Michael Sheen says he wants viewers of his new drama The Way “to feel like what it has felt like for the last 10 years of living” in the UK.
That is, “in a society where you don't know if you're in a horror film or a sitcom,” he told viewers at a Q&A for the show on Monday night. “Something that feels life and death stakes suddenly goes incredibly surreal and absurd, and then goes back to being incredibly scary again.”
The Way, which is due to air in February, follows the Driscoll family in the old industrial town of Port Talbot on the Welsh coast. Estranged from each other, they nevertheless have to set out on a cross-country odyssey to safety when they become tied up with civil unrest in the area.
In addition to making a cameo appearance in the show, The Way also marks Sheen’s first directorial role.
“I was never going to direct it. And then they said it's going to be in Port Talbot and then I have to direct it,” he joked.
“And the original seed of the idea was, I had this idea about watching a British family being uprooted and you didn't know why. And having to kind of flee their homes and go on the journey across Britain and then get across the channel. So it was a sort of refugee journey in reverse to the way we normally see it.”
It is also a passion project for the Welsh actor, who grew up in and now lives in Port Talbot himself – while the cast, who are majority Welsh, mostly grew up in the same area.
“There was so much of him in it,” said Steffan Rhodri about Sheen, who plays dad Geoff Driscoll (and who went to drama school with him). “I mean, you see a bit of Port Talbot. The one bit you didn't see is a massive wall with a mural of him on it.”
Was it hard to film the show without including it? “It was very hard,” Sheen joked. “We came very, very close – I mean, we were literally around the corner from it, and Callum made me go and have a photograph with it between takes. So that was difficult.”
‘Callum’ is Callum Scott Howells, best known for his performance in Russell T Davies drama It’s A Sin. He plays the disaffected Driscoll son, Owen – whom we first meet as a lonely figure looking for connection, and who gets caught up in the riots that sweep the town.
“It says in the script, James put something like, ‘we don't know why at this point, but he's feeling something. He’s there now, and he’s present’. And that for me kind of said everything. Like he doesn't he doesn't even know why he's rioting, but he's doing it,” Howells said.
“That was something that I really kind of threw myself into, and Michael was great in allowing me to do that. Yeah, those riot scenes were so fun, we just got to go nuts, you know. I headbutted a riot shield… because I’m nuts.”
The show itself also features the writing talents of James Graham, best known for political film Brexit: The Uncivil War and BBC crime drama Sherwood.
“We talked collectively about not wanting a traditional dystopian future, which was, which was really grim and bleak,” he said. "I think we all got excited by imagining the reverse of that... what if it was the myths and the legends and the folklores that embed themselves in our national psyche. Do they trap us? Do they inhibit us?"
The end result, he said, was a "contamination of genres." Not just social realism: the second episode becomes "a road movie, or an adventure movie on foot.
"So you start to see these elements of the myths and legends that the family carry with them become those stories we grew up with like Watership Down and Wizard of Oz, and it becomes very fantastical and weird."
