Game changer

Michael Sheen on playing legendary U.K. football coach Brian Clough in The Damned United

TEAM EFFORT: Michael Sheen

Peter Morgan and Michael Sheen are at this point responsible for an entire micro-genre of their own. Morgan, a playwright and screenwriter, has penned three films that deal with real-life British personalities, and which all star Sheen as a well-known U.K. figure. Sheen played former Prime Minister Tony Blair in Stephen Frears’ The Queen, TV interviewer David Frost in Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon and now, in The Damned United, a less familiar figure on these shores, legendary football (you know, soccer) manager Brian Clough.

Directed by Tom Hooper (who also helmed HBO’s John Adams mini-series), the film follows Clough’s tumultuous period in the ’70s as the manager of Leeds United, then the top team in the U.K. Clough had famously been critical of the team’s players and former manager Don Revie (played here by Colm Meaney), so the appointment was a surprise—and he was not well-received by the lads after publicly incriminating their rough-and-tumble style of play. Clough had made his name building up small, little-known teams along with his buddy Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), but he didn’t last long with Leeds—44 days, to be precise. The story of his time with the team is a portrait in pride, self-destruction and a truly bizarre love of the game.

“We described the film in some ways as being about a marriage and an affair,” says Sheen, speaking to the Mirror at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. “The marriage is between Clough and Taylor and the affair is with Leeds United. Clough knows that this woman is bad for him and that he shouldn’t go down that road, it’s going to lead to destruction, but he just can’t help himself. And then eventually the fever breaks and he goes back to his wife and asks for forgiveness.”

Having played so many real-life characters, Sheen has built up a creative method based on careful research and assimilation. “I spent three, four months just watching everything I could watch and reading everything I could read and just immersing myself in the world of him,” he says. “Because the last thing you want to do when you’re playing a real person is to be thinking about, ‘Am I doing this the right way, how would he react to this?’ It’s just got to be second nature, so when I’m filming and we’re doing a scene, I just react in the moment, like I would in any film. Which requires me to do a huge amount of work beforehand and then just forget about the work. And just trust that I will be in character when I do it. Otherwise I think it would just become very dead and staid, like an impersonation.”

Though not well-known over here, the legend of Clough persists in Britain. “He’s sort of a folk hero now in a way,” Sheen explains. “He’s the ultimate underdog. He used to take these teams from nowhere—these weren’t top teams, these were people who were rejects—put them together and then come all the way up and bring them up to championship-winning teams and people loved that. And the fact that he had a pure vision for the game as well, that he talked about it being a beautiful game that should be played beautifully, just adds to it even more. He’s like Robin Hood, isn’t he?”

THE DAMNED UNITED OPENS
THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 16