This article was the cover story of a recent Sunday Times Culture magazine…

Michael Sheen’s second coming

The actor is resurrecting his home town’s Passion play — and, with the help of all Port Talbot and the Manic Street Preachers, giving it an almighty spin

The golden strand fans out to east and west. The sea ripples as far as you can see while, behind, hummocky mountains patrol the horizon. Further down the esplanade, a neon sign beckons all comers to Hollywood Park. This really could be the epic Californian coastline. The first sign that it’s not is an alternate spelling: Parc Hollywood. Gunmetal skies also give the game away, as do the belching stacks and steepling cranes of the steelworks. When all is said and done, pebble-dashed Port Talbot is not Tinseltown.

Yet, more than any community of such a size, it can claim a kind of twinning. Apart from steel, the principal export of this small, unloved town on the south coast of Wales is actors: first Richard Burton, then Anthony Hopkins and most recently Michael Sheen, next to whom I am standing on the tufted dunes. The other two never banged the drum for their home town like Sheen, who moved to Port Talbot when he was eight.

“Nobody else from here when I was growing up seemed to actually like it,” he says. “And I loved it. I thought it was the best town ever. I have a bizarre aesthetic — I find it incredibly visually exciting.” So exciting that he is coming home to mount what sounds like the most ambitious theatre project taking place anywhere in the British Isles this year, incorporating a local cast of more than a thousand. Sheen last acted in front of an audience in Frost/Nixon on Broadway. This autumn, he will be playing Hamlet at the Young Vic. For this prodigal return, however, he’ll do things such as sleep rough on Mynydd Du, the Black Mountain, which looms over the town.

Over Easter, The Passion is being staged — if that’s the word — in Port Talbot by National Theatre Wales, in association with the Cornish company WildWorks. It will start at dawn on Good Friday on the beach (where, for the record, the great Welsh rugby team of the 1970s used to train). It’s here that a local man who has disappeared for 40 days and nights will return, dirty and bedraggled.

Sheen will be in character, playing what he coyly calls “a Jesus figure”, over three days until he is crucified on a traffic island next to Parc Hollywood at sunset on Easter Sunday. “I’ll probably be the only Jesus figure,” he says, “who can be on the cross and actually say, ‘I can see my house from here.’”

This will be the climactic production in the fleet-footed NTW’s acclaimed opening year, which has seen genre-defiant pieces sprout all over Wales in found spaces, the open air, as well as the odd traditional theatre. Back when the company was juggling ideas, Sheen was an obvious port of call. Yet he went into the meeting with Lucy Davies, the NTW producer, whom he knew from working at the Donmar

Warehouse in the 1990s, fully expecting to rebuff her. “I thought they were probably going to ask me to do Hamlet in Cardiff, and I just wasn’t really into that idea. So I came along with a bit of a heavy heart. Then Lucy started talking about how it wasn’t building-based, and was much more connected to the communities and site-specific. I found myself saying, ‘Oh, it’s a bit like the Passion play in Port Talbot.’ It was almost as if the words were coming out of my mouth, and in my head I was going, ‘No, no, don’t say this. What are you doing?’”

The production will evoke, but not quite revive, Port Talbot’s tradition of producing a Passion play in nearby Margam Park, featuring local am-dram and church groups. “It might even have been the first play I ever saw, weirdly,” Sheen says. “I think I was 10. I always remember this one bit, after the crucifixion — you heard this noise in the forest and suddenly what seemed like the whole of Port Talbot emerged, then this figure in white would come out. From the beginning, people have said, ‘Oh, Michael’s doing the Passion play again.’ And we’re not, so I’ve been trying to get it out there, because I don’t want people to be upset.”

Much as Sheen wanted to avoid the NTW altogether, once he had roped himself in, his instinct was to steer clear of God. He’s not religious himself: while he has zealots among his forebears, he asked his parents if he could stop going to church at seven. Mostly, though, he was wary of casting himself as Port Talbot’s messiah. Since leaving to train at Rada, Sheen has cornered a market in wayward visionaries and mercurial sociopaths — Kenneth Williams, Caligula, Brian Clough, Mozart, Peer Gynt. And, of course, Tony Blair. Like a man coming in from the wilderness — in this case Los Angeles, where he lives — he is returning to his home town to play the biggest visionary of them all.

“I’ve always been aware of the danger that I’m seen as the saviour. At first, it wasn’t going to be anything like the original Passion story. We were going to come up with some alternative fairy tale that allowed us to use the entire town. But everywhere we went, we said, ‘Oh, this would be great for Pilate’s palace’, or ‘This would be great for the crucifixion’. And eventually I said, ‘This is pointless. We’re just trying to avoid doing the obvious thing that the place is telling us to do.’ I became more comfortable with the idea of this character who hasn’t come to teach, but to listen. The central conceit is that a local man has no memory of who he is or the town. He’s like a blank slate, so people have to tell him what this town is and why it matters to them.”

The play, written by Owen Sheers, is therefore partly a homage to a place that Sheen spends the afternoon driving me round. He points enthusiastically to a patch of grass between council houses. “That’s our Garden of Gethsemane.” We visit a beautiful old working men’s club that will host the Last Supper. We also stop at the cemetery and a pedestrian underpass that will be the site of key incidents in the life of Christ. The place he mostly wants to show me, however, is something that, for Sheen, sums up Port Talbot’s reality more than any other.

We park on Llewellyn Street, much like any other tightly hemmed-in terraced street, but for one key difference: only half of it is there. The other half was razed to make way for the M4, constructed throughout the 1960s. A forest of concrete stilts holds up the motorway where the north terrace of Llewellyn Street once stood. “My town is the joke of the area,” Sheen says over the roar of traffic. “People say it’s horrible and ugly and smelly, and there’s nothing here, and it’s literally bypassed, literally overlooked. Subliminally, the columns of the motorway are saying, ‘You’re not worth looking at.’”

Well, the town won’t be passed over this Passover. On the Saturday afternoon on Llewellyn Street, Sheen is planning to knock (by prearrangement) on a resident’s door and ask if he and some friends can come in. “I love it that the source material sometimes says, ‘And Jesus was at the house of Simon, taking refreshment, then a huge crowd gathered.’ So we’re going to do that here. We are hoping there are going to be thousands of people. I want the house to be full of people.”

Needless to say, nobody else in Port Talbot could pull all this off, not even Hopkins (an American citizen, who nonetheless came home to celebrate his 70th birthday). In expensive threads, Sheen exudes the discreet confidence of worldly recognition signally denied to his home town. As we do the rounds, the goodwill flowing in his direction is palpable. In the working men’s club, a shell-suited young man wreathed in tattoos tremulously asks for his autograph.

On Llewellyn Street, a pensioner invites us in for tea. He and his wife, who is in her dressing gown, talk to Sheen as if they’ve known him for ever. In their presence, his Welsh accent gets audibly folksier. Afterwards, he concedes that he doesn’t know them from Adam.

The first person Sheen went to for advice about how to make The Passion stand up was his father, Meyrick, a quondam Jack Nicholson impersonator who knows everyone in Port Talbot. Doors have opened everywhere: the mayor and dignitaries, the council, am-dram and dance groups, seven choirs, even the Manic Street Preachers, who will be playing at the Last Supper. Most important, health-and-safety gauleiters have all signed up. The one thing they did say was that Sheen will need his own cross. The traffic island has three lampposts, but they’re not strong enough.

Sheen’s movements will be beamed to the crowds on giant screens. Potentially, anyone who comes to watch will also be in it, caught on camera by two documentary crews and a film crew making the movie version, directed by the polymath artist Dave McKean. It will, it’s hoped, get a cinematic release alongside Sheen’s other forthcoming films. (Look out for Jesus Henry Christ, with Toni Collette, Beautiful Boy, with Maria Bello, a cameo in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and “the last lot of Twilight films”).

I have interviewed Sheen several times before, always in London. Meeting him in the town the motorway passed over brings home how his abiding loyalty is not so much to Wales — hence his preference for playing Hamlet in London over Cardiff — as to Port Talbot. “This place has become more and more important to me as time has gone on,” he explains, “and this project is a result of that. The way people are with me because I’m on the telly, I haven’t really earned. I could be anyone. There is something else beyond that, which I’m hoping I will be able to share with the town and experience with the town as well.”

Our tour is done. Sheen has to arrange a house rental, having been back living with his parents. As the orange sun spreads low across the Bristol Channel, I take a walk along the sands where The Passion will begin. Down the coast, I can pick out the bright lights of Swansea, and beyond it Mumbles, wellspring of Catherine Zeta-Jones. As darkness throws a pall over the bay, I turn to head back east and am greeted by a miraculous sight. The stellar lights of the steelworks are twinkling spectacularly over the town. After sundown, after all, Port Talbot really does look like Hollywood’s twin town.?