THE DAMNED UNITED directed by Tom Hooper, screenplay by Peter Morgan based on the novel by David Peace, with Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney, Jim Broadbent, Stephen Graham and Martin Compston. A Mongrel Media release. 97 minutes. Opens Friday (October 16). For venues, times and trailers, see Movies.
Someday, Michael Sheen will have played everyone in Britain.[rssbreak]
In The Queen, he captured Tony Blair’s tics and insecurities opposite Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth II. In Frost/Nixon, he was the overmatched David Frost to Frank Langella’s raging Richard Nixon. And now, in The Damned United, he’s legendary English football manager Brian Clough, whose disastrous tenure with the top-ranked Leeds United in 1974 is the stuff of footie legend.
Sitting down with Sheen – looking suave and comfortable in his tailored suit amid the chaos of the Toronto Film Festival – I have to ask him the inevitable. Which Beatle is he eventually going to play?
“I’d want to play Lennon, but I probably would be cast as McCartney,” he laughs. “I met Paul McCartney, actually, on a flight not long ago. I was sitting there going, ‘I can’t go over there.’ And then he came over to me. He said, ‘You’re famous, aren’t you? I’ve seen you on the telly.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen you on the telly a few times as well.'”
His brief impression of McCartney is spot-on – the accent, the smiling voice, the gregarious head-bobbing, everything. Then, in a breath, he’s back to himself, talking about inhabiting a very different northerner.
“There’s a lot of affection for this man,” Sheen says of Clough. “When he was alive and managing, he was a kind of love-him-or-hate-him guy, and I think since he’s died, he’s just a love-him guy. If you think about what the game was like then as compared to now, it’s like a different world. I think Clough symbolizes that for a lot of people. And because he had a vision of the game – that it was a beautiful game, and it should be played beautifully – he’s a perfect symbol for the golden era of sports.”
Sheen knows what he’s talking about. He played football as a boy – well enough to be offered a spot on the Arsenal youth squad when he was 14. He turned it down to focus on acting, but the brush with the big leagues wound up informing his understanding of Clough.
“Clough was a player, and his career got cut short,” Sheen explains. “People said that when he was training with the players, he would stand near the goal mouth, and whenever the ball came toward him, he would put it in the back of the net, because he just wanted to score goals. There’s something kind of tragic about that – all he wanted to do was score goals, and he spent his life watching other people do that.”
Interview Clips
Michael Sheen on The Damned United’s key metaphor:
Sheen on his relationship with screenwriter Peter Morgan:
Sheen on his lifelong love affair with football:
normw@nowtoronto.com
