Michael Sheen interview: ‘I could never do impersonations of people’

In an acting career that has seen him play such luxuriantly coiffed men as Tony Blair and David Frost, Michael Sheen has found himself in some pretty hairy situations. Last year, as game-show host Chris Tarrant in Quiz, the ITV drama about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’s “coughing major” scandal, he wore a bald cap beneath a toupee the colour of summer wheat. In Amazon’s fantasy series Good Omens – in which he’s fretful angel Aziraphale to David Tennant’s demonic Crowley – he sports mutton chops the likes of which, he says, we’ve not seen “since the glory days of 1970s Welsh rugby”.

But his latest role might represent his greatest wig-out yet. In Last Train to Christmas, a poignant time-travel fantasy film, Sheen plays Nottingham’s king of nightclubs, Tony Towers, whose champagne-swilling hubris is sorely tested as he travels home for the festive season on a train like no other. Whenever a baffled Towers moves between carriages, he finds himself transported from one decade to the next – and his hair keeps pace, morphing from 1970s rocker’s shag to 1980s mullet to 1990s daytime-DJ bouffant and beyond.

The question we must put, then, to this most accomplished of impersonators: are hairpieces his secret weapon? Far from it, says Sheen. Especially when playing real-life characters, it can be “a bit of a battle, if you’ve got a lot going on, on the surface”, he tells me. “The audience come with expectations... they want you to be as much like that person as possible. But as an actor, you can’t let that take over.”

For the 52-year-old Sheen, his speciality “came out of complete left field… I could never do impersonations of people,” he tells me, beaming in from central Scotland where he’s filming season two of Good Omens (bleached-blond curls: model’s own). “So it was kind of a shocker when I realised I’d become known for that. Every single time I’ve played one of those characters, I’ve always been genuinely terrified going into it.”

We’re talking the day after Eddie Redmayne is quoted as admitting that playing a trans character based on artist Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl – a performance that earned him an Oscar nomination – had been “a mistake”. Where does Sheen stand on the very current debate about the roles actors should be “allowed” to play?

“If an actor like me playing a character is stopping someone who historically has had less opportunity – because of particular physical disabilities or ethnicity or whatever,” replies Sheen, carefully, “there’s a sort of basic unfairness, I suppose, in that.”

He seems uneasy – and no wonder, given the roles he has played. To name just three: in 2007 film Music Within, he was an activist with cerebral palsy; in the 2003 Evelyn Waugh adaptation Bright Young Things he played a character he described as “the campest man in cinema -history”; then he was Kenneth Williams in Fantabulosa! (2006). “At the times that I played certain characters, the cultural conversation was very different. And I suppose I wasn’t thinking in that way,” he admits.

“But it’s a complicated area. In some ways, it’s easier for me, or an actor like Eddie Redmayne, to say: ‘Well, I wouldn’t choose to do that now.’ A lot of actors don’t have much choice. And that would be a harder decision for them. But I have the luxury, the privilege, of being able to make certain choices, and I know that I’ll still be at work at the end of the day.”

Indeed, even in a pandemic, acting’s greatest living Welshman (pace Anthony Hopkins) has been as busy as ever. Quiz was the TV drama hit of the first lockdown. Last autumn, Sheen’s appearance in a streamed Old Vic production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer received brilliant reviews, and this summer he was back on the boards, performing Under Milk Wood for the National Theatre.

And then there was Staged. The two-hander “Zoom-com”, in which he and old pal David Tennant played -exaggerated luvvie versions of themselves, was the brightest and sharpest of the socially-distanced shows invented by broadcasters last year. A shaggy-bearded Sheen filmed himself at home in Wales, with cameos for his girlfriend, 27-year-old Swedish actress Anna Lundberg, and their baby, Lyra.

Back in Los Angeles, where he lived for years, he also has a daughter, Lily, with his ex-partner Kate Beckinsale. But when Lily left for college – “going off to have her own life”, he says – he decided he wanted “to come home again – and not just come back to the UK, but come back to Wales”.

His commitment to the land of his fathers was at the heart of another Sheen revelation from the past year: that he’d returned the OBE he was awarded in 2009 for services to drama. Initially, he had been thrilled. “For someone who does a profession where you can’t play for your country – like, if I’d been a footballer, I could maybe have got a Welsh cap – to be given an OBE felt something along those lines,” he says. (As an adolescent, he was scouted by Arsenal.)

But then he was invited to give the 2017 Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture, in honour of the late Welsh socialist. Sheen thought hard about “things like devolution – and why it is that the Welsh don’t have the same kinds of cultural and social platforms and institutions that the Scottish do”. Having investigated the history of English imperialism in Wales, he realised he had to choose between “saying the things I was going to say” and “holding on to the OBE”. He decided, he says, “it would make me a hypocrite if I was to do both” – and chose to give back the gong.

“I wrote a letter – I think I had to write it to Charles. And I said: ‘I mean absolutely no disrespect by this. But it’s just a personal thing that I realised that I had a personal choice to make, and I’ve chosen this way. And I think that’s the choice I can feel most comfortable with.’ ”

And did the Welshman hear back from the Prince of Wales?

“No, I didn’t receive a reply,” he says, with the faintest of smiles.

If that doesn’t fit our idea of Sheen having the ear of royalty, it’s because we’ve seen him on screen so many times as Tony Blair: first in 2003’s The Deal, then in 2006 in The Queen, and finally in 2010’s The -Special Relationship. He is not, however, playing Blair opposite Imelda Staunton’s Queen in the fifth series of The Crown – the acclaimed Netflix drama created by Peter Morgan, screenwriter of all three of those Sheen-as-Blair outings (as well Frost/Nixon in which Sheen played David Frost). That honour has fallen to Bertie Carvel. Is that a cause for regret?

“Oh, right! I didn’t know he was playing it,” replies Sheen. “But, God, no, not at all! For a start, when I first played Blair, I was about the right age, [or] maybe a little young still. So the thought now that I’m way too old to play Blair is a bit bracing! But no, I think that the run of things that I did were plenty.”

Does he perhaps have his eye on that other plum telly role, in Doctor Who, after Jodie Whittaker hangs up her sonic screwdriver next year? After all, his old West Glamorgan Youth Theatre Company pal Russell T Davies is taking the reins for the series from Chris Chibnall.

“Um, ooh, I don’t know, really,” he says. “As an actor, it’s a tough one, because you become so synonymous with that character. And also, just seeing a little bit of how the fans of Doctor Who respond to certain things – you wouldn’t want to get it wrong, would you?”

He will have heard a little of that from Tennant, who occupied the Tardis from 2005 to 2010, a time of peak Doctor Who mania. For a while afterwards, the Scotsman seemed a bit haunted by the experience. “Maybe it makes it difficult for people to accept you in different roles,” says Sheen, diplomatically.

As we started on physical appendages – albeit fake ones – let’s end on them, too. Sarah Silverman, the comedian and former partner of Sheen, has claimed that he nicknamed his penis “The Great Christine Baranski”, after the American actress. Is there, pray tell, any truth in that?

Sheen’s mouth crinkles. “The -lesson to take from that is: if you’re going to be in a relationship with a stand-up comedian, be prepared for things like that to suddenly come into existence.

“I mean, no!” he clarifies, laughing. “She made that up completely. And I think it was as much a shock to me as it was to Christine Baranski – it was probably as much a shock to Sarah when she said it!”

So, was it excruciating, two years later, when Sheen starred opposite Christine Baranski in the American legal drama The Good Fight?

“That was a very interesting first meeting,” laughs Sheen, “because I had to say: ‘Look, I have not named any part of my body after you, Christine. I would be honoured if I did. But that was not the case.’ So that became quite a nice bonding thing between us!”

Last Train to Christmas premieres next Saturday on Sky Cinema and Now TV