Writer Melinda Newman
Michael Shannon is beating himself up. It’s the day after a Q&A for his film 99 Homes
and he’s festering over an exchange with an audience member who
aggressively maintained that his character, morally challenged eviction
specialist Rick Carver, is “detached”.
Every time she said the D word, Shannon
bristled and vehemently disagreed, finally, forcefully but calmly
saying, “I was there every day. I think your perception of the character
is faulty.” By this afternoon, the clash has escalated in his memory
and he’s feeling contrite. “I just kind of lost it a little bit. I was a
little embarrassed. I got into it with a woman and I shouldn’t have
gotten into it with her,” he says, folding his
six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch frame into a chair at the Sunset Marquis
Hotel in West Hollywood. “I should have just let her say whatever she
wanted to say, but this woman kept insisting that Rick has no feelings.”
Rick isn’t real, of course. But to
Shannon, 41, he sure is. For the past 15 years, the actor has served as
the patron saint of misfits and creepy characters, making a name for
himself by playing people most of us would cross the street to avoid.
There’s the delusional paranoiac Peter Evans in 2006’s Bug, apocalyptic prophet Curtis LaForche in 2011’s Take Shelter, and mentally unstable neighbour John Givings in 2008’s Revolutionary Road,
for which Shannon was singled out—in a cast that also included Kate
Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio—for a best supporting actor Academy Awards
nomination. Last year, he wrapped the fifth season of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, portraying the puritanical, repressed Nelson Van Alden.
Even in a superhero movie like Man of Steel,
his character, Superman nemesis General Zod, has issues. So it’s no
surprise that Shannon admits to feeling protective toward outcasts like
Rick. “I do, because everybody hates his guts and Rick knows that, but
he’s still trying. He’s like, ‘Should I just quit? If I wake up tomorrow
morning and say I’m never evicting someone from their house ever again,
do you know what would change? Nothing.’ Why should he stop? It’s not
his fault.”
Though he may be best known for playing
characters on the fringes of society, his resume is filled with regular
Joes who rise above their circumstances to accomplish great things. In
Oliver Stone’s 2006 film World Trade Center, he played Dave
Karnes, a former U.S. Marine who helped rescue two police officers
trapped in the collapsed buildings. In this fall’s Freeheld, he
portrayed Dane Wells, a police officer who became one of his lesbian
partner’s leading advocates when she fought for her same-sex lover to
receive her pension benefits as she dies from terminal cancer.
The ability to bring empathy and non-judgment to his characters makes Shannon stand out among his peers, says 99 Homes
director Ramin Bahrani, who calls Shannon “one of the greatest actors
working in the world today … I see Michael as a sensitive realist with a
huge, generous heart that is in pain because our world is so violently
cruel,” Bahrani says. “That is why and how he was able to make us
sympathize with Rick Carver. To be clear, no child in kindergarten
raises their hand and says, ‘Teacher, teacher, I can’t wait to grow up
and evict families one day.’ ”
That belief that every human deserves
compassion extends to the real-life characters Shannon has portrayed,
including egomaniacal Svengali (and now alleged rapist) Kim Fowley in
2010’s The Runaways and notorious hit man Richard Kuklinski in 2012’s The Iceman.
“I’m like, well, yeah, okay, I can’t dispute that the man claimed to
have killed a lot of people, but that’s not what drew me to the story,”
Shannon says. “He was a monster, but he also possessed a great amount of
love and longing for traditional things.”
Shannon has made a name for himself by playing people most of us would cross the street to avoid.
Shannon’s wide-eyed intensity, male
equivalent of resting bitch face (check out the “Michael Shannon Tries
to Smile” Tumblr), and rugged jawline just miss making him movie-star
handsome in a way that lends itself to playing oddballs (Shannon told
David Letterman that as a young actor none other than Sidney Poitier
called him “weird”), and he wouldn’t have it any other way. “If somebody
hands me a script where a bunch of dudes run around shooting at each
other and driving cars, I don’t give a shit,” he says. “The point I’m at
now, I’m not going to go do a job unless I think it’s compelling [and]
unless I think that somebody could sit in a dark room and get something
out of it.”
It’s a bit of a cliché by this point, but
part of Shannon’s tenderness toward outsiders comes from being one
himself, with piercing adolescent wounds that have scabbed over, but
never healed. Growing up, Shannon wasn’t thinking about acting. He was
too busy navigating the tricky path between his mom’s home in Lexington,
Kentucky, and his dad’s house outside of Chicago after his parents
divorced when he was “tiny”. A few years after the split, his mother, a
social worker, remarried and had three more children. “Then he goes out
and has an affair,” Shannon says of his stepfather, running his hands
through his short, medium-brown hair. He’s still getting used to the
parameters of the cut he received the day before.
“The next thing you know, he’s gone and
it’s my mom with four kids. It was hell for all of us. It was hell for
my mom, it was hell for me,” Shannon says. “I was like, ‘I’m getting the
F out of here.’ ” He moved in with his father, a professor at DePaul
University, and transferred to New Trier High School in the wealthy
Chicago suburb of Winnetka, notable for being the inspiration for John
Hughes’s The Breakfast Club. He hated the school, calling his
time at New Trier “dark and eerie. I came there my freshman year from
Kentucky. I didn’t know anybody.”
Salvation came in the form of theatre. His first play was Winterset
at the Illinois Theatre Center in Park Forest, Illinois, when he was
16. His memories of the production are deliciously appropriate for an
adolescent boy: “It was pretty far from the city, so I would stay with
another guy in the play. I remember he had a ferret that would piss all
over everything.”
Shannon had no epiphany that he would become an actor following Winterset,
he only knew that plays provided solace. Acting “kept me from going
completely bat shit crazy because high school was a rough time,” he
says. “It was tremendously therapeutic to have that outlet.”
He continued to work in theatre and also began appearing in film, including 1993’s Groundhog Day,
where he played WrestleMania-loving newlywed Fred. After moving to Los
Angeles in 1999, he landed small parts in big films like Pearl Harbor, Vanilla Sky, and 8 Mile,
slowly gathering acclaim as he toggled between major studio projects
and indie films. He also started an indie rock band, Corporal, that
still plays together on occasion, most recently on his birthday in
August. “It’s not like a lot of people show up when we play,” he shrugs.
“At the end of the day, I’m an actor. There’s a stigma around an actor
having a band. It seems kind of silly. I don’t fault anybody for
thinking that.” Yet, like any aspiring musician, he can’t help but
wonder what might have been if he were able to devote more attention to
Corporal. “It’s frustrating because I feel like it could probably be
fairly successful, but I just don’t have the time, so when I actually do
it, it makes me kind of sad. We’ve been at this level for a long time
now and I wish I could take it to the next level.”
In person, the coiled intensity Shannon
brings to many of his on-screen characters comes across as slightly
introverted and contemplative. His blue eyes seem kind rather than
menacing, enhanced by the blue Deerhoof T-shirt he’s wearing. He is
engaged and present, coming back to questions if he doesn’t feel he
answered fully initially. He looks away frequently, rarely making eye
contact when he speaks and only occasionally when being spoken to.
Unlike almost everyone else in 2015, he isn’t shackled to an iPhone.
Shannon essentially lives off the grid or,
perhaps more accurately, sometime in the 1990s. He has a flip phone and
a CD Walkman and only uses e-mail when absolutely necessary. He has no
Facebook or Twitter accounts or even his own webpage. “Steve Jobs. He’s
the devil. Fricking Apple stuff. I don’t know how he did it,” he says.
“I mean I have a little, tiny one-and-a-half-year-old and anything
that’s made by Apple, even little babies are hypnotized by it.” He tries
to keep his girls—he and partner Kate Arrington also have a
seven-year-old—off screens as much as possible. “But it’s hard to do. My
daughters are not zombies yet. They’re still paying attention to the
real living and breathing world.”
He pauses as if to connect the dots:
“Maybe that’s why I’m so averse to technology, because it takes you out
of the moment. And that’s the nature of what I do. That’s what people
pay me money to do—[to] be in the moment.”
Shannon’s been “in the moment” a lot
lately. He shot six films in eight months, often beginning one, jetting
off to shoot another, and then returning to finish the initial film.
“I’m kind of like a paratrooper. Just drop me out of the plane,” he
says. “I land on the ground and start doing the job. Then once
everybody’s wiped out, I run out of the jungle and go on to my next
thing.” But not before giving the character everything he’s got, Bahrani
says. “Michael is a relentless bulldog who never gives up until he has
found the best way to attack a scene … He’s an endless slot machine that
shoots out nothing but gold.”
Director Ramin Bahrani calls Shannon “one of the greatest actors working in the world today.”
Up next in theatres is The Night Before
(November 20 release), a comedy starring Seth Rogen, Anthony Mackie,
and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Shannon has a small role as their high school
pot dealer. “To all those people out there wondering when I was going to
be in a comedy, here it is. Merry Christmas,” he says dryly.
While Shannon doesn’t appear often in standard-issue comedies like The Night Before,
he finds the humour, dark as it may be, in plenty of his characters. “I
mean, they wrote Van Alden funny in a very warped way. The scene where
I’m ironing the guy’s face. It’s ridiculous, for sure. How could you not
laugh? Comedy is brutal as much as it’s guys smoking weed and cracking
jokes.”
His string of playing real people continues with 2016’s Elvis & Nixon.
He plays the King to Kevin Spacey’s Nixon in the true 1970 tale that
pivots around Presley trying to persuade the 37th president of the
United States to give him a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs.
“I never thought it was a good idea for me
to play Elvis and I was scared shitless to do it,” Shannon admits,
adding that on the first day of shooting he always finds himself
“completely terrified.” Then former Elvis aide Jerry Schilling, who
accompanied Presley on his White House trip, took him out for fried okra
in Memphis and to Graceland, Sun Studio, and even the public housing
project where Presley grew up. “He put his hand on my shoulder and he
said, ‘Look, Elvis was my best friend. I knew him for years and years
and years and I’m telling you right now, I know you can do this. You
have more in common with him than you think.”
He has also reunited with Take Shelter director Jeff Nichols for 2016’s Midnight Special,
in which he plays a father who resorts to drastic measures to protect
his son, who has special powers. Shannon is De Niro to Nichols’s
Scorsese, having appeared in each of Nichols’s films, including flying
to Virginia for one day to make a cameo in Loving to keep his
streak unbroken. “I want to be in all his movies,” Shannon says. “His
scripts are all bulletproof. He’s very compassionate and we’re both from
the south. That has something to do with it.”
In March, he heads to Broadway to star in a revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night with
Jessica Lange and Gabriel Byrne. The immediacy of live performance
still enraptures him and he remains active in the 75-seat A Red Orchid
Theatre, which he helped start in Chicago 22 years ago, returning from
his and Arrington’s Brooklyn home for productions. “Camera work is very
technical. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it, but it’s not the same. Acting
in front of a camera is like surgery, it’s very precise. But the stage
is spiritual to me. It transcends thought,” he says. The more demanding
the role the better, says Shannon, who revels in the exhaustion that
comes from being on stage. “You can get lost in a play. I love being out
on stage for three hours because two hours doesn’t do it. There’s
something about keeping on going even when you’re tired, [when] you just
don’t think you can do it anymore, but you have to do something. The
ghosts come out,” continues Shannon, who had a 45-minute monologue when
he performed Eugène Ionesco’s The Killer last year
off-Broadway. “That doesn’t happen much on movies. I mean, it’s a long
day on a movie set, but when I hear people complain about it, they’re
like, ‘Oh, I’m so tired’ I just think, ‘Pussy’.”
Appearing in the Eugene O’Neill play feels
like a tip of the hat to his late father, who revered seeing Jason
Robards, Jr., on Broadway in an O’Neill play in the late fifties and
used that experience as a way to relate to Shannon’s decision to pursue
acting. “When I started acting, my father, initially, was perplexed. The
only way he could relate to it was [recalling that play] and he would
tell me how much that means to him.
“I’m a lot like my father,” Shannon
continues. “My father was actually a very charismatic and volatile
person. When he went to school, undergraduate at Duke, he enrolled in
all these Bohemian classes like philosophy and French literature and he
taught ballroom dancing. And then one day he decided that life’s
questions were too much for him to contemplate. He just wanted something
that made sense because it overwhelmed him, so he went to accounting.
Me, I didn’t get overwhelmed by it. I just kept asking.”
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