Read below an interview Michael Sheen has given to Australian paper The Saturday Paper, in which he discusses Amadeus and revisits his career:

Right at this moment, the Welsh actor Michael Sheen is in Sydney to rehearse Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus for the Opera House. He plays the composer Antonio Salieri. “I’ve never rehearsed somewhere so beautiful before,” Sheen says. “Coming in every day and seeing the sunshine sparkling on the water.”

In this moment, he says, “You’ve got the character and you’ve got you. You adjust the levels of certain things within you to try and meet the character. Because our raw materials as actors are just our own experiences, otherwise you’d just be on the outside of the character. If you want to be in the character, you have to connect with them.”

Early 1980s: West Glamorgan Youth Theatre Company in Swansea, Wales. Sheen’s first role is as an ant in Karel and Josef Čapek’s The Insect Play. The theatre smells like mashed potatoes and, as Sheen rehearses, the ladies preparing lunch in the room next door can always be heard chattering.

In this moment: “I dream about that place. I dream about that room. It had such an impact on me. I remember precisely sitting down cross-legged with maybe four or five other stage management students and they said, ‘We’re going to do a run-through.’ There is a taped line literally right in front of me that is the edge of the acting area and then these older kids did a run-through of The Crucible.

“I had not really seen a play at this point – I’d been in one, but I’d not really been to the theatre to see a play. I’d seen musicals. I sat there and my life changed in that moment. I mean, I’d never experienced anything like what I experienced over the next couple of hours, it literally blew my mind. It changed the wiring in my brain. To be that close, watching. It was a brilliant production. It’s an extraordinary play, an incredibly powerful play. It works really well with young people doing it, the hysteria of the witch trials and the young girls.

“I’d never really experienced the power of storytelling before, in that way. Just how much it made me feel, just kind of played with my head: it was dangerous, it was exciting and it was moving, it was funny and it was right there in front of me. I wasn’t sitting like you would in a theatre, I was there. There was nothing to distract, there were no costumes or lights, it was just raw storytelling in front of me.

“I think that moment – I know I wouldn’t have been able to put words to it at the time – but I know that’s what made me, what opened up the possibility of what you could do, why theatre matters, why storytelling matters, why people coming together and having a shared experience can matter. I know the trajectory for me really started there, in that hall.”

1998-99: Michael Sheen stars in Amadeus in London, Los Angeles and New York City. “I’m amazed with how familiar I am with it after 23 years. We did so many performances. I realised it’s just imprinted on my brain, the intonation patterns of Salieri. I played the opposite part, I played Mozart. Salieri is so obsessed with him. Weirdly, to have a ghost of that character knocking around in my head is not a terrible thing.

“Part of what I’ve found exciting about Salieri is being at this point in my life and career. To play someone who has got to a certain place in their career and questions the worthiness or the meaning of what they’ve done, and has to wrestle with that. I thought, well, that’s a very interesting thing for me to play with, because all those things are present and current for me.”

2012: Sheen looks for the first time at a photo of his great-great-grandmother, Mary Ann North, on the TV show Who Do You Think You Are? She was a lion tamer and elephant trainer. They look so alike that he could play her perfectly, in a wig and a puffy-shouldered dress.

In this moment: Sheen feeling his way into the character of Salieri. “So, prog rock – you know, there were all these incredibly successful musicians having incredible careers and then punk came along and within a fairly short time they were done and that time was over and it was just embarrassing, you didn’t hear it anywhere. So I realised, Oh I see: Salieri. He could have a long time of success and then a very quick, and now you’ve gone. And for a man who had become, let’s say, quite addicted to that fame and that place, to suddenly not have it? He had been driven sort of mad by the emptiness of the success and then it’s all gone.

“The one thing he craves is an audience, which is what the play is. The play is him summoning up an audience, ghosts of the future to tell his story to, and he says this is my last performance. There’s a sense of theatricality about that. I started to think about Sunset Boulevard and Norma Desmond, someone who is going, All right Mr DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”

1998: Sheen arrives in London to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). “And then, one day, not long after I’d arrived in London, I walked into a McDonald’s and no one could understand me when I asked for milk. ‘Milk! … MILK!!! … It’s not that hard, is it? MIIILLLK!!!?’ ‘Oh, milk?’ COME ON! Really? It’s that different? Anyway, I suppose that’s where it started. The ‘having it reflected back to me that I was different’ thing. But I didn’t like that. I wanted to be different. I just wanted it to be in a way that I chose. I didn’t like how exposing it felt. I didn’t want my difference to be something that was defined by other people. I wanted to be in control of it.

“And so I started adapting. Shifting my shape to hide that difference so I could control when it was seen or not. In the first couple of weeks of being at drama school, I remember one of the voice teachers asking if she could record me speaking. She said she did that with a lot of students who had quite strong regional accents when they arrived. She used them as teaching aids for when someone might need to learn a particular accent for a play. She said she had to do it in the first few weeks though, as people tended to lose their accent so quickly and then it would be no use.”

2009: Queen Elizabeth II awards Sheen the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his service to drama.

2017: Sheen returns his OBE, thinking he would be a hypocrite if he kept it.

In this moment: “People say, ‘Why do you go on about the Prince of Wales and all that kind of stuff? It’s from so long ago, it doesn’t matter.’ A big turning point for me was when I did the Raymond Williams lecture. Raymond Williams was this extraordinary Welsh writer about culture and all kinds of things, and he always used to talk about how the past and present connect and how they affect one another – that is the important thing.”

November 16, 2017: Sheen delivers the Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture with his hair bleached white. He is in the middle of filming Good Omens, where he plays the angel Aziraphale opposite the demon Crowley, played by David Tennant. The joy of the show is in their tender love for one another.

In the lecture, with his angel hair, Sheen says: “As the towns and villages that grew up around the coalfields and the ironworks have been beaten down and forgotten about, seemingly even by the political party borne out of its struggles; as our squares and high streets are littered not only with cheap chicken and pizza shops but also thousands of empty chapels and darkened welfare halls; and as the dazzling promises that the offer of Britishness made seem to ring ever more hollow with each passing Welsh budget day, we are left with the realisation that the world did indeed reshape itself. And we were, after all, left behind. No matter what deals we thought we made, the Pied Piper of Britishness danced us all down to the river, and then left us there.”

2019: A meme of Sheen as Aro, the Italian vampire in the Twilight series, white ruff at his neck, 18th-century golden suit, vampire-pale obviously, seen from below. How people who eat steak rare look down on those who like it well done.

In this moment: Speaking about Staged, a series that began during lockdown and was filmed via Zoom with Tennant, where you watch their beards grow in real time. “In the new series of Staged, there’s an episode called ‘Staged Unseen’, where there’s a blooper reel kind of thing, and when they showed clips from season two, where we had been in lockdown for quite some time, I mean – how hairy I am! It was quite shocking to me. I look like a member of The Band, you know the Bob Dylan band? There’s just so much hair and the beard is just huge and I was really shocked. It is an odd thing, to be able to look back and go, That was a weird time, and we did that? We filmed that in our kitchen?”

Early 2020: Playing himself in Staged. Sheen holding back tears while Tennant looks on.

In this moment: “Wales is playing in the World Cup, the first time since 1958. It’s only the second time in the history. I did this speech that kind of went crazy and of course all I get is abuse from English football fans. But of course the point of all that, the point is – it wasn’t really about football, it wasn’t even about the World Cup. It was a way of, I hoped, getting people galvanised and interested, excited and curious.

“I’ve been sent so many videos from schools in Wales of students studying this speech in order for teachers to get them to do their own versions. It’s been extraordinary, this explosion of interest in Welsh culture, from Welsh people themselves, and even if people are vehemently against what they think I’m talking about, or what it supposedly represents, it’s alive and present and that’s incredibly exciting. Obviously, the World Cup will come and go and Wales’s sporting accomplishments will rise and fall, but the idea of bringing the past into the present and opening that discussion up – and we can talk about why that doesn’t happen very often.”

September 27, 2022: Sheen roaring to the Welsh World Cup team. “Close your eyes and feel the breath on the back of your necks. Because that’s every man, woman and child in this old land standing there with you, at your backs. That’s the people of Wales, your people. Feel their breath quickening with yours. Hear their blood drumming in your ears, pounding through your heart, bursting through your chest. That’s the blood of Wales, your blood, red as the ancient book of dreams. Red as the rising flag of Merthyr. Red as the great wall of Gwalia. Because that’s what you carry with you, boys, across 64 years, across half the span of the world. It’s there, on your chest. It’s there, at your back. It’s there, at your side. Because they always say, we are too small, too slow, too weak, too full of fear, but Yma o Hyd, you sons of speed! With that red wall around us, we are still here!”

In this moment, laughing: “Some people say my life is like a monologue.”

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