mouthfulofplanets - Tumblr blog

mouthfulofplanets · 11 days ago

Text

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 …’”

60 notes · View notes

mouthfulofplanets · 29 days ago

Text

Hungry for Good Omens 3 crumbs of information? Let’s see what I’ve found and speculate a bit about cast members, filming locations, and… trees! As always, please tag accordingly, share only with the fans consenting to know potential spoilers, and get yourself something to drink since it’s going to be a longer read.

News flash: both Ned Dennehy (well-known to Good Omens fans as Hastur) and Sean Pertwee (recently revealed to star in the Finale as Brian Cameron) admitted to have been working on location in Tenerife during the film’s production time slot (January and early February, respectively). In Dennehy’s case, even providing a rather intimately close look at his character.

The location alone isn’t particularly surprising, as the Canary Islands and Tenerife in particular are currently experiencing an influx of international productions, including several TV shows by global streamers, making use of the favourable weather and prices. But Dennehy’s post, additionally liked by a Good Omens crew member, seems somewhat suggestive.

In the Instagram story above, Sean Pertwee called 14 January 2025 his last day on the shoot in Tenerife and subsequently traveled to London and Edinburgh, from where he shared another video three weeks later.

Now, technically the Tenerife film set could be a part of Pertwee’s NCIS: Tony & Ziva job he started last autumn. However, that would imply that he plays a greater role in the upcoming production than the currently available promotional materials imply, and the location stamp in the bottom right corner, Drago Milenario, is too deliciously Good Omens coded to overlook it.

It isn’t even a place, really, but a living organism. A plant. A tree.

Meet Drago Milenario, also know as El Drago, a natural monument and symbol of Tenerife. The oldest and largest living specimen of the endemic Dracaena draco (dragon tree), it is said to be a thousand years old and stand at 18 metres high with a 20-metre perimeter. “Great big bugger,” as Aziraphale would say.

There has been much debate over the age of the tree, and some even say that it may be over 5000 years old; more recent estimates seem more conservative and suggest that El Drago is no more than 800 to 1000 years old. It is difficult to say unambiguously, because the traditional method of counting rings is not applicable in this case — dracaena has no rings.

Its home, the Millennial Dragon Tree Park, or Parque del Drago, in Icod de los Vinos, is a sacred place and a burial zone of Tenerife’s original inhabitants, the Guanches. Members of the Guanche people venerated El Drago as a divine tree; a symbol of wisdom and fertility, believed to have magical powers, granting longevity and warding off evil spirits. Its blood-red oil or sap is called dragon's blood and historically used to treat wounds and embalm corpses. According to local legends, that’s because slain dragons don’t actually die, but rather turn into dragon trees like this one.

The dragon part of the story sounds objectively cool, but if we overlook it for a second, we might notice why the connection to Good Omens is so strong here. When asked about trees in the show’s context, one’s first point of reference is quite naturally the Garden of Eden scene and the shot above featuring the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The thing is, it wasn’t the only one.

According to the Bible, the very reason why Aziraphale was even stationed in Eden (possibly with a few other armed angels) was to protect the Garden from the newly exiled humans. More specifically, his “apple duty” meant that he was supposed to guard a very particular and yet unseen tree:

“The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of lifeand eat, and live forever.’ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the Tree of Life.” (Genesis 3:21-24)

In the apocryphal Apocalypse of Moses, the tree of life is also called the Tree of Mercy. Adam, the first human, famously sent his son Seth and wife Eve back to the gates of the Garden to beg God and His angels for some oil of the Tree of Life to save him from his deathbed by granting either full immortality or longer lifespan. They were obviously denied, but in another part of the Bible — the Book of Revelation, on which most of the official Good Omens plot is based, Jesus announces the details of His Second Coming, including who and when will get the right to enjoy this forbidden fruit:

“Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to reward each one as his work deserves. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life, and may enter the city by the gates. (Revelation 22:12-14)

The Catholic Church in particular believes that the Tree of Life mentioned above is the Eucharist and often combines the image of the Tree with the Cross of Christ, both literally and figuratively (see above: The Tree of Life printed by John Hagerty, 1791) granting the immortal life to His Chosen Ones:

And he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him; they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illuminate them; and they will reign forever and ever. (Revelation 1-5)

In his Roll Play BAFTA interview published on 10 February 2025, while talking about his work for the Good Omens Finale, David Tennant himself has specifically referred to the possibility of Aziraphale and Crowley spending eternity together. But where? Well.

The visual symbolism of an apple tree seems so important for the Good Omens 3 plot that it’s even represented on the exclusive mug design shared on 30 April by one of everyone’s favourite production crew spouses, Carla Scott Fullerton (fullercoaching on Instagram):

For those who missed the original discussion, the reverse side of the complimentary mug gifted to Good Omens 3 crew members and depicted above contains a photo of slate number 100, scene 59 of the production with a quote “We’ve come to a decision…”. A typical feature film of this length consists of around 60 scenes, so it’s definitely the ending or one of the scenes directly preceding it.

Which means that the story ends, as it began, in a garden. And with a very specific apple tree, adorned with initials AZ and CR in two little hearts as hinted by the drawing in the background.

There’s a specific crew member though — one of the firsts to be confirmed for the upcoming production, actually — that has shared a Good Omens themed work with an apple tree a whole year earlier.

Here you can see Michael Ralph’s (i.e., Good Omens production designer’s) concept art depicting Neil Gaiman’s version of heaven on earth – “Heaven is a Library” – at LA music venue, The Wiltern, for The Art of Elysium’s Heaven 2024 charity gala. It’s got Va Va Voom yellow walls, red carpet, spiral stairs, a centrally located oculus, and lots of plants with an apple tree with a swing in the middle. In case this image wasn’t suggestive enough, it’s worth to focus on the twin display tables with Cupid statues on top, direct copies of the one from A. Z. Fell and Co. bookshop in Soho.

It’s not even subtle — and wasn’t meant to be, considering how Event Eleven, the creative agency behind the gala, typically organises high budget premiere events and promotional campaigns for Amazon Prime TV shows, and to this day it’s the closest we’ve got to a Good Omens 3 public celebration.

While this one was for charity and officially not affiliated with the studio, it took place only three weeks after the official announcement of Good Omens 3 and involved not only this curious simulacrum of Aziraphale’s bookshop as a setting, but also Jon Hamm on stage as the guest of honour, referencing the co-leads of the TV series and reciting an excerpt from the 1990 novel in an approximation of their characters’ voices, and the Ukrainian artist Katya Zvereva was commissioned to make an installation for the gala called literally “Tree of Life” (above).

If you remember my bookshop meta, you will probably find the official explanation of the event’s theme particularly interesting:

“Heaven is two things that are, perhaps, the same thing. Heaven is both a library, the place where we go for knowledge, wisdom, advice and for stories, and heaven is also a refuge, somewhere that we can go, whoever we are, for safety and protection. Heaven contains librarians and refugees, shelters the helpless, and gives them — us — somewhere quiet to sit and read or listen.”

Not incidentally, the only iteration of the Tree of Life in the actual show so far has been built into the layout of Aziraphale’s bookshop (left). Its Kabbalah depiction (right) is a representation of the entirety of creation, composed of ten spheres — referred to as the Sephiroth/Sefirot as a whole — each denoting a universal quality, such as wisdom or beauty. To quote The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order by Israel Regardie:

This altar diagram shows the Ten Sephiroth with all the connecting Paths numbered and lettered, and the Serpent winding over each Path. Around each Sephirah are written the Names of the Deity, Archangel and Angelic Host attributed to it. The Twenty Two Paths are bound together by the Serpent of Wisdom. It unites the Paths but does not touch any of the Sephiroth, which are linked by the Flaming Sword. The Flaming Sword is formed by the natural order of the Tree of Life. It resembles a flash of Lightning. Together the Sephiroth and the Twenty Two Paths form the 32 Paths of the Sepher Yetzirah or Book of Formation. The Two pillars on either side of the Altar represent:

1. Active: The White Pillar on the South Side. Male. Adam. Pillar of Light and Fire. Right Kerub. Metatron.

2. Passive: The Black Pillar on the North Side. Female. Eve. Pillar of Cloud. Left Kerub. Sandalphon.

458 notes · View notes