Michael Shannon: 'I'm not trying to exorcise any demons'
Need someone to play a zealot or a crackpot plagued by apocalyptic visions? Call Michael Shannon. He talks about his latest role
'If I were God," says Michael Shannon, "I would just be up there scratching my head, thinking: what the hell am Isupposed to do with this? For everyone helping an old lady across the street, there's someone else bludgeoning a person to death. And sometimes they're the same. How can He separate us all out?" He stares at his latte, confounded.
The plight of the Almighty does not trouble everyone. But Shannon's sense of empathy extends even to those whose existence he doubts. Or loathes. The day we meet, heis shaken by shots of the dying Gaddafi. "It's just amazing how destructive we're capable of being." He believes vehemently in the capacity for kindness.
It is this sensitivity that makes him such a singular actor. Soon he will be a superstar when he plays the baddie General Zod in Man of Steel, the revamped Superman. So far he has specialised in men desperate to do the right thing: incontinent truth-tellers, regardless of the fallout. Cracked zealotssuch as the prohibition agent in Boardwalk Empire, erect and chilly as atombstone. Or zealous crackpots such as the electroshock patient in Revolutionary Road, who tells the pregnant April Wheeler (Kate Winslet): "I'm just about the sorriest bastard I know. But I am glad ofone thing: I'm glad I'm not gonna be that kid."
The latter was a performance that made his face famous. And what a face: pop-eyed and guileless, vaguely babyish for all its crumples it is a big Shannon tic to scrunch up his features in deep distaste. ! Yet it i s his legs today folded storkishly under the coffee table that add edge. At 6ft 4in, his characters don't just speak from the high ground, they pose a real threat should they losetheir struggle with self-control.
His latest part, in Take Shelter, was custom-made: written for Shannon by director Jeff Nichols after he heard him speak softly on the phone to his small daughter. He plays Curtis, a gentle-tempered mine engineer in Texas who dreams about a storm that presages apocalypse. Oil splatters from the sky, sparrows follow. Those closest to him his supportive wife (played by Jessica Chastain), his colleague, even his dog turn ferocious. Curtis takes a rational approach: either he is schizophrenic, like his mother, or the world really is in peril, and he had better knock up a shelter in the garden quickly. He investigates both avenues, remortgaging his house and incurring the wrath of the devout local community (Curtis himself does not attend church).
Nichols' film is a Noah-ish fable: halfhymn to the comfort of faith, half vindication of atheism, and much impressed by the practical heathen. Shannon shares Curtis's scepticism. "Ifyou don't believe there's some organising principle, or somebody up in the sky pulling the strings, then it can be very stressful. And nature itself is very arbitrary it's not malevolent or benevolent; it doesn't even know we'rehere."
Take Shelter is charged with eco-fear. "You think they'll get a little bit of fresh water, clean air in the country. Well guess what? It's not like that any more." Shannon is disappointed in what he sees as Obama's lack of action. "If you can't breathe, or drink the water, what difference does it make if you got social security? And it can be a lucrative proposition. The Chinese get that they're building solar panels like crazy. It's two words: oil and coal. We gotta stop using them. And we probably won't." He ru! bs his f orehead. "I go back and forth between having hope and not having hope."
He likes to think the film will work as a clarion call to those who think they can cover their eyes. "Curtis is responding to this latent sense of destruction Ifeel is everywhere. You can't escape this feeling of disintegration. The worldis fragile. But you also can't let it ruin your life. I'm actually a pretty composed person. I guess people imagine I spend my life thinking aboutcrazy, sinister things but I don't, really. It's not like I'm trying to exorcise any demons."
It is true, Shannon has a keen sense of humour, a great drawling, deadpan delivery. Yet on the demons issue, well, he puts the power of a show-stopping scene in Revolutionary Road, for instance, down to a festering desire to tell his own mother to "shut up".
Details from his past suggest a doomed desire for normality. He was born in Kentucky in 1974 and his mother (a lawyer) and father (an accountancy professor) split up shortly after; each parent has been married five times. At school, he played piano and viola, but was disturbed enough to be referred to a psychiatrist, whose office he trashed and counsel he refused for a spell, at least. Acting was a release. "It was basically a way to make feelings and impulses I was having appropriate. Onstage it was like: 'Please go ahead, scream, run around, beat your chest' and everybody says how wonderful you are."
Going straight from school on to thestage, he wound up in Chicago, at the Steppenwolf theatre company, including Tracy Letts, now a Pulitzer-prize-winning playwright, who wrote some of his breakthrough roles. It was in 1998, in a New York production of his play Killer Joe, that Letts noticed ashift in the balance of instinct and intelligence in Shannon's technique. "It was the first moment it was no longer watching a dog on stage," hesaid. "You can't take your! eyes of f adog on stage, but a dog doesn't necessarily help you tell good stories."
Yet Shannon still seems as reliant onpure charisma as craft. "I honestly prefer not to talk about something a lot before I do it. I don't know if that means I'm like some super-intellect or maybe it's just not that complicated. Occasionally I'll catch myself and I'm just like: 'I don't think you really knew what you were doing in that scene. I think you were just faking it.' And the other half of my brain is like: 'Well who gives a shit? If they'd wanted me to do it again they'd have asked me to.'"
He smiles, cracking the makeup slathered on for this morning's breakfast TV. He shares a shoot-from-the-hip attitude with Curtis, "an archetypal southern man who doesn't go around talking about his feelings". He shares his style, too: that pink foundation sits strangely with the lumberjack workwear: checked shirt, supermarket jeans. He prefers his stories good and bloody.
"Drama is conflict. There aren't any Greek plays about people having lunch. It's about them killing themselves, each other, the gods, the gods killing them. If Take Shelter was about a man who lived alone and ate Pringles nobody would give a rat's ass. What makes it a story is that there's a family, and a man who cares about them.
"Jeff Nichols was going through a lot of heavy stuff, a lot of anxiety about getting married and starting a family. And he wrote this movie as an expression of that anxiety. But instead of writing it straight which would be as dull as watching paint dry he made a beautiful allegory."
Shannon empathises. His daughter, Sylvia, was born three years ago to Kate Arrington, another Steppenwolf graduate. "I've never worried about anything in my life a fraction of the way I worry about my daughter. It's much more than hoping people like the play you're in, or that your outfit does! n't look bad. It's the real deal."
Take Shelter is ambivalent about attachment. It suggests that love is to trust someone else even if it goes against your instincts, but it also hints at the impossibility of intimacy.
"I do think Curtis feels isolated and alone," says Shannon. "Even from the people he loves the most. And that to me is always an interesting thing to explore. It's that whole thing of 'most men lead lives of quiet desperation'. Which is obviously one of the most profound things anybody ever said."
Does it bother him, this abiding idea that he himself is a troubled soul? He smiles. "It's OK. I get it. You can't just say Michael Shannon is an actor who's been in films and plays. Nobody's gonna read that. Who gives a crap?"
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