That the actor Michael Shannon has time for an interview is, in and of itself, staggering. The theater, television and film veteran and Oscar-nominee (for 2008’s “Revolutionary Road”) has five films to his 2015 resume, with nine — yes, nine — pending next year, according to the IMDB.
Last fall he concluded his run as the troubled Prohibition agent-turned-Capone lackey Melvin Van Alden on the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.” And Mr. Shannon is currently in rehearsals for “Pilgrim’s Progress” with A Red Orchid Theater, his stage company in Chicago, in between trips to California to commit his next projects to celluloid.
“I don’t get much free time,” Mr. Shannon, 41, told The Washington Times at the weekend.
His statement is borne out by the fact that two of Mr. Shannon’s films are bowing this month alone. “Freeheld,” a true-life story about a New Jersey policewoman fighting against entrenched orthodoxy to bequeath her pension to her wife, is out Friday. “99 Homes,” a darling of the festival circuit, is out now.
In the latter film, Mr. Shannon plays real estate shark Richard Carver for director Ramin Bahrani. Carver, a veritable devil figure, evicts unfortunate Floridians from their homes in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis and then scoops up properties for pennies on the dollar. The film opens with Carver evicting Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), his son and mother (Laura Dern).
“His survival instinct I found very compelling,” Mr. Shannon said of the vulpine Carver. “The way that he ferreted out the way to work the system to his advantage, which is hard to do because the system is a beast.
“It’s a labyrinth, and most people get gobbled up by the minotaur. But Rick has figured out a way to not be a victim, which … in spite of some of his ethics, I have to say I admire.”
Such cynicism is a key element of “99 Homes.” At first angry and frustrated at circumstances, Dennis takes a desperate gamble to make ends meet by in fact going to work for Carver. To even his own surprise, Dennis finds he is rather adept at eviction and turning over properties to Carver’s firm, launching a dynamic similar to such tales of capitalistic woe as “Wall Street” as Dennis effectively becomes Carver’s dark apprentice.
On the poster, Mr. Garfield is seen in profile, a wounded pleading in his eyes for salvation, while Mr. Shannon is seen at bottom, his gaze fixed and menacing, perhaps incapable of empathy. As Mr. Bahrani himself said at Ebertfest in April — where the film had its U.S. premiere — “It’s not like [Richard] was born to be [a villain]. The system created him.”
A key moment in the film occurs at the film’s climax, when Dennis makes a crucial public choice about his relationship with Carver. Carver, surprised — if not humbled — delivers his character’s benediction in a simple line of dialogue that Mr. Bahrani did not write.
“[Mr. Bahrani] just confessed to me, ’I don’t have an ending,’” Mr. Shannon said. “’I just can’t figure out how this relationship should end between these two people.’”
While shooting the final scene, Mr. Shannon, Mr. Garfield and Mr. Bahrani tried various exchanges between Dennis and Carver, until one particular take when Mr. Shannon ad libbed the now-crucial closing line. It was a cut and a print.
“I think the best, the richest, the most complex ending will probably materialize out of the moment,” Mr. Shannon said. “You’re not going to be able to sit and write some big long soliloquy that’s going to make everyone stand up and applaud.
“I had to figure out how Rick felt, and I figured it out during the take. I figured it out while the camera was pointed at my face.”
“Michael Shannon is like an endless machine of gold, always spitting out more gold,” Mr. Bahrani said of his villain.
Thinking on his feet
Born in Lexington, Kentucky (his favorite bourbon is Blanton’s) the unconventionally handsome Mr. Shannon came to stardom via the Chicago stage. He cut his teeth downtown with such iconic companies as the Steppenwolf, co-founded by Gary Sinise. He followed the lights to both New York and London, with the odd TV and film work out in Los Angeles.
But it was as the strangely, sinisterly offbeat Peter Evans in “Bug” that made Hollywood take notice. Mr. Shannon originated the role of the mentally unsound Evans, who convinces a woman named Agnes White that the government is secretly tracking them with small, unseen insects, which takes them both on a rapid descent into shared paranoia and psychopathy.
After scoring a Joseph Jefferson Award nomination for his 200 stage performances of “Bug,” Mr. Shannon was cast in the 2006 film version written by the playwright, Tracy Letts, and directed by William Friedkin (“The Exorcist”). The film co-starred Ashley Judd as the impressionable Agnes.
“You do the play, you do the whole thing from top to bottom, and then you go get a hamburger or something. But when you do the movie you shoot like three pages in one day,” Mr. Shannon said of the difference between proscenium and soundstage acting.
The slow pace of filmmaking, he said, allowed him to go deeper than ever before into the defective gears that made Peter Evans tick unevenly.
“I never feel like I’ve found everything there is to be found,” he said of delving into the abyss that was Evans in the film. “For me the movie is another opportunity. … I guess a great thing about the structure of shooting the movie is that you get to go in and explore the moments in a microscopic way.”
On the strength of his screen performance in “Bug,” Mr. Shannon began briskly stamping out an oeuvre of quirkily wound-up film characters — frequently on edge. In his acting, his deep voice is often kept in check; he speaks silently and methodically until his character’s rage typically bursts forth in a torrent of fire.
One particularly gruesome scene on “Boardwalk Empire” had his Van Alden snapping and burning an adversary’s face with a clothes iron. (His propensity for such sub-level danger suddenly flaring volcanically was even channeled comically into a Funny or Die sketch, in which he read aloud a much-lambasted letter from a furious sorority president to her pledges.)
It was also on the strength of “Bug” that Mr. Shannon met Chicago’s “papa bear” of film barometrics. While promoting the movie at Cannes, Mr. Friedkin introduced Mr. Shannon to Roger Ebert, the venerable critic for the Sun-Times.
Mr. Shannon described Ebert as an “icon” and a man who championed often-underappreciated films — and which led to his founding his own film festival in his hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, 135 miles south of Chicago.
“Something that really meant a lot to me that Roger did — and I still [have the article] cut out of the paper — was his review of ’Shotgun Stories,’” Mr. Shannon said of the small 2007 film. “We were pretty well convinced that nobody on earth would ever see it, and there’s Roger Ebert giving it four stars and talking about what a unique beautiful artist [director] Jeff [Nichols] is.”
So grateful was Mr. Shannon to Ebert’s blessings that he made frequent appearances at the critic’s annual spring film festival. Mr. Bahrani, director of “99 Homes,” was another artist whom Ebert, who died in 2013, gave his backing to.
“I’ve always felt his belief in me was more than I believe in myself,” Mr. Bahrani said at April’s Ebertfest screening of “99 Homes.”
The film is even dedicated to Ebert’s memory.
A busy playbill
Mr. Shannon has become Hollywood’s go-to thespian for the unsteady, the oddball, the cheerily vile, sometimes the even furiously violent. He was magnificently over the top as Kim Fowley, the late manager of the 1970s girl group, in 2010’s “The Runaways,” and he effectively menaced Superman as the evil Gen. Zod in 2013’s series reboot, “Man of Steel.” (While listed on the cast list of next summer’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” Mr. Shannon maintains he isn’t sure if he is even appearing in that film, offering: “Hell if I know, I thought [Gen. Zod] was dead!” The IMDB lists the film’s status as “completed.”)
When asked his opinion on a promotional legal notepad tie-in for “99 Homes” featuring Mr. Shannon’s likeness and “Richard Carver Realty” logo across the top, Mr. Shannon seems genuinely surprised. Having his simulacrum on a Gen. Zod action figure is one thing, but such a free-spirited marketing gimmick for the more serious “99 Homes,” to him, feels a bit odd.
“That’s really funny they’re doing branding with this movie, that’s hysterical,” he said. “The fact that I’ve gotten to a place as an actor where someone would do something like that, and the fact that my likeness on it might make it valuable in some way, is pretty miraculous.”
However, he added he doesn’t wish such Madison Ave. techniques to take away from the seriousness of the housing crisis and ongoing poverty portrayed in the new film.
“I would never make light of the situation,” he said, the lifted vowel timbres of his adopted Chicago clearly more evident in his voice than any native Bluegrass State accentuation. “At the end of the day, the movie’s about something tremendously sad, and something that screwed up a lot of people’s lives. So I would never want to seem like I’m having a good time at people’s expense.”
• Eric Althoff can be reached at twt@washingtontimes.com.
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