Michael Sheen gave an interview to The Sunday Times Culture magazine, published on its February 11 issue, in which he talks The Way, Nye, A Very Royal Scandal and why he doesn’t want to go back to Hollywood.
You can find the scans of the magazine on the photo gallery:
Now to the interview…
When Michael Sheen had an idea for a dystopian TV series based in his home town of Port Talbot, in which riots erupt when the steel works close, he had no idea said works would actually close – a month before the show came to air. “Devasting,” he says, simply, of last month’s decision by Tata Steel to shut the planet’s two blast furnaces and put 2,800 jobs at risk.
“Those furnaces are part of our psyche,” he says. “When the Queen died we talked about how psychologically massive it was for the country because people couldn’t imagine life without her. The steel works are like that for Port Talbot.”
Sheen’s show The Way – was never meant to be this serious. The BBC1 three-parter is directed by Sheen, was written by James Graham and has the montage king Adam Curtis on board as an executive producer. The plot revolves around a family who, when the steel works are closed by foreign investors, galvanise the town into a revolt that leads to the Welsh border being shut. Polemical, yes, but it has a lightness of touch. “A mix of sitcom and war film,” Sheen says, beaming.
But that was then. Now it was become the most febrile TV show since, well, Mr Bates vs the Post Office. “We wanted to get this out quickly,” Sheen says. With heavy surveillance, police clamping down on protesters and nods to Westminster abandoning parts of the country, the series could be thought of as a tad political. “The concern was if it was too close to an election the BBC would get nervous.”
I meet Sheen in London, where he is ensconced in the National Theatre rehearsing for his forthcoming starring role in Nye, a “fantasia” play based on the life of the NHS founder, Aneuron “Nye” Bevan. He is dressed down, with stubble and messy hair, and is a terrfic racounter, with a lot to discuss. As well as The Way and Nye, this year the actor will also transform himself into Prince Andrew for a BBC adaptation of the Emily Maitlis Newsnight interview.
Sheen has played a rum bunch, from David Frost to Tony Blair and Chris Tarrant. And we will get to Bevan and Andrew, but first Wales, where Sheen, 55, was born in 1969 and, after a stint in Los Angeles, returned to a few years ago. He has settled outside Port Talbot with his partner, Anna Lundberg, a 30-year-old actress, and their two children. Sheen’s parents still live in the area, so the move was partly for family, but mostly to be a fugurehead. The actor has been investing in local arts, charities and more, putting his money where his mouth is to such an extent that there is a mural of his face up on Forge Road.
“It’s home,” Sheen says, shrugging, when I ask why he abandoned his A-list life for southwest Wales. “I feel a deep connenction to it.” The seed was sown in 2011 when he played Jesus in Port Talbot in an epic three-day staging of the Passion, starring many locals who were struggling with job cuts and the rising cost of living in their town. “Once you become aware of difficulties in the area you come from you don’t have to do anything,” he says, with a wry smile. “You can live somewhere else, visit family at Christmas and turn a blind eye to injustice. It doesn’t make you a bad person, but I’d seen something I couldn’t unsee. I had to apply myself, and I might not have the impact I’d like, but the one thing that I can say is that I’m doing stuff. I know I am – I’m paying for it!”
The Way is his latest idea to boost the area. The show, which was shot in Port Talbot last year, employed residentes in front and behind the camera. The extras in a scene in which fictional steel workers discuss possible strike action came from the works themselves. How strange they will feel watching it now. The director shakes his head. “It felt very present and crackling.”
One line in the show feels especially crucial: “The British don’t revolt, they grumble.” How revolutionary does Sheen think Britain is? “It happens in flare-ups”, he reasons. “You could say Brexit was a form of it and there is something in us that is frustrated and wants to vent. But these flare-ups get cracked down, so the idea of properly organised revolution is hard to imagine. Yet the more anger there is, the more fear about the cost of living crisis. Well, something’s got to give.”
I mention the Brecon Beacons. “Ah yes, Bannau Brycheiniog,” Sheen says with a flourish. Last year he spearheaded the celebration of the renaming of the national park to Welsh, which led some to ponder whether Sheen might go further in the name of Welsh nationalism. Owen Williams, a member of the independence campaigners YesCymru, described him to me as “Nye Bevan and Che Guevara” and added that the actor might one day be head of state in an independent Wales.
Sheen bursts out laughing. “Right!” he booms. “Well, for a long time [the head of state] was either me or Huw Edwards, so I suppose that’s changed.” He laughs again. “Gosh. I don’t know what to say.” Has he, though, become a sort of icon for an independent Wales? “I’ve never actually spoken about independence,” he says. “The only thing I’ve said is that it’s worth a conversation. Talking about independence is a catalyst for other issues that meed to be talked about. Shutting that conversation down is of no value at all. People say Wales couldn’t survive economically. Well, why not? And is that good? Is that a good reason to stay in the union?”
On a roll, he talks about how you can’t travel from north to south Wales by train without going into England because the rail network was set up to move stuff out of Wales, not round it. He mentions the collapse of local journalism and funding cuts to Nation Theatre Wales, and says these are the conversations he wants to have – but where in Wales are they taking place?
So, for Sheen, the discussion is about thinking of Wales as independent in identity, not necessarially as an independent state? “As a living entity,” he says, is how he wants people to think about his country. “It’s much more, for me, about exploring what that cultural identity of now is, rather than it being all about the past,” he says. “We had a great rugby team in the 1970s, but it’s not the 1970s anymore and, yes, male-voice choirs make us cry, but there are few left. Mines aren’t there either. All the things that are part of the cultural identity of Wales are to do with the past and, for me, it’s more much more about exploring what is alive about Welsh identity now.”
You could easily forget that Sheen is an actor. He calls himself a “not for profit” thesp, meaning he funds social projects, from addiction to disability sports. “I juggle things more,” he says. “I also have young kids again and I don’t want to be away much.”
Sheen has an empathetic face, a knack of making the difficult feel personable. And there are two big roles incoming – a relief to fans.
Which leades to Prince Andrew. “Of course it does.” This year he plays the troubled duke in A Very Royal Scandal – a retelling of the Emily Maitlis fiasco with Ruth Wilson as the interviewer. Does the show go to Pizza Express in Woking? “No,” Sheen says, grinning. Why play the prince? He thinks about this a lot. “Inevitably you bring humanity to a character – that’s certainly what I try to do.” He pauses. “I don’t want people to say, ‘It was Sheen who got everybody behind Andrew again.’ But I also don’t want to do a hatchet job.”
So what is he trying to do? “Well, it is a story about privilege really,” he says. “And how easy it is for privilege to exploit. We’ve found a way of keeping the ambiguity, because, legally, you can’t show stuff that you cannot prove, but whether guilty or not, his privilege is a major factor in whatever exploitation was going on. Beyond the specifics of Andrew and Epstein, no matter who you are, privilege has the potential to exploit someone. For Andrew it’s: ‘This girl is being brought to me and I don’t really care where she comes from, or how old she is, this is just what happens for people like me.'”
It must have been odd having the prince and Bevan – the worst and best of our ruling classes – in his head at the same time. What, if anything, links the men? “What is power and what can you do with it?” Sheen muses, which seems to speak to his position in Port Talbot too. Nye at the National portrays the Welsh politician on his deathbed, in an NHS hospital, moving through his memories while doped up on meds. Sheen wants the audience to think: “Is there a Bevan in politics now and, if not, why not?”
Which takes us back to The Way. At the start one rioter yells about wanting to “change everything” – he means politically, sociologically. However, assuming that changing everthing is not possible, what is the one things Sheen would change? “Something pratical? Not ‘I want world peace’. I would create a people’s chamber as another branch of government – like the Lords, there’d be a House of People, representing their community. Our policital system has become restrictive and nonrepresentational, so something to open that up would be good.”
The actor is a thousand miles from his old Hollywood life. “It’d take a lot for me to work in America again – my life is elsewhere.” It is in Port Talbot instead. “The last man on the battlefield” is how one MP describes the steel works in The Way, and Sheen is unsure what happens when that last man goes. “Some people say it’s to do with net zero aims,” he says about the closure. “Others blame Brexit. But, ultimately, the people of Port Talbot have been let down – and there is no easy answer about what comes next.”