The star of Showtime’s Masters of Sex reflects on the psychological study he makes of all the characters he plays, from a renowned sexologist to a Twilight vampire.
Michael Sheen as Dr. Bill Masters on Masters of Sex.
Showtime
Michael Sheen has played an in-over-his-head talk show host in Frost/Nixon, a powerful and villainous vampire in The Twilight Saga, and a hilariously cantankerous Englishman in 30 Rock. But there is perhaps no role more perfect for him than his current one: the closed-off and confounding sex researcher Bill Masters on Showtime's series Masters of Sex, entering its third season in July.
The character, a real-life figure, plays into Sheen's unique desire to question and probe every character flaw and motivation. And on Masters of Sex, that's encouraged.
"I suppose I took a risk in Season 1, which was to not reveal too much about him and just present him as what he is on the surface whilst I already knew what was going on underneath," Sheen told BuzzFeed News, seated at a booth in the back of The Six restaurant in Studio City, California. "It ran the risk of alienating people and people not liking the character, because very damaged people tend to not be people that you warm to in life immediately; but the more you find out about them, maybe the more you are able to have a reciprocal relationship."
The character of Bill Masters could have easily become a more traditional protagonist with someone other than Sheen in the role, but one of the actor's primary goals is to make Bill's behavior comprehensible, never simply excusing it. Whether he's softening toward his partner — both in sexual research and in bed — Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), or reverting to his bad habits, Sheen grounds the character in reality.
Of course, showrunner Michelle Ashford and the Masters of Sex writing staff had their own goals for Bill's arc, but it was Sheen who insisted on making the character, especially during the first season, a frustratingly hard nut to crack.
Masters and Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) in Season 2 of Masters of Sex.
Showtime
The complicated, flawed antihero is not new: It has, in fact, become a staple of many recent cable dramas. But Sheen wanted Bill to be distinct from Mad Men's Don Draper, Breaking Bad's Walter White, and House of Cards' Frank Underwood.
"All these characters have something that sugars that pill, and I point-blank refused to have anything that sugars the pill," Sheen said. "I wanted to make it difficult for the audience."
The pill, in this case, was Bill's backstory, but Sheen felt like revealing too much in the first season — the specter of Bill's abusive father looms much larger in Season 2 — would play right into viewer expectations.
"What I love about the form of multi-episodic storytelling on TV at the moment is that you can really take your time with revealing character, and revealing the story of this person, contextualizing them," Sheen said. "There are more shorthand ways of doing things. We get so used to them. We're so sophisticated as an audience now, we see through it."
Those who have stuck with Masters of Sex have been able to see Bill evolve — slowly, for the most part, but with a boost thanks to Season 2's time jump. For each season, Sheen finds an existing story that will give him context with which to explore Bill's journey. And Season 2, which tracked the shifting power dynamics between Masters and Ginny, was steeped in Minos, the Minotaur, and the labyrinth.
"This became the myth, for me, of Bill Masters in Season 2, a man who was turned into a monster by his father and ended up trapped in a maze, and anyone who had the misfortune to wander into that maze and meet him would be kind of punished by him," Sheen said. "That becomes the kind of guiding, underlying, unconscious part of who that character is.
If it sounds pretentious, Sheen is well aware. He even recalled Ashford delicately reminding him, "You know, other actors don't really look at where their characters sit in terms of mythology and Jungian archetypes."
"I can bore myself talking about this sort of stuff, so I know how it comes across," he said. "But ultimately for me it's a balance between this kind of work, this kind of exploration of ideas and analyzing things and that kind of stuff, and then just absolutely, in the moment, being open to something. The best work that I've done, I think, is when there's a balance between those two aspects."
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