board a somewhat strange train that sends him forwards and backwards in time to various stages of his life when he changes carriages. He told Chris: “I play Tony Towers, who is one of the leading figures on the East-Midlands nightclub scene of the 80s!
“He’s larger than life, he’s on the train on Christmas Eve. That last train, to get from London to Nottingham, on Christmas Eve, and he finds himself thrown into a situation, we all know what it’s like, you move forward a carriage, you move forward ten years in your life. You move back a carriage, you move backwards ten years in your life. We’ve all been there! We’ve all done it!
“It goes from the 40s, all the way up to 2015, so you see him as a little boy, and you see him as an old man at times. So, you see the scope of this man’s life.”
Michael recently declared himself a ‘non-for-profit’ actor and announced he will be donating most of his earnings to social causes. He explained to Chris that it all started because of the Homeless World Cup: “I brought it to Cardiff. I wanted it to come to Wales because I’d been involved with it a few times and I’d seen it in different places and I thought, this is something that is transformational for people, potentially. People who have experienced homelessness, social exclusion, come and play for their country, put the shirt on for their country, and suddenly there’s no stigma. They’re not homeless people, they’re people playing for their country.
“With a few weeks to go, [it’s a] long story, but the money disappeared. And so it was either, walk away from it and say to all these people who are coming from all over the world, ‘You’re not going to have this experience,’ or I had to do something, so I gave everything I had to it. The house I used to live in in America, which I hadn’t sold yet, the house I’d bought in Wales, I sold them both, you know, remortgaged them, put all that money in, put every bit of money that was in my bank account in to keep us going, and just to get through it, and thinking, ‘Well, I’ll be able to earn it back, hopefully’, so that’s what I’m doing.
“Doing that changed my life, because it made me realise that I could do that. I’m in a lucky position where I’m earning good money. I know that won’t always be the case, and whilst I am, I thought, ‘Well, I should go a bit further then. I’m not in ruins, you know? I can do this.’”
Michael has since set up scholarships and bursaries for Welsh students who come from financially-challenged backgrounds to go to Jesus College in Oxford and to drama schools around the UK, as well as setting up individually-tailored budgets for people experiencing homelessness, “so they don’t have to tick boxes around what they do, and that can be transformative.”
The star actor explained: “You see how people live in very different ways, just because of the geographical coincidence of where they were born. I feel like, well, people who come from where I come from, should have the same opportunities as anyone else.”