October 14, 2007 - At the press junket for Music Within, Michael Sheen spoke briefly about working on the feature film version of the stageplay, Frost/Nixon. Frost/Nixon is a reenactment of the 1977 television interviews of U.S. President Richard Nixon by the legendary British talk show host David Frost. Sheen and Frank Langella are reprising their roles as Frost and Nixon, respectively, in the movie with director Ron Howard at the helm.
Sheen was just days away from finishing the Frost/Nixon film when he took part in the Music Within junket. Commenting on the end of the shoot, Sheen said, “That will be the end of a very long journey for me because I started doing the play a year last July. We were rehearsing the play a year last July. So on Thursday, I'll be taking off David Frost for the last time. And it's been amazing, it's been great. It's a great journey and Ron Howard has been fantastic. He's sort of famously the nicest person in Hollywood, and he is. That's just true. And great to work with. It's been amazing.”
Sheen admitted he was a little nervous heading into the last few days of filming because the man himself, David Frost, was going to be coming to the set. “I have met David a few times. He came to see the play a few times. But I've never actually done it, acted as him, and then have him be able to comment on it immediately afterwards,” explained Sheen. “So that will be interesting.”
“It's an extraordinary moment in time, really, the Frost/Nixon interviews, because it's kind of [like] the world changed really at that point, where certainly the world of politics and the media changed, where they did sort of come together in a weird way,” said Sheen about the impact of the televised interviews.
“And forever after that, politicians realized how much their image was, or how people perceived them, was all about how they come across in the media. So for instance, those interviews, Nixon had no editorial control. [He] didn't get the questions in advance. Can you imagine Bush doing that now? Bush agreeing to someone interviewing him with no editorial control? It'd never happen. And it's because of those interviews that they changed.”