Welsh-born Michael Sheen has long been one of ComingSoon.net’s favorite actors to talk to and when we learned that he was going to be in Toronto for his new football (soccer) biopic The Damned United–his first time at the Toronto International Film Festival since starring in Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things in fact–we had to take some time to sit down with him.
Sheen has been extremely busy as of late, following his turn as David Frost in Ron Howard’s Oscar-nominated Frost/Nixon with a number of other high profile films. Later this year, he’ll be seen as the Italian vampire leader Aro in The Twilight Saga: New Moon and he also voiced the White Rabbit in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, out in March.
The most recent announcement was that Sheen would be playing a role in Disney’s upcoming Tron Legacy and everyone automatically assumed he’d be playing a villain–why do they always assume that? Do they not realize what a nice guy he is?–but earlier, he revealed exclusively to ComingSoon.net that he would in fact be playing a nightclub host in the Tron world.
“That was amazing, because there’s a lot of green screen in that,” he told us, “But my stuff was mainly in this amazing set that they built because I’m a nightclub host, so they built the nightclub and there were hundreds of extras and it was one of those great scenes where there’s just loads going on.”
He went on to comment on the much-viewed short film (the Grid VFX Concept Test) that was used as a demo to get the film greenlit, saying that the movie has far surpassed the impressive CG work in that film. “[Director Joseph Kosinski] did that to get Disney to give the okay to make the film. Joe now says that he doesn’t like people seeing that because it’s moved on so much from that, and that looks awesome.”
The young female fans of the “Twilight” series who may be unfamiliar with Sheen’s previous work, except possibly his turn for the “other side” playing a werewolf in the “Underworld” movies, should be pleasantly surprised by what he brings to the series as Aro, although he already knows that he’ll not be in Eclipse, even though he believes his character will indeed be back for the fourth film, Breaking Dawn.
(Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to ask him about the rumors of another “Underworld” movie and whether he might be involved, but hopefully, we’ll have a chance to ask his co-star Bill Nighy about that tomorrow.)
You can look for the entire interview with Sheen closer to the U.S. release of The Damned United in select cities on October 9.
