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Michael Sheen on Music Within
By Fred Topel | Image property of MGM.
Michael Sheen seamlessly transformed into Tony Blair for The Queen. He is even more unrecognizable as Art Honeyman. Confined by cerebral palsy, Honeyman hooked up with Richard Pimental in a rehabilitation facility. The two became fast friends throughout their work finding jobs for disabled veterans.
Michael Sheen Talks Music Within
"It’s interesting because you’re playing a real person," said Sheen. "Just because nobody outside of his immediate circle of family and friends knows who he is, in a way that doesn’t affect the process at all. It’s exactly the same process as playing someone who everybody is familiar with, because I’m not trying to do an imitation of the person, I’m trying to work out who they are underneath, and the way the express themselves and the way they move. All the external things are an expression of what’s going on underneath."
CP is a very specific disorder, so Sheen did nail that one to an extent. To be totally accurate might not have been cinematic. "The reality of speaking, or having a conversation with Art is that to get one word out takes about a minute. So to get a sentence takes a long time. To actually, realistically, represent that in the film it would take twelve hours the film. So I brought that up with [director] Steve [Sawalich] when we first started talking about it, and I said, ‘Well look, how’s that going to work?’ And he said, ‘Well, I think for the purposes of the film the audience will see Art as Richard sees him, as Richard hears him.'[ So because Richard can understand what Art is saying, then you sort of see it through his eyes."
Pimental understood Honeyman because the registers of his Palsy coincided with the only registers he could hear with his disability. However, the film takes an outside perspective at least once. "In the scene in the pancake house, the first scene in the pancake house, we sort of thought it was important that the audience see what they see at that point. In that bit you can’t understand what Art is saying, and I do realistically show what it’s like to get one word out takes a long time, but you can’t do that for the whole film. So I tried to give a sense of that without having to slavishly stay to it."
Music Within
Sheen isn't method. He did get out of his wheelchair for coffee breaks, but did commit to a certain Art Honeyman experience. "I did stay in the chair for quite a bit. I always talk about it like, it’s like turning the volume down a bit, because you can’t sort of switch it on and off, something like that, but you can’t keep doing it at force blast all day because it’s exhausting. I had to have physical therapy every day anyway. I had to have someone who worked on my body because I was all messed up at the end of the day, so in between takes it’s like just turning the volume down to five, so I’d still be in but it would be just on a much lower level. And towards the end of the film I’d sort of mess with people, and be doing the scene, and if there were a lot of extras that day, we’d be doing it and then at the end of it I would go, ‘Great, that’s brilliant, thanks,’ and I’d walk off and you’d see people go huh, what happened. But that was when I was sort of comfortable with it all, so I’d mess with people a little bit."
Music Within opens to theaters on October
26th.
For the trailer, poster, clips and more movie info, go to the Music Within
Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of MGM.
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