Michael Sheen Quotes - Page 3

My rule of thumb is that I want to do things I'd like to go and see myself.

My taste in watching things runs from dramas and low-budget films to high-end fantasy/science fiction.

It's interesting that in searching for monsters to play you often end up playing leaders.

I live a very Kenneth Williams-like existence.

I think I'm becoming more relaxed in front of a camera. I suppose I'll always feel slightly more at home on stage. It's more of an actor's medium. You are your own editor, nobody else is choosing what is being seen of you.

By the time you are 30 you are still trying to make your 15-year-old self happy but you are a different person. You need to be brave and let go of that.

Although my family - parents and sister - all work in the personnel management business, their real passion is performing, amateur operatic societies and so on.

While I enjoy spending time in L.A., Britain is my home.

I can be a lazy dresser.

I've always loved animation and animated films.

A parent can seem very kind and gentle, but as any child knows, as soon as that parent gets stressed, they can suddenly turn and get a bit angry.

I think the best acting is when you allow yourself to be kind of vulnerable in the moment.

We live in a bubble of the fantasy of death, but the reality of it is something that we obviously all face and have to deal with, at some point.

When you come to actually act, it's a game. It may be a very serious game, but it's still a game. If you lose that sense of play, the work suffers.

My experience of working on this show, even though there is so much about sex and sexuality, and we find out a lot of facts and statistics that are very interesting, in their own right, I found that I started talking about relationships more, and the emotions, the difficulties and the challenges. So, I became far more open about that, which I think is probably an indication with the show itself.

You don't want to get into doing the same thing, over and over again. I know I don't.

I don't do the whole L.A. nightlife thing.

With vampires, there is such a great tradition that you suddenly find yourself a part of. Each generation reinvents what that means to them.

The more you think that you are watching a show about sex, the more you ultimately are watching a show about the challenges of just connecting with human beings and being intimate.

But obviously, things have changed in many ways since the '50s, when the show is started, in terms of sexuality, and how much access we have to images of it and information about it. But, the same problems always apply. It doesn't matter whether we know a lot more about sex now or if there's a lot more access to it. The same problems of intimacy, of dealing with other people, of connecting and being vulnerable with other people, which is what the show is ultimately about, still applies now, I think.

Having said that, what I think we found, in doing the show, and in life, generally, is that the more you try to separate sex from everything else, it's impossible. You can't. The act of observation affects the actual experiment, and we see that in this.

Well, I think tone is very important with this show [Masters of Sex] because there are certain elements or certain aspects to the show that may be reminiscent of other shows. But, it really is a very new kind of show, in terms of the subject matter and the way it's being dealt with, and the fact that it's about real people and real events.

We knew, very early on, that we had to be very, very clear that directors need to speak to actors and actresses and be very clear about what is expected, and find out whether they're comfortable with that. Wardrobe has to be in place. There have to be checks.

It has to be absolutely believable. It's also going between images and scenes with nudity and sexuality that would be seen, in conventional terms, as kind of sexually exciting. It's up against things that are much more medical and gynecological, and notoriously we, as a culture and a society, have some issues with that kind of thing.

When you're working on something where there's usually one sex scene in the film, it all gets a little bit of a gray area and people get a bit uncomfortable and awkward. You just get through it. But, it became very clear on this that that can't happen. There can't be any gray areas on this because there are actors and actresses coming in for a day or a couple of days, as well as people who are there regularly.