Michael Sheen, who played talk show host David Frost both on stage and now in the upcoming screen version of "Frost/Nixon," knows that the transition can be scary.
"The great joy and fear about working in front of a camera is that it picks up everything," said Sheen. He rejoined his stage costar Frank Langella for director Ron Howard's adaptation of Peter Morgan's acclaimed play about the 1977 interviews that revived Frost's career and humanized a disgraced Nixon. The film opens Friday.
So when Frost's cheerily sly grin dissipates on screen or a glimmer of despair flashes across his eyes as he bears the weight of turning his hard-won interview with Nixon into great TV, moviegoers see things that theater audiences in London and New York -- outside the first few rows -- didn't get to see.
"In theater, you have to find ways to get things across," said the curly haired, Welsh-born actor. "On film, Frost became more internal. Things could be more fleeting, and more ambiguous. What comes through a lot more is the insecurity and desperation, the desire to be liked and yet feeling that things are going badly."
The 39-year-old Sheen has already proved how good he is at dramatizing the private worries of a public figure with his portrayal of Tony Blair in the fact-based drama "The Queen," also written by Morgan. The Blair/Frost twofer has established him as a chameleonic new star of sorts, although Sheen is quick to point out that an actor's transformation inevitably functions as a mirror.
"I think it was Oscar Wilde who said: Give a man a mask, and he'll show you his true face," Sheen said recently in an interview at a Beverly Hills hotel. "Of all these characters, I'm only playing myself. Because that's all I've got. At some point I recognize myself in them, and that's the starting point. I build everything from there."
In prepping to play Frost, Sheen watched footage of the British host's old show, along with other research. (He chose not to meet the man himself until after the play was up and running in London.) But with portraying any real person, Sheen says, what counts is the character the writer envisioned. "You can fight against it, but ultimately the story is the master, and it's always going to be Peter Morgan's Frost," says Sheen. "You have to sublimate yourself to that and accept it."
