In praise of Michael Shannon

Michael Shannon says exactly what he’s thinking, and we love him for it. In a recent interview, he lays into Alexander Payne and Woody Allen. It's pleasingly at odds with the blandness of most A-list actors

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 20 Sep 2016

Actors can be boring, not because they have nothing interesting to say, but because they have teams of publicists filing away at every spiky edge to their character until it’s as flat as their gym-honed stomachs. If rock stars say something controversial their sales rocket. If an actor does similar, they could be out in the cold for years.

There’s a perfect example of this blandness in a recent interview in the Guardian with Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt, who are promoting The Magnificent Seven, directed by Antoine Fuqua. The interviewer, Ryan Gilbey, is asking the pair to discuss the political dimensions of the film, and how it relates to the current state of US politics. Both actors refuse to engage with the question.

“You’re putting too much on it, man!” Washington tells Gilbey. “It’s a movie. Antoine was excited about westerns. He grew up watching them with his grandma. He wanted to see me and Chris riding on horses… It wasn’t, like: ‘How are we going to reflect society?’” Which would be a fine answer, were it not for the fact Fuqua had already said that the reason he likes westerns is that they “reflect where we are in the world.”

Pratt, still very much on the rise in Hollywood, is even more tight-lipped: “Everything reflects,” he says. “Mirrors reflect.” Not exactly Peter Ustinov, is he? As Gilbey says at the end of the feature: “Nothing like getting blood out of stones or opinions out of A-list actors.”

Not all A-list actors are as coy, however. Not only is Michael Shannon regularly the most brightly dressed star on the red carpet – check him below in floral Hawaiian shirt, denim cutoffs and multicoloured sneakers for the premiere of American Pastoral at Toronto International Film Festival – but he gives the most colourful quotes too.

Speaking to Variety about his new film Nocturnal Animals, in which he stars with Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal, the Revolutionary Road and Midnight Special actor dropped all kinds of truth bombs. When asked if he still has to audition for parts, or if they’re just handed to him now, he recalls auditioning for Alexander Payne’s 2013 bittersweet drama Nebraska. If you’re thinking to yourself, “I can’t remember Michael Shannon being in Nebraska,” that’s because the audition didn’t go well.

“I haven’t auditioned in a while," he tells Variety. “The last person I auditioned for was Alexander Payne, because he’s Alexander Payne, so he gets to do that. But I didn’t really like him very much. He should have cast me and he didn’t. He just wasn’t very nice.” (The role went to comedian Will Forte.)

There’s no love lost, either, between Shannon and Woody Allen. “Woody Allen isn’t very nice either,” adds Shannon, unprompted.

“You’ve never been in a Woody Allen movie,” notes the interviewer.

“I know,” says Shannon. “I auditioned for some play he wrote in New York once. He doesn’t even look at you!”

Shannon’s most delightfully zen putdown came earlier in the year when he was asked by Vulture to comment on who would win out of the title characters in Batman v Superman, in which Shannon played the corpse of General Zod, the defeated villain from Man of Steel. His response was golden: “I’m so utterly unconcerned with the outcome of that fight. So profoundly, utterly unconcerned. I can’t even come up with a fake answer.

"I guess I have to root for Superman because he killed me, so I would hope that he would continue his killing spree and become like a serial killer Superman. That’s a new take on Superman. We’d all be in a heap of trouble if Superman was a serial killer. He could just wipe us all out. But then he’d be lonely.”

Don't go changing, Mr Shannon.