WILL SHARPE

The actor has been on a roll since White Lotus, and his latest role as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the Starz limited series Amadeus may be his “most exciting challenge” yet

- BY H. ALAN SCOTT

How did you make this well-known story your own?

One key difference between this and the play—and the film, to a degree—is that [with] it being five hours, there's a little bit of space to explore different points of view. Where the play is sort of unilaterally from [composer Antonio] Salieri’s perspective [Paul Bettany], there's more space to sit with Amadeus and sit with Constanze [Mozart’s wife, played by Gabrielle Creevy] in this iteration. All of this music came from the real person and is an expression of something he really felt or thought. So I found myself listening to his music quite a bit, in a sort of background, almost meditative way.