A Damned Good Acting Lesson From Michael Sheen

The "Frost/Nixon" star on the kick he got from playing a soccer coach in "The Damned United."

Do you find it easier when you’re putting on the makeup and the long hair to get into a character like Aro than when you play, say, Brian Clough in a suit and tie?

It’s all part of it. With Brian Clough, as soon as I had my hair done and made the eyebrows a bit bushy or something, put the suit on…it’s dressing up, isn’t it? It’s back to playing, when you’re a kid and you pick up a sword and you’re a knight. It’s little symbols of the character that just get your imagination going. It becomes a bit more sophisticated the older you get, but in other ways, it’s just as simple as that. It’s anything that allows your imagination to engage in what you’re doing and suddenly, you’re not acting. When you’re a kid in your room and you’re pretending to be a pirate, there’s a moment in play, and I’ve seen it when kids do it, they’re not pretending anymore, they just are it. That’s the level you’ve got to get to no matter how old you are.

The amazing thing about this performance is how tight your face seems to be throughout the entire film. I must admit I thought it was makeup at first.

I would never use prosthetics. I don’t like sticking things on. I don’t really like wearing wigs, either. For the real-life characters, I’ll just use my own hair and put weight on, lose weight, do whatever I can to change myself without actually adding anything — then it’s about really trying to change myself. With Frost, his mouth shape is very different to Clough’s mouth shape — the structure of the jaw — Blair’s is different, so I find the more I inhabit this person, the more I immerse myself in their world, the more I start to see that the way they use their mouth is different and then that changes the whole shape of my face and slowly, it transforms.

I’ve read that you come from a family of entertainers — your father is known as a part-time Jack Nicholson impersonator — so was there some sense of one-upmanship at the dinner table?

It would be interesting to go back a few generations in my family and get them all together, because my great-great-great-grandmother was an elephant and lion tamer with Barnum & Bailey Circus. She was married to a classical actor, and we’ve got preachers and carnival and fairground people in our family — it would be great to get the whole mixture. My parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts were all into amateur musical stuff, so everyone was always prepared to tell a good story. But when I grew up, I just liked to listen. I didn’t enjoy the performing of it that much, but I’ve always been a good listener.

“The Damned United” opens in New York and Los Angeles on October 9th.

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