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‘Get it done, Michael. Get it done.’ 🥺💙

Michael Sheen: my dad’s last words — and how they inspire me

The actor talks movingly about the recent death of his father, Meyrick, setting up a new Welsh National Theatre and why he’s given away most of his money

For years, long before his father, Meyrick, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Michael Sheen would imagine the final conversation the two men would have. He assumed that it would be the time to say what had been unsaid. Meyrick died last month. He was 85 and Sheen was at his deathbed, with his mother, Irene, and his sister, Joanne. They all knew the journey they were on — “It had one destination” — and, as such, Sheen had time to prepare what he might say, sitting with Meyrick in his final days.

“But, ultimately, it just gets very simple,” says Sheen, a 56-year-old with a full ruffle of hair and beard, who seems a little more sombre than usual, as if shrunk by the flying away of friendly ghosts. “You just say, ‘I love you.’ And that’s it, really. When I was growing up, I used to measure who I was by how different I was to my father, but as I’ve got older, I measure who I am by how similar I am to him.”

Tributes poured in for Meyrick, a local hero in his hometown of Port Talbot, where Sheen was also brought up and near which he now lives. Meyrick worked in the steel industry and enjoyed a side hustle as a Jack Nicholson impersonator, but spent many years engaging and supporting local projects in the struggling community. In Port Talbot, up on Forge Road, there is a mural of Sheen, and the day after Meyrick died a local artist added his image. The family drove past it on the way to Meyrick’s funeral.

“It is amazing to have that,” says Sheen, adding that the mural is handy for his children to remember their grandfather by. Sheen has a 26-year-old daughter, Lily, from his relationship with the actress Kate Beckinsale, and, Lyra, five, and Mabli, three, with his partner, the actress Anna Lundberg, 30. “Lyra thinks that when people die, they become gravestones,” Sheen says. “There was no way I was going to be able to explain that my dad is now ashes in an urn, but I can take them to that mural and they can engage with him through that. And so can my mother, who met him when she was 14 and lost him when she was 83.”

I ask what Meyrick was most proud of, if there is a particular role by Sheen he admired above all others? Sheen smiles. “He always talked about a Steven Berkoff play, Harry’s Christmas, that I did in the summer holidays when at drama school,” Sheen says. “Dad took a bit of time off from work to watch me doing it and called my mum and said, ‘Irene, you have got to go and see this!’

“But the last thing he said to me was about Port Talbot,” Sheen says. “By the end, he was confusing and conflating things, but the spirit was clear. I was telling him about the possibility of a project in town and he wasn’t able to say very much, but the last thing he said to me wasn’t about acting. He was so passionate about his community, where he grew up and lived all his life, so communicating that to me was the most important thing to him at the end. It was very telling. He just said, ‘Get it done, Michael. Get it done.’”

Sheen’s life changed in 2011. Before then, he was simply Hollywood’s favourite Welsh actor, living in Los Angeles, the star of Frost/Nixon, The Queen and The Damned United. There was acclaimed TV work and theatre too, but then, 14 years ago, came The Passion, a 72-hour immersive play with professionals and locals that took over the streets of Port Talbot. He never looked back. That experience meant Sheen returned to Wales and became what he is now, partly an actor, but mostly a restless campaigner, much like Meyrick, for the arts and the people he feels have been left behind.

“I’ve got no control over what people remember once I’m not around; legacy is for other people,” he argues when I ask if this pivot to philanthropy was fuelled by wanting to leave behind more than roles. “But I can do something about now — using whatever resources I have, financial or my platform. So yes, I want to be the best actor I can, but it has also become increasingly meaningful to me that people respond to the other work I do.”

The work he has done, with his own money, includes restoring local venues; funding the Homeless World Cup in Cardiff; backing Port Talbot Town FC; helping working-class voices access the arts; and fronting Michael Sheen’s Secret Million Pound Giveaway on Channel 4, which assisted 900 people caught up in the grip of debt. Now, he has co-written a children’s book, A Home for Spark the Dragon, about a homeless dragon. Every book sold will raise £1 for Shelter.

Which makes Sheen very unusual. Does he think more well-off peers should follow his lead? “Well, I’m acutely aware there is a possibility that what I am doing causes more damage than good,” he explains. How so? “Because if you blunder in with good intentions but low knowledge into areas where people have all sorts of vulnerabilities, it might do harm. So I would not just try to get people to put money into things. Most people I know, actors or anybody with money, do care, but not everyone has the same opportunity to engage in a way I do and so feel they might make an idiot of themselves. So I would hope that other people would get more involved, but I don’t in any way judge people who don’t.”

Yet Sheen is hardly a ten-Marvel-movies-in-the-bank sort of actor. Yes, he did a few Twilight films that paid handsomely. Yes, he is well off. But how can he afford to spend the thousands he does? “It’s interesting when people talk about me as a multimillionaire,” he says, smiling. “Because no — I don’t have that much money. I mean, I have money compared to lots of people, but this is about juggling debt. I’m still paying off the Homeless World Cup. It’s not like I have all this spare cash. And there are times I can put money into things and times when I can’t.”

Which brings us to the arts — specifically Welsh National Theatre, the body that Sheen helped to found in January, as artistic director, to replace National Theatre Wales after it lost £1.6 million in funding from Arts Council of Wales. Reports say that Sheen is funding the new project. The co-production model, whereby the theatre will team up with other theatres, helps but other than that is the money really all coming from him? “Arts Council Wales gave National Theatre Wales transitional funding to either wrap up or come up with a plan for the future,” Sheen says. “And that plan ended up being me running the new organisation. There was an argument if any of that transitional funding should come with us and that’s now been resolved, so we will be in receipt of around £200,000. I am paying for everything else.”

And he wants to be ambitious. Nye, the play in which he stars as the Labour politician Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, returns to the National Theatre in London next month before a run at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. Tim Price’s play tackles a serious subject, the NHS, in an innovative but mainstream way — which is exactly what Sheen wants.

“When the current seems to be going in one direction,” he says, “it appeals to me to not let yourself be swept away by it, but turn your shoulder into the current and go the other way. So it’s not just us saying, with theatre, ‘We’re going to hang on!’ We’ll be more ambitious. We’ll be bolder.”

One of Welsh National Theatre’s first plays is Owain & Henry, about Owain Glyndwr’s rebellion against Henry IV of England. Which feels mischievous. Sheen is barely able to contain his glee. “The subtitle is ‘The End of England’. Cheeky is the wrong word — it’s audacious, challenging. I love that about it.”

There is a sense, though, that when it comes to the arts Sheen is just papering over the cracks. Backing Welsh National Theatre is one thing, but the list of financial crises in Wales extends to the National Museum Wales, Welsh National Opera, the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, St David’s Hall in Cardiff and many more.

It is more than one actor can solve, surely? “Well, clearly the system doesn’t work,” Sheen says with a sigh. “It’s f***ed! And what really exercises me is that some people are making massive amounts of money, but over the last 50 years we’ve been told about efficiency, how technology will save costs. Yet the majority of communities get less and less. It is not working, is it? Everything gets cut. I am not just talking about the arts. That should be the context within which we talk about anything.

“And then in that context,” he continues, on a mellifluous roll, “we get told: ‘Well, if it’s money going to your theatre or to nurses, what do you think we should do?’ That is a nonsense argument that reveals something about our society and values. It should not be the case where you have to decide between giving money to the NHS or the arts. All that reveals an attitude towards the arts as some sort of luxury add-on, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of who we are as human beings. Something is fundamentally wrong.”

It can be easy to forget Sheen is an actor, but he has hardly stopped his day job. As well the return of Nye, there is the potential return of Good Omens, the fantasy show he made with his friend David Tennant that was due a third series before sexual assault allegations arose against its creator Neil Gaiman. Sheen and Tennant filmed a feature-length finale instead of a run of episodes. “But I really don’t know what’s going to happen with it,” Sheen says. “We were both relieved we finished the story, but that’s within this really difficult, complicated, disturbing context. I hope people get to see it, but that, to a large extent, is out of our hands.”

Something that’s very much in his control is A Home for Spark the Dragon, which he wrote because having his two youngest children has thrust him back into the world of bedtime stories. He wanted to tackle a difficult subject and help parents to talk to children about homelessness.

Once, in north London, Sheen had started to talking to a homeless man whom he one night introduced to his family. “It clearly meant a huge amount to him,” Sheen says. “And made me realise, on a basic level, that we need food and drink to stay alive, but need connection as well. One of the hardest things about being on the streets is the feeling you’re just not seen.” He pauses. “But the book has to be engaging,” he insists. “If there’s a whiff of worthiness, it’s dead in the water.”

I wonder though — does Sheen show other parents up? Surely, when doing a bedtime read, he is all-in on the actorly voices? “My kids just don’t know what they’re getting,” he bellows. “Like, this is peak quality kids’ book reading and they take it completely for granted.” Could he charge them? “Well, we’ll see — I mean, they pay in one way or another, don’t they?”

He laughs. He was inspired to write Spark — which he would like to turn into a series — after reading to his girls The Invisible String by Patrice Karst. It is a children’s book that does not shy from tough conversations he thinks we should be having with our children.

“There’s a boy and a girl in this storm and they run scared into their mother, who tells them about the invisible string that connects them,” he says. “Even when they’re not together, they still feel it. Then, later, the kids ask, ‘What about Uncle Billy?’ Who is clearly dead. And it’s then you realise how hard it is to talk about this stuff, how much as a culture we avoid it. When I lost my father, it became a question of how we tell the girls.” He smiles rather sweetly. “And in the book? For Uncle Billy? Well, the mother says, ‘Yes. Yes, you’re still connected to him, by this invisible string …’”

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