Michael Sheen: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

1. Brian Clough €“ The Damned United (2009)

It's apposite that Sheen's best performance of his career, then, would be in another of these fact-based dramas and, yet again, from a script that Peter Morgan wrote. In fact it's Morgan's work that might seem most impressive on first blush, working from David Peace's award-winning novel which was nevertheless written in such a manner as to be unfilmable (it's entirely stream-of-consciousness interior monologuing from Clough). In that sense, The Damned United lost something in translation from page to screen. But in another, much more palpable sense, it gained a lot in Michael Sheen. In taking on the part of legendary football manager Brian Clough, he was again taking on the part not only of a famous and beloved figure, but one very much in the public eye. With The Damned United, it isn't that Sheen looks identical to Clough in the same way he did Blair. Far from it, in fact; he doesn't look anything like him. But what he does do is provide a powerhouse performance that's some entrenched in the legend of Clough that he breaths life into a carefully-constructed public figure, his boundless optimism and self-mythologising worn down by a unsuccessful season as Leeds United's new gaffer. Future King's Speech director Tom Hooper doesn't do much behind the camera, but he doesn't have to: all he needs is Sheen on screen, and the audience is totally enraptured.