SundayTimes: Michael Sheen Interview + Still of "MIDNIGHT IN PARIS"

Michael Sheen’s second coming

The actor is resurrecting his home town’s Passion play — and, with the help of all Port Talbot and the Manic Street Preachers, giving it an almighty spin

The golden strand fans out to east and west. The sea ripples as far as you can see while, behind, hummocky mountains patrol the horizon. Further down the esplanade, a neon sign beckons all comers to Hollywood Park. This really could be the epic Californian coastline. The first sign that it’s not is an alternate spelling: Parc Hollywood. Gunmetal skies also give the game away, as do the belching stacks and steepling cranes of the steelworks. When all is said and done, pebble-dashed Port Talbot is not Tinseltown.

Yet, more than any community of such a size, it can claim a kind of twinning. Apart from steel, the principal export of this small, unloved town on the south coast of Wales is actors: first Richard Burton, then Anthony Hopkins and most recently Michael Sheen, next to whom I am standing on the tufted dunes. The other two never banged the drum for their home town like Sheen, who moved to Port Talbot when he was eight.

“Nobody else from here when I was growing up seemed to actually like it,” he says. “And I loved it. I thought it was the best town ever. I have a bizarre aesthetic — I find it incredibly visually exciting.” So exciting that he is coming home to mount what sounds like the most ambitious theatre project taking place anywhere in the British Isles this year, incorporating a local cast of more than a thousand. Sheen last acted in front of an audience in Frost/Nixon on Broadway. This autumn, he will be playing Hamlet at the Young Vic. For this prodigal return, however, he’ll do things such as sleep rough on Mynydd Du, the Black Mountain, which looms over the town.

Full Interview HERE

MSonline