Clockwise from left: Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Wheeler, Michael Shannon as John Givings, Richard Easton as Mr. Givings, Kate Winslet as “April Wheeler” and Kathy Bates as Mrs. Givings in "Revolutionary Road." Copyrighted photo by Francois Duhamel.

Click the play button to hear our podcast with Michael Shannon, including the childhood experience that helped inform his performance in Revolutionary Road.

“There were no movie stars on that set,” actor and Lexington native Michael Shannon says of his latest film, Revolutionary Road.

Celebrity chroniclers and film fans may beg to differ: The Sam Mendes picture features the reunion of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who sailed into cinematic history as the doomed lovers in 1997’s Titanic, the all-time box office champ.

That might be a story line helping to sell the film. But when he was there to film, Shannon says, “it was a group of people united by a passion for the material and wanting to honor the book.”

The book is Richard Yates’ 1961 novel about a Connecticut couple who try to break the bonds of mid-20th-century suburbia. Frank Wheeler is a cookie-cutter office worker in New York and his wife, April, cares for their home and two children. She hatches a plan to break their boring routine by moving to Paris, where she will support the family through a high-paying government secretarial job and he can figure out what his passion is and pursue it.

Friends and coworkers politely congratulate them, but privately scoff at Frank and April’s plan as childish.

All except John.

Played by Shannon, John is the son of Frank and April’s real estate agent, played by Kathy Bates.

He was once a gifted mathematician, teaching at a university, but he has since been committed to a sanitarium, where he has undergone dozens of electroshock treatments. When he meets the couple, John seems to have a distinct disdain for suburban life.

“Plenty of people are on to the emptiness,” John says to Frank and April during a walk in the woods, “but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.”

The question is implied: Is the fact that the crazy guy seems to be the only one supporting the plan good or bad?

The question is soon moot, as April’s pregnancy and Frank’s lucrative promotion scuttle the Paris plans.

In his second scene, John angrily condemns the change of plans, particularly Frank’s role in changing them.

The idea of a suffocating suburbia brought to mind a family Shannon says he used to visit as a child.

“They were very nice and quiet,” Shannon says. “They didn’t say much, and they didn’t seem connected. … It was kind of creepy, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

“Maybe John experienced something like that.”

Whatever Shannon channeled, John is the latest in what has become a signature type of performance for the actor: the character who appears briefly but sears himself into the moviegoer’s memory. We’ve seen it before in films like World Trade Center, in which he played an ex-Marine who walked out of an office building and back onto duty after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Shannon’s turn in Revolutionary Road has earned his some shout outs such a small feature in Entertainment Weekly magazine and even a rumble of Oscar buzz.

Shannon says all the praise is tempered by an experience last week in Peru, working on a new movie with legendary director Werner Herzog.

“I’ve spent a lot of time the last few months having people tell me I did a nice job and they think I’m pretty good at acting and stuff,” Shannon says. “Then I went down and got back to actually trying to make something work, and I felt a little rusty.”

The Herzog film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, is one of several big projects in the offing for Shannon, including two new films being shown at the Sundance Film Festival. In Missing Person he plays a noir-style detective and in The Greatest, he has - yet again - a small but pivotal role opposite Susan Sarandon.

Missing Person is looking for a distributor at Sundance and The Greatest, Shannon says, shouldn’t have trouble finding distribution because of its marquee stars, Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan.

Shannon, of course, knows all about marquee stars from the Revolutionary Road experience, and what they are like when it’s time to get down to business.

Though there was not a “Titanic reunion” buzz on the set of Revolutionary Road, Shannon does see one aspect of DiCaprio and Winslet’s first pairing as essential to this film.

“The only real remnant of it is their friendship, which is a very genuine friendship that they have, very pure,” Shannon says. “Sometimes they seem like high school buddies. And that’s very helpful for the work they’re trying to do on a film like this. Two people that didn’t have a history with one another would have had a harder time manufacturing that kind of relationship.”

And it takes a lot of work to create performances like the ones in Revolutionary Road, ones that earn critical acclaim and fuel awards-season speculation. That’s why, far from getting freaked out about working with movie stars, Shannon says it’s essential to be prepared the moment he walks on set and plays a character.

Shannon says, “People are very complicated, so it takes a lot of preparation and thought to try to create one.”