As an entertainment journalist, I’ve been fortunate enough to interview Michael Sheen for several movies like The Queen, Alice in Wonderland, Midnight in Paris and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2.
This is the first time we’ve discussed a TV series. After Sheen was on the Television Critics Association panel for Showtime’s “Masters of Sex,” I landed a one on one interview with him. The series chronicles the Masters and Johnson research on the science of sexuality that began in 1956. Sheen plays Dr. William Masters, and Lizzy Caplan is Virginia Johnson. We’ll see how Masters hooked up devices to copulating couples, and also how he and Johnson butted heads over methodology, not to mention their personal lives.
CraveOnline: Masters is so clinical, is he not aroused in the slightest bit by the nature of the research he’s doing?
Michael Sheen: I don’t know, we’ll have to see, won’t we?
Do you think that’s his journey?
I think knowing what is going on for him and how he feels about certain things and what his motivations are and all the things that are interesting to find out, that’s the journey of the show for him. He’s someone who’s such a kind of closed book in so many ways, even to himself. And he’s someone who’s based his whole life around control and yet we see in the story at the beginning, he meets someone, Virginia, who seems to create a problem for that.
He starts to feel like he’s not in control so much and he has a lot of different feelings about that, so he’s both drawn to her, but also wants to resist that because that’s so threatening to him as well. So that’s a very interesting relationship and also a very interesting journey to chart as an actor, but also hopefully to watch.
Are you playing it as he really believes he can take arousal or attraction out of this research, or maybe that he’s overcompensating?
Well, I’m not going to tell you what I’m playing. That’s up to you to decide, but what I think he wants to do is to separate sex from every other complication, which of course is impossible. So the more that he tries to compartmentalize it and separate it, the more messy his life becomes. But I think his desire would be to keep things very, very separate and contained.
Was the idea of a fake orgasm really revolutionary in 1956?
I think most things about sex were fairly revolutionary in terms of having a discussion about them. There’s so much mythology about sex, even now. Certainly then, when it was so taboo to talk about it. I think there were very clear roles for men and women in sex, within a marriage, outside of a marriage. It was all very defined and very unequal and all kind of consolidating social values at the time and social mores of the time.
So the idea of faking an orgasm, I don’t think men were particularly aware of that kind of thing happening and why they would be interested. I think the idea of why a man would even care about whether a woman was having an orgasm at all would probably be fairly revolutionary, I don’t know. So the idea of faking an orgasm, I don’t think there was much being talked about with that. Maybe amongst women, maybe they shared that themselves, I don’t know but the idea certainly for a man like Masters to find out about that is I think fairly illuminating for him.
Is there any video or footage of Masters, the way he spoke and carried himself?
A little bit, not much. Not much. There’s quite a few photographs, but he was a very, very private man and I think that’s reflected in the amount of footage of him. There’s not a huge amount.
Does that make it harder for you? Is that a challenge you accept?
No, because I’m not trying to look or sound like him, that’s not really, I don’t think, an important aspect of this piece. That really only comes into play when people are very, very familiar with the person. I don’t think there’s much of a need to do that really with this character.
Do you seek out roles that are based on real people?
No, not at all. I’m interested in playing characters based on the script and the story and whether they’re an interesting person and whether there’s something to explore there. A lot of the people I’ve played who were real people, it was mainly because they were written by one man. They were written by Peter Morgan and we were working together a lot, but it’s not like I seek it out. Although I do enjoy it.
Is it not just an American accent, but a 1950s American accent?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And not just the accent, because an accent and the way someone speaks is only a reflection really of who they are and what’s going on inside them, so obviously a man in the 1950 like Masters is very different to a man now. So you’ve got to take that into account as well and that obviously comes out in the way they speak and the way they express themselves.
Were you looking for something on television?
No, not at all. I’d just finished doing a play in London. I was doing Hamlet on stage there and I’d spent quite a bit of time in Britain that year. I hadn’t planned to but just the way things have worked out, so I’d been away from my daughter a lot who lives here in L.A. So I was hoping to be able to do something that would keep me in Los Angeles more, so that work wouldn’t have to take me away as much.
But I hadn’t thought about doing a TV series really, so I was a bit nervous about that just because I hadn’t done it before and it’s a big commitment to sign on potentially for many, many years playing the same character in the same show. So I was a bit nervous, but when I read the script and found out more about the character and met the people who were involved in it, I thought it was a risk worth taking and they seem seem to dovetail with what I needed in my life at the time.
Has it fulfilled your expectations?
It’s gone way beyond. I’ve been really, really excited about the process and how it works because it’s so much more collaborative than a lot of the films I’ve worked on really. Because it’s not scripted up front, because you’re writing it as it goes along to a large extent, the discoveries you make as an actor about the character and about the relationships can actually directly feed back into storylines and episodes.
I’ve really enjoyed that, and also playing a character where there is so little being revealed on the surface, you can really take your time to explore that character. Rather than over two hours in a film maybe, over 12 hours in a season you can slowly, slowly reveal more and more complexity about characters and relationships which is amazing. I’ve really enjoyed that.
Do you think Masters would be gratified that in the decades since his research, we’ve come to a point where a show as graphic as “Masters of Sex” could be on TV and explore this subject?
I think, from my understanding, that for both Masters and Johnson, their feelings about the way sex and sexuality has become expressed in society, I think they had very ambivalent feelings about that. I think on the one hand, the more information that is available for people about sex and sexuality, the more help there is available if there’s issues around it, obviously they were very pleased about.
But I know that in the ‘70s, they were very concerned about the amount of pornography and the way sex had become commercialized and was being exploited and exploitative, I know they had a lot of worries about. So I think the fact that there’s a TV show on that can be so explicit and so graphic is not in its own right something that they would feel good or bad about. I think it would be more about what use was that put to? Is it something that is actually helping people or is it something that is creating more of a barrier again? Which so much of the way sex is portrayed can do. It can just make us feel like we’re less than and inferior, not measuring up and I hope that this show doesn’t do that.
In some respects, we’re as prudish as ever so in some ways has the Masters and Johnson research not forwarded the conversation?
I don’t think it’s anything to do with the study so much. It’s about what we do with it. It’s like saying the science that’s created certain weaponry [is bad]. It’s what we do with it that matters. Nuclear energy is neither good nor bad. It’s what use we put to it. We need to know about this stuff though. I think we have more to learn about how society works and how culture works and how consumerism works in terms of how sexuality is manifested than we do about what the study was.
