How Michael Sheen transforms into his characters

Michael Sheen is starring in the UK film, The Damned United about legendary, opinionated football manager Brian Clough, with Timothy Spall as his right hand man, only friend, and crutch Peter Taylor.

From TheStar.com:

The normally reserved Sheen transforms so convincingly into the late soccer firebrand Brian Clough, a man fans loved to hate, it’s almost as if another actor were standing in for him.

But it’s all Sheen, best known on these shores as the dapper actor who played Tony Blair in The Queen and David Frost in Frost/Nixon, two roles he also aced. Clough is his first major sports figure, whom Sheen depicts during 44 tumultuous days in ’74 when he was the outspoken and ultimately turfed coach of Leeds United Football Club.

“It’s just a case of osmosis,” Blair, 40, said last week during the Toronto International Film Festival, where The Damned United had its North American premiere. It opens Friday.

“I don’t want to wear wigs or wear prosthetics or anything like that, so I just immerse myself in the world of the character. Then the impersonation side of it, to a large extent, takes care of itself.”

Sheen also did “little things” like straightening his curly hair and sweeping it up and back to match Clough’s no-fuss look.

But where Sheen really scores, in his estimation, is mastering the sound of his characters.

“It’s how we express ourselves, through our voice. We give ourselves away through our voices a lot of the time. If I’ve got everything on the inside right, I think hopefully it comes out in the right way as well.”

Getting Clough’s chipped tones precisely meant mastering the man’s mongrel blend of accents from across northeastern England (he lived and worked all over), with the addition of Clough’s own affectations. Clough was fond of his own voice, especially on TV interviews where he raged against perceived enemies.

Sheen’s hard work impressed – and even unnerved – The Damned United director Tom Hooper.

“There was this weird sense that I was directing Brian Clough, not Michael Sheen,” Hooper said at TIFF.

“There were angles I was shooting him from where he looks so uncannily like him. And yet, he doesn’t actually look that much like him. It’s just that his ability to inhabit this character is so phenomenal.

“And the research he puts into it! He watched every bit of footage of Brian Clough he could find and heard every bit of audio. He knew all of his famous quotes. He could extemporize as Clough on any subject. By the time I started shooting, there was three months of hard work that Michael had done.”

The job was all the more impressive knowing that Sheen doesn’t consider himself a big fan of soccer, or football, as it’s called in Blighty.

“I wanted to be a football player when I was a kid, as most kids do in Britain. I was given the opportunity to play with a youth team. But it would have meant my whole family relocating to London, and we lived in a small town in Wales, so that didn’t happen.”

Instead Sheen grew up to become an actor, often taking roles where he plays famous Britons, both living and dead. People now see Sheen as an embodiment of the British psyche, and he’s starting to see connections in his characters that he didn’t necessarily notice before.

He was amazed when, as he started his research for The Damned United, he found an ancient video of Frost interviewing Clough on YouTube; one Sheen character talking to another.

“A lot of these characters, Blair, Frost, Clough, are all people who want to put across confidence and charm and being very together. But underneath there’s huge ambition.

“There’s a desire to hide what would be considered the uglier emotions. But in America, no one has any problem with ambition, whereas in Britain, we have a huge problem with ambition.”

The Damned United has been out in Britain since the spring and the reaction there has been generally positive. The folks over ‘ome even feel some affection for Clough, who died in 2004.

“Back in the day, he split people a lot more. People would say, `Oh, it’s Ol’ Big Head on the telly.’ Now I think people are aware of what he gave to the game, what he represented to the country. Even the people who hated him before now really love him.”

Sheen feels a certain responsibility toward his characters, and he’s been praised for depicting Clough in less severe terms than author David Peace did in his novel The Damned Utd, which scenarist Peter Morgan adapted for the screenplay.

Sheen’s subjects don’t always return the compliment. He has met Tony Blair just once, after The Queen became an international hit, and the former British prime minister said he had no intention of seeing the movie.

But then Sheen was preparing to play Blair again in the sequel The Special Relationship, due out in 2011. It examines Blair’s encounters with former U.S. president Bill Clinton (played by Dennis Quaid) and Sheen was surprised that the politician hadn’t been completely candid with him.

“Weirdly, and this is sort of life imitating art, but in one of the interviews I saw with him (Blair), they ask him about when he went to meet the Queen for the first time … and he says, `I’m not quite sure what I did. Anyway, what do they do in (The Queen)?’

“So he uses the film to answer a difficult question! So hang on, you can’t say you haven’t seen the film and then use what happened in the film to answer the question for it!”