Michael Sheen was more of the definitive Tony Blair in The Queen than Tony Blair is himself. He also channeled reporter David Frost in Frost/Nixon. Now he plays Leeds United’s brief manager Brian Clough in The Damned United. Sheen shared his artistic process for imitating life, and also gave hints as to what’s in store with him in New Moon, where he plays Voluturi vampire Aro. 

Crave Online: You look so much like Brian Clough that I thought it was him on the TV monitors during the interview scene.

Michael Sheen: It was an actual interview. It’s all me. It’s us recreating an actual interview that happened in life that you can watch but we don’t show any of it in the film. It’s just all the interview. It’s just an uncanny lifelike ability that I have to change. No, the interviews that bookend the film, the one at the beginning and the one at the end, are both based on real interviews at least. It is extraordinary viewing to watch them. The fact that he did on his first day at Leeds go to a TV interview first is kind of extraordinary and the fact that that last interview they do they really did surprise him with Don Revie. He didn’t know he was going to be there and it was the day that he’d been sacked and just went to the TV interview and then suddenly, there’s his nemesis sitting there next to him on his day of humiliation. It’s really extraordinary viewing to watch it. And I did, I watched it over and over, both interviews over and over again, not to try and copy what he did but just to try and get to the heart of what’s going on for him, to try and find the spirit of what’s going on for him rather than to try and slavishly imitate him.

Crave Online: Was this process any different from other historical characters and what stood out about Brian?

Michael Sheen: Well, look, the process is always the same in terms of the work I do beforehand. I’ll start with just watching the person and I’ll find one book and I’ll start reading through one book. I don't know whether it’s a good book or not. I’ll just find a book about him because you’ve got to start somewhere, and then I’ll start watching footage. There’s a team of researchers who put together all the footage for me and find all the stuff. Then I slowly start working my way through everything that exists about the person. Eventually I’ll find there’ll be one book that I find really useful and there’ll be certain bits of footage that I find for some reason I connect with. I might not even know why I connect with it to begin with and I might only find that out by the end but something will kind of speak to me about it. I’ll sort of compile all that and then that becomes my kind of talisman in research that I’ll just go back over that, and over that and over that over and over again. With Brian, I suppose what I found was that for a man who was famous in Britain for being the epitome of arrogance and self confidence and self believe, the thing that surprised me was how little self confidence he actually had, how little self belief, how much he had to achieve things in order to boost up his feeling of self-belief, self-esteem. Anyone who’s that driven to achieve and to win and to be the best, I think feels like they have to make up for something. There’s some sort of never ending hunger for something that can never be fulfilled. I think with Brian it was the fact that he was stopped from doing what he wanted to do when he was a younger man. He was a player and that was his dream and that dream was cut short. I think for anyone, you look at people who get in accidents, in car accidents or motorbike accidents when they are young and they’re not able to do what they want to do. There’s a whole psychological thing that you have to go through to accept that I suppose and I don't think he ever really accepted that. So there was always this kind of frustrated resentment in him. That whole disguise, that mask was covering that up and underneath that was a lot of vulnerability and insecurity and anxiety and wanting to be told you’re the best, you’re the best. Rather than him being able to just go, “I am the best.” He didn’t have the confidence to do that so I suppose that was the revelation, for a man who was supposedly one thing to kind of use that and then discover something underneath.

Crave Online: Do you remember Brian Clough yourself?

Michael Sheen: Well, the events of the film, when he was at Leeds in 1974, I was five so I don’t remember that. But he went on, his greatest achievements were after this. He went on, he found a team called Nottingham Forest. They were in the bottom of the second division or something and he took them not only to the top of the first division but into Europe and they won the European Cup twice, so what he achieved there, with Peter Taylor again, was unprecedented and never done again. So I remember that. That’s what I kind of grew up with. And I suppose also the later Clough where towards the end of his time in Nottingham Forest, as the alcohol took its grip on him more and more, he became more ravaged and bloated looking and he became in some ways quite a tragic figure because he and Taylor argued again, split up, they never made it up. Taylor died, Clough never forgave himself I think for never making things up with Taylor and he just got more and more kind of in the grip of it.

Crave Online: You played Tony Blair twice. Any talk of the Brian Clough sequel?

Michael Sheen: That’s true. Well, because this is an adaptation of a book obviously and there is no other book to do but there is a whole other story there which would make for great telling so maybe in a few years time, when I’m a bit older, I’ll do the last few years of Blair and the last few years of Clough as well.

Crave Online: Why did Brian rub his eye?

Michael Sheen: Yeah, it’s something he did quite a few times I watched and it works very well obviously. It makes it seem like he’s not that bothered about what he’s being asked about. I found that if I did that, if I used that when he was being asked something like momentous or whatever, it sort of had a good effect. It was all about deflection. He was a magician, Clough. He was a master media manipulator I suppose. That kind of insouciance that he would have, that sort of nonchalance about saying huge things, hugely outrageous and kind of controversial things whilst just all he’s doing is rubbing his eye and not really thinking about it. I think it all added to that kind of persona that he used. I think he was a self mythologizer and kind of iconoclast and he used that brilliantly.

Crave Online: How much of a futbol fan are you?

Michael Sheen: Well, I’m a big football fan. Not as big as I used to be. When I was a kid, that was all I cared about was football. All I wanted to do was be a football player. When I was a kid, if I wasn’t at school, I’d be playing football in the street or in the football field next to me. Even when I was at school, every time there was a break, I’d be playing football and talking about it and getting football stickers and filling up albums and all that kind of stuff. Then when I was 12, I got offered the possibility of going to play for Arsenal, the youth team, and then coming through. I lived in a small town in Wales and it would’ve meant my whole family having to go and live in London so my dad said, “No, if you’re still interested when you’re 16 then you can go then.” But it’s too late when you’re 16. You have to go when you’re much younger. And also I was into other thing by then like girls, drinking and acting.