Michael Sheen. How best to describe this pillar of popular culture? He’s an actor. Yes, that’ll do nicely.
More than that, though, he’s a dramatic utility player and a comedic pinch hitter. He’s the kind of actor that you can count on to be the most watchable character on screen, no matter what role he’s playing. How many movie stars working today can pull off playing both a vampire and a werewolf? Neither of those performances is on this list, by the way.
With a film and television career stretching back to the early ‘90s, Michael Sheen has given fans plenty of material. Here’s a look at some of his weirdest, funniest, and most moving performances across movies and TV.
10: Tron: Legacy
Far and away the best movie in the Tron franchise thanks to a killer soundtrack, stunning visuals, and a counterintuitively short list of Tron movies, Tron: Legacy really seemed like it was going to be the start of something. If you saw it in theaters, you probably still remember the way that it felt when a digitally de-aged Jeff Bridges first looked you in the eyes. That’s a lamb that’ll never stop screaming.
And then there was Zuse, the powder-white digital nightclub entrepreneur played briefly but expertly by Michael Sheen. Chewing up scenery like Pac Man on a landscape painting by Roy Lichtenstein, Sheen gives the distinct impression that he was let off the directorial leash and just kind of went full theater kid while extras beat each other up around him. It’s the acting equivalent to watching an animal raised in captivity run on grass for the first time, if the grass was made out of glow sticks and the animal in question had just watched a bunch of Simon Pegg and Charlie Chaplin movies.
9: The Spoils of Babylon/The Spoils Before Dying
Weirdness is a commodity, and prime cuts of the stuff are a rare and beautiful thing. The Spoils shows were something else. Products of SNL and FoD alums, they were unceasingly uncomfortable and filled with more movie stars turning in more bizarre performances per capita than your average off-Broadway independent theater.
Michael Sheen appeared in both entries in the franchise, appearing in one episode of The Spoils of Babylon and four episodes of the follow-up The Spoils Before Dying. Sheen is never better than when he’s in freak mode, and these performances prove it.
8: Staged
Real quick, how was your 2020? Not great? Well, did you at least use the opportunity to work with Judi Dench and Samuel L. Jackson over Zoom? You didn’t? You bought Rocksmith and then never installed it? We all did, bud.
Except Michael Sheen and David Tennant, who managed to turn global catastrophe into one of the only genuinely entertaining pieces of lockdown-era comedy on record. Staged, which follows the discussions of make-up versions of the celebrated actors as they work together via video conferencing, confounded audiences by tackling the quarantine experience and dangling a loogie over its mouth, metaphorically speaking. For evidence of how good it was, compare it to all of the other Skype-based comedies that got second and third seasons. What’s that? There aren’t any? That’s enough rhetorical questions for two paragraphs? Yeah, okay.
7: Frost/Nixon
On paper, Frost/Nixon is a movie where the shirtless guy from the Underworld franchise argues with Skeletor about shoes.
But in practice, it’s so much more than that. It’s a deft adaptation of a celebrated stage play. It’s the movie that piled award nominations in Michael Sheen’s lap like the Octomom visiting a mall Santa. It somehow walks a line between humanizing one of the most famous moments in political journalism and turning it into a spectator sport. Sheen’s performance as David Frost is something close to mechanical in its precision, even when the historical facts aren’t. This is that rarest of prestige award-season period pieces that’s worth watching again, not just leaving on the Blu-ray shelf so visitors will see how great your taste is.
6: 7 Days in Hell
If it’s true that the value of art can only be found in the feelings it creates, then the value of an artist must be derived in equal part from the intensity with which they evoke these reactions. In 7 Days in Hell, Michael Sheen, more than perhaps any other performer of his generation, makes the audience feel sticky and bad.
There may never be a more accurate on-screen representation of the gruesome realities of ‘90s-era BBC interviews than the one Sheen gives in 7 Days in Hell. The mockumentary follows a fictitious tennis match that lasts a whole week, and Sheen plays talk show host and cigarette receptacle Caspian Wint. From the glare of the sweat and grease on his face, to the way he just sort of trails off and smokes for a while when Kit Harrington lifts his shirt, it is a masterclass in making your viewers want to go take a shower.
5: The Queen
Across the globe, there are nations which call their citizens to service. In Korea, Israel, Singapore and Russia, men are required to serve in the armed forces. In the United Kingdom, all actors must, before retiring, appear in a bone-dry drama about the Royal Family. Also, they have to do an episode of Doctor Who or they’ll go to jail.
2006’s The Queen represented a big moment for Sheen, whose performance as Tony Blair landed him his first BAFTA nomination. Helpfully, he’d had a chance to warm up, playing the Prime Minister in 2003’s The Deal, also directed by The Queen helmer Stephen Frears. It’s weird that more actors don’t spend three years getting into character before they take a part. Laziness, probably.
4: 30 Rock
Blade director Stephen Norrington. Whoever thought he could pull off heels in To: Wong Foo. That IRS agent that followed their gut. There have been a fair few people through the years that could rightly claim to have been correct about Wesley Snipes.
But none of them were as correct as Michael Sheen’s character on 30 Rock, about whom we will say very little else so as not to ruin the joke for anyone that hasn’t seen it. Suffice it to say that across four too-brief episodes, he does great work with the material, matching and even exceeding the level of comedy that you’d see on your average episode of Chums.
3: Masters of Sex
The thing of it is, it’s hard to know exactly how to describe Masters of Sex, the Showtime series that got Michael Sheen his first Golden Globe nomination. It’s biographical, in the same way as, say, Bohemian Rhapsody or those stories that 12-year-olds tell about how they totally kissed a girl.
But the truth should never get in the way of a good story, and Sheen does a critically lauded job of telling the kinda-sorta tale of sex researcher William H. Masters. He’s in good company, too – also starring Lizzie Caplan as Masters’ research partner Virginia Johnson. Across four seasons, the series boasts a cast that includes performance powerhouses like Sarah Silverman, Allison Janney, and the Greg Grunberg.
2: Good Omens
Good Omens started life as a collaboration between two remarkable writers. After it was published in 1990, both authors took ideas from the story and developed them into their own novels – Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods in 1992 and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Anansi Boys in 2001 and 2005, respectively. The point is, Good Omens was too much story for one book, let alone a mini series. The adaptation was going to lose some stuff in translation.
But if there’s one thing that Amazon’s Good Omens series got 140 percent right, it was the depiction of Crowley and Aziraphael, an angel and a demon duo who’ve been hanging out since the beginning of time. Played by David Tennant and Michael Sheen respectively, their relationship, already touching on the page, turns into something even better on screen. Just shy of overt and too beautiful to be subtle, it’s one of the best romances committed to film in the last decade, and the chemistry is thick enough to warrant a second season, despite a lack of published source material.
1: Michael Bolton’s Big Sexy Valentine’s Day Special
Some people might look at a ranked list of Michael Sheen’s performances, notice that it tops out with a minute-and-a-half-long scene from a joke holiday special, and assume that the author doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Some people also think lima beans belong in chow mein. Some people don’t know what love is.
Just shy of the 17-minute mark of Michael Bolton’s Big Sexy Valentine’s Day Special, a painfully cringe, agonizingly uninspired stage performance of “Old Time Rock & Roll” is interrupted by a flashback to the rehearsal process. The whole thing, it turns out, was the brainchild of a deeply intense Bob Fosse analogue, played by Sheen. He throws a chair. Cigarette embers careen from in front of his face as he berates his dancers. He throws that chair from earlier again. It probably took half an hour to film. Whatever. Alec Baldwin was in seven minutes of Glengarry Glen Ross and we made him into Hollywood royalty.
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