Michael Shannon: ‘I think television is garbage – I certainly don't watch it'
Striding biblically into the green room at a London Bridge rehearsal studio, Michael Shannon is a daunting figure. Six foot three, craggier than Mount Rushmore and pathologically unsmiling, the double Academy Award nominated, Kentucky-born actor has the most 'just walked out of a Cormac McCarthy novel' energy to him of anyone I've ever met.
'Are you familiar with the play?' he asks immediately, in what is possibly an innocuous opening gambit, but also possibly an attempt to determine if I'm some sort of lightweight flim-flam entertainment journalist. Because we're not here to talk showbiz. We're here to talk about his role in the Almeida Theatre's revival of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten. And also we're here to talk about my favourite band of all time, REM.
You will recognise Michael Shannon. It would be truly remarkable if you hadn't seen one of his films, because according to his official bio there are over 90 of them. Whether you know him from offbeat indie flicks (of which he has made dozens), huge blockbusters (he famously played General Zod in Man of Steel and The Flash) or somewhere in between (those Oscar nominations came for Sam Mendes's Revolutionary Road and Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals), it is a statistical inevitability that you have seen a Michael Shannon film. You'll recognise that rough-hewn face. You'll be aware he has range, but always presence and weight – he's not much of a romcom guy.
What British audiences haven't seen for a long time is Michael Shannon on the stage. At home, he's an enormously prolific theatre actor: he does roughly a play a year. He's also a musician: he and musical partner Jason Narducy having spent what one can only assume to be the absolute last remaining seconds of Shannon's recent free time touring America with sets based around the first three albums of legendary indie rockers REM.
Now Michael Shannon the theatre actor and Michael Shannon the musician are both heading our way. At the end of the summer he and Narducy will do two nights at the Islington Garage, playing REM's 1985 album Fables of the Reconstruction (which was recorded in London, at Wood Green's Livingstone Studios).
But first A Moon for the Misbegotten, the great American playwright O'Neill's bleak but redemptive final play. It's not been seen in London since 2006, when Kevin Spacey starred as its cynical alcoholic lead James Tyrone Jr, a character based upon O'Neill's own brother. That performance made Spacey the first ever actor to have played James in both Moon and Long Day's Journey Into Night, O'Neill's most famous play, in which James Jr first appears. Now Shannon makes that a club of two.
You played James Tyrone Jr on Broadway in a 2016 production of Long Day's Journey – presumably that was a good experience?
'Oh, that's one of my favourite productions I've ever been involved with. I adored the cast. Jessica Lange as my mum, and Gabriel Byrne as my dad, and John Gallagher Jr as my brother. Just a very, very tight knit group. I love building families on stage. It's one of the primary things that theatre is useful for, I think: we all have families, so we love to see others and how they function.'
You must have been aware James Jr was in another O'Neill play: did you have long-held aspirations to do A Moon for the Misbegotten?
'Well, people would come to see Long Day's Journey and they mentioned A Moon for the Misbegotten. They'd say that I should do it. But I had no idea how that would ever come to pass. So it just kind of went in one ear and out the other. And then lo and behold my agent said that Rebecca [Frecknall, director] wanted to speak with me and it was like a gift.'
UK audiences probably don't realise what an enormous amount of theatre you do despite your screen success – presumably it's very important to you?
'Film is a director's medium and TV is run by writers and producers and corporate overlords. I mean, I do television, because from time to time there are interesting projects that come across my desk, but by and large, I think television is garbage. I certainly don't watch it. Films are more interesting, but they're the director's medium, they're not theatre where an actor can really do their thing. I like acting, so that's why I do theatre.
Do the lines between film and TV feel blurred in the streamer era? Like you have a new Netflix show (Death by Lightning) coming up…
'The thing I've learned about TV is you enjoy shooting it, but my expectations for it are zero. You walk away and you expect them to destroy it. That's what you expect. If and when you ever actually watch the damn thing, you expect it to be hugely disappointing, because a bunch of morons are gonna go in and screw it up.'
But the buck stops with you on stage?
'There's no morons that come in who know nothing about art and have no training in the arts whatsoever manipulating the hard work that you've done as an artist and turning it into crap. In the theatre what the audience sees is what I want them to see.'
What's a hard sell from you on Eugene O'Neill and this play?
'I think O'Neill is one of the finest playwrights who's ever lived. You know, Long Day's Journey, when he wrote it, he didn't want it to be produced because it was so personal to him, he didn't really think it was anybody's business. He was trying to ease his own suffering and I think it's similar with this play. The depth of the trauma he's trying to exorcise out of his own consciousness writing these plays, I have a tremendous amount of respect for it. We're really lucky to to have O'Neill because he changed drama forever.'
James Tyrone Jr is based on O'Neill's older brother – do you find information like that useful or do you prefer to just build your own character?
'I mean I do both, you're a fool not to do as much research as you can. Now, 90 percent of it you may dispense with and say: I don't need to remember that or think about that ever again, but it's not going to hurt you, you know?'
Let's talk about REM. You have an REM covers band, which is an unusual thing for a very busy actor to have…
'It was not my choice necessarily. We originated as a one-off show, a one-off performance of Murmur. That's what Jason Narducy and I do. We pick a record, we play the record, that's it. We do it one time. But we did Murmur in Chicago at a venue called Metro, and it was very popular and other venues started reaching out to Jason and saying please come do this here. And so, that was when Jason turned and said, well, what do you think? Should we do it more than once?'
And then you toured the next two REM records…
'People were like, OK, are you gonna do the next one, which is very flattering. But I was not writing in my diary one night saying, you know, dear diary: I would like to go on tour with a band that plays REM. It was just kind of manifest destiny or something. We love playing it, people love hearing it, the band has been supportive and they're just the kindest, sweetest human beings you could ever want to meet.'
The band recorded Fables in London – I think they famously had a fairly miserable time…
'One of the things I find most impressive was just what hard workers they were, all four of them, just the way they toured, the amount of music they created in such a short period of time. Those first five, six records – it's just unbelievable what they managed before they were even 30 years old.'
Michael Stipe's early lyrics are famously indecipherable – as an actor do you feel you need to understand a song like 'Harborcoat' or 'Radio Free Europe' in the same way you understand James Jr?
'It's a different kind of understanding. I think words are not as effective at communicating as we like to think they are, which is why music is oftentimes so compelling. Which is why, frankly, probably a lot more people are moved by 'Harborcoat' than by going to see a play, because something's happening in that compressed period of time that is really at a very high frequency. It's a way people communicate a lot more effectively, than just language. Language is overrated I think. '
What have you been listening to lately?
'As I'm working on the play, I've been listening to a lot of ragtime; ragtime may actually predate this period, but for some reason it's been resonating with me as I work on that.'
Oh interesting – I'd sort of assumed you were an indie rock guy…
'My musical taste is not even something you could write about really. It's too far reaching. I love music more than I could possibly express. I am not an indie rock guy. It doesn't mean I don't enjoy indie rock. I love indie rock. But I also love 50 other kinds of music.'
You've been in over 90 films, plus TV, plus a play most years, plus a band: you, I mean, do you not ever require a break? That has to be relentless…
'Over 90? Really?'
That's what it says in the bio your publicist sent over!
'Oh, well, there's no mandate for working or not working or anything.'
You can't be taking much time off!
'I guess mathematically you might have a point, but I don't think much about it. There's a lot of stuff I don't do, where I'm like no, no thank you. But it's all a blur. They asked me to write my bio for the programme and at this point, I just find it kind of scary. I don't wanna even think about it, like it's a mess. Yes, I've done a lot of stuff. Just put: I've done a lot of stuff, the end. And then you write the damn thing and then they're like, oh, it's too long. What difference does it make what anybody's done? Yesterday, doesn't really even freaking matter. All that matters is right now.'
A Moon for the Misbegotten is at the Almeida Theatre, now until Aug 16.
Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy play The Garage, Aug 22 and 23.
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