Playboy Interview: Michael Shannon

A candid conversation with the star of screen and stage whose bone-deep empathy leads to indelible, Oscar-worthy performances but stops at the gates of the White House

You’re not likely to find a better example of the real Michael Shannon than the story of how he spent this year’s Academy Awards night. Although he wasn’t nominated, The Shape of Water — the interspecies romance in which he co-stars as a sadistic government agent — was up for several categories, including best picture. When it took the top prize, Shannon didn’t join his director and castmates onstage; instead, he watched it all from the Old Town Ale House, a Chicago fixture where the jukebox never gets turned offand a painting of a naked Sarah Palin with a machine gun hangs on a wall. Shannon was sitting alone at the bar in a puffy jacket, nursing a beer beneath the tiny TV. If any other A-list actor had done this, it would have felt like a bad PR stunt. But when Shannon skips the red carpet to slum it at a dive bar, it feels exactly right — the perfect expression of his mercurial spirit.

If Shannon has a master plan for his career, it’s difficult to pinpoint; then again, the same could be said of his entire life. From an early age, he was a natural vagabond: Born in Lexington, Kentucky, he bounced between living with his mother, a social worker in Lexington, and his father, an accounting professor in Chicago. After dropping out of high school, he co-founded A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago, then broke into movies, first as a bit player in Groundhog Day, before deciding he wanted to do theatre instead. He fled back to Chicago to do plays including Tracy Letts’s Bug and Killer Joe, both of which went on to critical acclaim in New York and London, which led to bigger roles in such blockbusters as Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys II, which led to filmmaker Werner Herzog, who has cast Shannon three times to date, calling him “arguably the most important [actor] of his generation.”