‘What’s great about theatre is there’s no intermediary’

‘Man of Steel’ actor Michael Shannon talks to Patrick Smith about the painful truths of Eugene O’Neill, the treatment of Zack Snyder, and the issues he has with autograph hunters

- Patrick Smith

Michael Shannon is musing about his return to theatre, in a low Midwestern drawl that rumbles along like a Chevy.

“There are times on stage where it seems like it’s just kind of as fulfilling as life gets...” the star of Man of Steel and Boardwalk Empire tells me, “and there are times where you do not want to be in front of 300 strangers, torturing yourself... and everything in between. But when it hits, it’s a very unique feeling. You can’t find it out walking down the street, or doing anything else. It’s a religious feeling.”

We're in his cramped dressing room at the Almeida, where Shannon is playing Eugene O’Neill’s haunted alcoholic Jim Tyrone in A Moon for the Misbegotten. His face is all shadowy hollows and sharp angles, brow permanently furrowed. Some roles have a powerful emotional effect on him, he admits, but he tries hard to shed them afterwards. “If I were still invested in every part I ever played in my life, I’d probably be in a straitjacket,” he says.

Today he is dressed in a more leisurely T-shirt and shorts combo. The 50-year-old is lean and sinewy, carrying his height like an inconvenience, his long frame folded slightly inwards. He’s taciturn and measured, in a way that could be unnerving were there not flickers of deadpan charm. For much of our early exchanges, his eyes, capable of conveying such intensity, remain closed. He has an Albert Einstein quote tattooed on his arm: “No problem can be solved by the same level of consciousness that created it,” it reads.

You get the impression that, while he is calm and meticulous on the surface, he might at any moment boil over into that next level of consciousness. But maybe that’s just because we’re so used to seeing him flip out so convincingly on screen. Indeed, throughout his career, Shannon’s currency has been an electrifying knack for the bottle-up-and-explode school of acting. His characters are often complex studies in inner conflict.