Michael Sheen

William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s groundbreaking research into human sexuality broke down misconceptions and prejudices about sexual behavior and dysfunctions. The series Masters of Sex is based on these two scientists, who set off the sexual revolution. As analytical and scientific as Masters was in his work, he masked deep emotional wounds that severely impeded him as a human being. Michael Sheen, who has played numerous real-life people in film and on stage, gives a brilliant performance as Bill Masters.

WS: What research did you do into the role of Bill Masters and do you have a process to get to the essence of a character?
SHEEN: This is the first time I’ve played a character where the context is so different from anything else I’ve done. Twelve hours per season is a very new process for me, rather than a film or a play or a TV film where you have the entire story from the start. My process is usually knowing what the whole story is, having a script and then working out what the journey of the character is and what you might be focusing on in any given scene, depending on where that scene comes in the structure of the piece. Whereas with Masters of Sex and Bill Masters, I didn’t have that. I had a pilot script to decide if I was going to be a part of it or not, and because it’s based on a real person, I also had materials about him to get a sense of the facts of his life and his career. Then it was about talking to Michelle Ashford, the show’s creator and head writer, about what sort of show we thought we would be able to explore, what sort of character we thought this man might be, where he might go and what were the things that I was interested in. So it was a very different way to approach a character and journey for me and it’s one that is still evolving. I’ve been able to have so much input and contribute so much based on what I am discovering about who the character is. It’s something I have never experienced before. In films, as you start to know more about the character and have a stronger connection with him, you can’t put that back into the story other than how you played the character. You can’t actually change things or come up with ideas for what might happen. The story is the story. But with Masters of Sex you can. That has been really exciting.

Sometimes in the middle of a scene—in that moment of actually doing it—the most interesting things come out. You haven’t planned them, it’s not something that is from the head; it’s some sort of experiential thing. Having a working set where I can guide where the character goes and what the story lines might be is really exciting. I’ve never experienced that before. So it’s a very different process for me.

Another thing that I am experiencing is that when you work on a character over a long period of time, the character starts to become more and more an amalgamation of the character as written, in this case a real person, but also me. My raw material is more than anything, me. As the audience does, the actor also spends so much time with the character. More and more of myself starts to come into it, not just the bits I’m aware of but the bits I’m unaware of. In creating Bill I’ve consciously tried to be as honest as I can in portraying the things that people might think are negative about him. There are things that are very much connected to who I am and the parts of myself that I am very ambivalent about. I didn’t want any of what was going on for Bill to be inauthentic, or to create some distance just because I’m doing things that I wouldn’t want people to see me do. I wanted them to be rooted in something. So when people come up to me and say, That Bill is such an asshole, I’m hurt by it because it’s me!

WS: Bill can show much more compassion and understanding for his patients than he does for his wife or son. What made him that way?
SHEEN: At the very core of who this man is and of his relationships and the way he has lived his life up to this point is what happened between him and his father when he was younger. He is a survivor of physical abuse. His father would violently beat him for no reason, so he’s grown up in the shadow of that apparently meaningless random punishment from the person who should have been protecting him. That shapes you in many ways. One of the greatest fears for Bill is that he could perpetuate that behavior. It’s like a poison that gets put into you by the abuser. One of the most demoralizing and destructive elements of that abuse is that it makes you feel that it now lives in you and you might perpetuate that cycle of abuse. So it struck me as something out of a Greek play that in trying to run away from this fate you run straight into it. In trying to not do what his father did to him, Bill is keeping his son at arm’s length. He is frightened of what the child might bring out in him and that he might not be in control. But by trying to create distance and not getting involved with his son, that is a different form of abuse or neglect. In season three we are seeing Bill starting to deal with the consequences of that. For all the apparent coldness and neglect toward his son, it’s actually coming from a place of trying to protect him and that is one of the awful paradoxes of having grown up a survivor of abuse.

With his wife, it’s another consequence of growing up with that experience—a sense that the universe is out of control. If the person that is supposed to protect you and look after you is actually the one who randomly exerts awful pain and terror on you, then the universe is very dark. Anything can happen at any time, and you have no control. In Bill’s case he’s grown up looking for anything that he can control, so he can retain some sort of balance in his world. He’s become a very controlling person; he has buried who he might be. I don’t think he ever really had the opportunity to find out who he really is, or what his authentic needs and desires are, because he has suppressed them and he controls his environment. The man we meet at the very beginning of the story is a man who had total control over his kingdom. He has a domestic life that has been consciously chosen. He has a wife he has consciously chosen in order to look a particular way. We see in flashbacks Scully, his mentor, saying to him, If you want to go down this very controversial road, you are going to need very respectable qualifications in terms of your specialized subject area and a very respectable family life. So Bill has chosen his domestic life. I don’t think it was done maliciously, [it just] happened and as time has gone on he and his wife just aren’t meant to be together.

The big, big, upheaval occurred when this woman Virginia Johnson came into his life and something in her called to the part of Bill that he had buried for so many years. And perhaps a more authentic part of Bill starts to look for oxygen. Those aspects of himself that he buried and locked up can’t live in the world he has created around himself, so that world has to be pulled down. So while listening to this truer self is a very positive thing for him, his listening to that becomes hugely destructive and that is always an interesting place to explore for a character and a drama.

WS: Does Bill use Virginia to get his research done and take a shot at the Nobel Prize or does he really respect and love her enough to elevate her to a partner status?
SHEEN: As is my experience in life there is no black or white answer. My experiences in life and what I’ve tried to bring to this character is that there is what we think we want and what we actually want. Then there is what life does to us and how that all interplays. I think of it as currents under the sea. What you see happening to a body on the surface of the water is often a result of the current underneath. It’s very complicated to be able to work out the patterns that shift over time. This is one of the things I find so interesting about the story in this long form. The narrative grammar we got used to in the 90-minute structure of film is different from [a TV series]. When you’ve got 12 hours in a season you can really explore those currents in a very different way. You don’t have to have an incident that creates instant change for the character, because it doesn’t happen that way in life. There are incidents that happen and maybe years down the line you realize, Oh this has changed as a result of that. This is one of the things I find most fascinating about telling the story this way and Masters of Sex can reflect that.

In answer to your question of whether he is using Virginia, it’s a mixture of his own complications and confusions and mixed up agendas and emotions and desires. He is experiencing things in the same way as other people are experiencing him. That is what has been interesting in season three, seeing some things he had locked down start popping out and surprise him as much as they surprise anyone else. That is fascinating.

WS: You and Lizzy Caplan have many intimate scenes. I imagine you developed a comfort zone to be able to shoot them. Is that a difficult process?
SHEEN: It hasn’t felt like a difficult process at all. It was never awkward. We connected early on with the rush and excitement of doing this show and starting this journey. That helps; that gives a kind of momentum to prepare yourself. Neither of us had partners at the time, which helped! We were doing very intimate and vulnerable scenes and that would have been difficult for partners to deal with at that point. I’m glad no one had to deal with that!

Then very quickly, not just doing the physical things but also emotionally and psychologically, coming to grips with the material, the characters and the relationships, we came to feel trusting of each other quite quickly. And that was combined with learning about what it takes for everyone to be comfortable and confident and secure doing those kinds of scenes. Because it’s one thing when you are doing maybe one sex scene in a film, where there are a lot of grey areas, people don’t really talk about everything because they are a little awkward or embarrassed. But in our show there is a lot of sex in every episode, there was no room for grey areas. We had to be very clear about what the process needed to be, what a closed set actually means, what the actors need when the director says cut, and what needs to be set up the day before the scene. Nothing is left till the day itself. Everything is being talked about; every expectation is explored, whether it’s costumes or the director or the other actors or whatever it might be. There was some difficulty in the beginning to learn all those lessons, but that has made it so much easier ever since. Lizzy and I have such an ease and trust of each other that I can’t imagine it being any other way now.

WS: The show deals with human nature and women and sexism, making it so contemporary for people today.
SHEEN: It’s interesting that people are rightly seeing that the show is dealing with feminine sexuality and exploring that in a way that hasn’t been done before. But it’s equally interesting that people haven’t picked up as much on the exploration of male sexuality, not just sexuality but masculinity and what that means and how that has changed. The idea of male impotence and male sexual dysfunction, how that affects a man and his sense of his own masculinity and therefore how that affects his relationship with his partner, whether it’s a male partner or a female partner, that is something that has been underestimated.

So ultimately, my overriding interest has been how we as human beings deal with intimacy, not just physical intimacy but emotional and psychological intimacy as well. How do we cope with knowing that for any relationship to be truly meaningful, we have to allow into that relationship the aspects of ourselves that we most want to defend and hide from people, because that is what creates the meaning for it. But when you do that you are then so frightened about losing that relationship. There is that image of two animals with their fangs very deeply buried into each other’s necks. If one of them lets go it will kill the other one because it would bleed to death, so they just hang on. And there is something about that, even though it’s a brutal, negative image.

[The irony is that] when you have so much emotional investment in a relationship with another person, it brings out every insecurity, every warning system that we have and makes us say, I am vulnerable, I am not protected here, I could be killed at any moment, and yet I have to act as if that’s not the case. I have to be open and I have to be vulnerable. We defend against vulnerability all the time in every aspect of our life. It’s the greatest challenge for us. In evolutionary terms we have evolved the way we have because we are guarding against our vulnerability. So when a relationship requires vulnerability it’s such a difficult game we have to play to stay vulnerable with someone who has all the ammunition to hurt us. And that is in every relationship we have, but obviously the stakes become much higher in a relationship with a sexual aspect as well. Everyone is dealing with it every minute of the day. That’s why even though there are no gun fights on our show, or any of the more sensationalist aspects of a lot of the shows that are popular, I really do feel every day when I go to work on Masters of Sex, it’s about the most important thing that we are all dealing with every day as human beings. No matter what country we are in, no matter what ethnicity we are, no matter what sexual or religious orientation, this is what it is to be a human being and have relationships with other human beings.

WS: Is it easier to play characters based on people who lived in real life because you have so much more material to draw on, or is it more challenging because the audience has such a clear image of the person that you’re playing?
SHEEN: It’s easier in some ways and it’s harder in some ways. If you are playing Bill Masters, even people who have heard of him or know about what he did, certainly don’t look at me on the show and think, Bill didn’t look like that or he didn’t sound like that. That’s different from playing someone like Tony Blair or Robert Frost, who are much more current and much more familiar to the audience. But in some ways having audience familiarity with a character and some expectation gives you another instrument in your orchestra, you can riff on what the expectation is. The writer Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Queen), who I worked with playing lots of characters based on real-life people, was so brilliant at being able to play with people’s expectations and convert them and create that lifting-the-veil kind of thing—whether it’s suddenly feeling sympathy for someone like Richard Nixon, or seeing a more vulnerable side to the Queen. That is a really positive thing and it gives you the structure you need to look at the actual life of the person. There’s usually a lot of material and video, and with the internet now there is all kinds of stuff you can look at. That gives you things that are tangible that you can work with, as opposed to a totally fictional character where there is much more choice that you have to make, there is much more freedom I suppose. Having that structure can be really great. But with someone like Bill Masters, where there are certain things that are known and there is structure to work on, we have to invent because there is so little known about the private life and what was really going on inside him. So by necessity we have to invent and there is a freedom in that as well.