Michael Shannon: ‘The performance is an escape for an actor as much as it is for an audience’

Michael Shannon sounds a bit tired. That’s hardly surprising. The charismatic, commanding performer – a character actor made off-beat movie star – is down to appear in nine films this year.

Next week you can see him fleeing coppers with an otherworldly child in Jeff Nichols fascinating Midnight Special. He's playing Elvis opposite Kevin Spacey's Richard Nixon in the unambiguously titled Richard Nixon. Then there are all those other things. When does he get to see his partner and two kids in Brooklyn?

“I actually wish I saw them a little more frequently,” he says. “But we shoot very quickly these days. We shoot a movie in four or five weeks. It didn’t used to be that way.”

Come to think of it, he is briefly in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. It can't have taken too long to shoot his scenes as General Zod.

A longer than usual silence breaks out. “Um . . . Urgh . . . We’ve been told not to talk about it.” Sigh! I point out that I’ve already seen the film. (This is the week before release.) “Oh I didn’t know that. I don’t think I’m allowed to say anything about it. What did you think of it?”

Anyway, where were we?

Michael Shannon has a presence unlike any other performer. He’s a good-looking fellow, but the heavy brow and firm stare can’t help but suggest hidden menace in every character.

Troubled presence

He secured an Oscar nomination for playing the wise, troubled presence in

Revolutionary Road

who could see through the other characters’ hypocrisies. More often, he plays men who have to work hard at figuring out the madness around them. I can’t imagine he began his career by dancing on tables for the entertainment of his pals.

“No, no, no. I was very reserved. I was very quiet,” he rumbles. “I started playing music before I got into acting. I don’t really know what happened. It’s not in my family or anything. It’s not something I dreamed about doing.”

A lengthy jet-lagged silence eats up the afternoon.

“I just enjoyed taking a break from myself.”

That makes a kind of sense. Born in Kentucky, Shannon was, following the break up of his parents, shuffled between that state and Illinois.

He has talked in the past about being sent to a therapist when young, but he isn’t the sort of chap to exaggerate such early traumas. His mother, a lawyer, moved from house to house in the south. Dad, an accounting lecturer, made his way to busy Chicago. Would it be sentimental to suggest that the nascent actor learned his trade when trying to fit in after each move?

“Well, all I know is that one of the thrilling things about acting is – aside from travelling from place to place – being able to travel within yourself. You travel within your own identity.

“The performance is an escape for an actor as much as it is for an audience.”

Theatre city

Shannon was lucky in that he found himself coming of age in one of the world’s great theatre cities. In Chicago, he helped form the company A Red Orchid Theatre and worked with the eye-wateringly prestigious Steppenwolf Company. Twenty years ago, for A Red Orchid, he appeared in the first production of Tracy Letts’s

Bug

, which later became a film by William Friedkin. There must be something in the air up there by Lake Michigan. Steppenwolf alone has spewed out a stream of great actors that includes Joan Allen, John Malkovich, Gary Cole and Laurie Metcalf.

“Well, I think the risk is slightly less daunting than it is in New York,” he says. “It is very expensive even off-Broadway to put on a show. In the 1990s there was an explosion of street-front theatre and people of very high calibre were doing plays very cheaply. There was nothing to be gained from it financially. It wasn’t about making money. We just thought: what’s the best way we can do this play?”

So, when they set up A Red Orchid, neither he nor his colleagues saw the process as part of a plan to become movie stars? It was all about the work under development.

“Yes, yes, yes. Very much. That’s a very sacred thing.”

At any rate, rather against the odds for such an odd actor, Michael Shannon did eventually become something like a movie star. Watch Groundhog Day with remote in hand and you will get the chance to freeze-frame a brief cameo. He can also be spotted in Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys II and 8 Mile. Over the last decades, enthusiasts for independent film have cherished his collaborations with Jeff Nichols. He has appeared in every one of that director's off-centre, gritty films: Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, Mud and Midnight Special. Later this year, he takes a supporting role in Nichols's much-anticipated Loving. Our own Ruth Negga plays Mildred Loving, a black woman who, in Virginia during the 1950s, was imprisoned for marrying a white man.

“Oh man I think she is going to be something in this movie. This could be a really thing for her. She’s amazing,” he says with unusual animation.

So what is it with Nichols and Shannon? This has become one of those great partnerships between actor and director. Scorsese and De Niro. Fellini and Mastroianni…

“Blake Edwards and Dudley Moore?” he chortles. “The stories are about people I know and places I’ve been. I never thought I’d see that crystallised.”

They are both southerners. Is that important?

“Yeah and there’s a character in Jeff’s films that an archetype of a fellow who is thinking a lot, but he is not capable of expressing himself that well. That’s not maybe a southern thing, but it’s something that I related to. I knew people like that growing up. I think Jeff and I are on parallel tracks. We have a lot of the same preoccupations.”

Enthusiast

If there is a “Michael Shannon character” in movies then he is just as Shannon has just described. Those introverted brooders have appeal. Not everybody has heard of Michael Shannon, but almost everybody who does know his name counts as an enthusiast. There will be a few more of those when he squares up against Spacey in

Elvis Meets Nixon

. “He was spiritually adrift,” he says sadly of Elvis. “He was never very comfortable with being Elvis. He never came to terms with it.”

I guess it’s easier to cope with being Michael Shannon. I’m sure that, when people approach him, they say nice things. I’ve yet to meet a fellow who has said: “I can’t stand that Shannon guy.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” he says with unexpected vigour. “Yeah pretty much. They’re awful nice.”

So when did that start? From 2011 to 2014 he played Nelson Van Alden, agent turned bootlegger, in Boardwalk Empire. We hear that punters are more eager to approach TV actors than movie stars.

"There's something to that," he says. "But I even got it back in the day. If you're in very popular movies like 8 Mile or Bad Boys II people remember you even if you're only there for five minutes. But I guess when Boardwalk Empire came along it changed a lot."

They no longer just recognise “that guy” from some film they saw; they now recognise Michael Shannon?

“That’s right. It’s finally got to the point where people know my name. Ha, ha.”