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Michael Shannon’s journey to the Academy Awards started at Tates Creek Junior High School in Lexington.
“I was in eighth grade, and I was not athletic at all,” Shannon says, recalling the years at Tates Creek. “But I wanted some sort of after-school activity.”

He tried the speech team.

“They gave me a little monologue to work on,” Shannon, 34, says. “It just captivated me. It wasn’t anything I fantasized about. When I was a little boy, I wanted to be an architect. So, it kind of surprised me.”

That surprise has translated into a serious stage and film career that has resulted in Shannon’s Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his performance in Revolutionary Road.

He will learn whether he won Sunday night, when the Academy Awards are handed out in Los Angeles.

Revolutionary Road, about a couple who try to flee 1950s suburbia, is loaded with Oscar-caliber talent, including stars and previous nominees Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes. But, on Jan. 22, when the nominations were announced, Shannon’s best supporting actor nod was one of only three for the film, in which he plays a mentally disturbed man who makes powerful observations.

The movie’s other two nods are for art direction and costume design.

Shannon slept through the nominations.

He was at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where two of his films were premiering: The Missing Person, in which he plays a noir detective, and The Greatest, in which he plays another brief-but-memorable role as the driver who killed Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon’s son.

“I had gone to see a midnight movie the night before … so, unfortunately, I didn’t get to sleep until 3 a.m.,” Shannon says.

The nominations were announced at 6:30 a.m. Utah time. That’s when his phone started ringing.
“I was pretty shell-shocked,” he says. “It just kept ringing all day long.

“That’s the special thing about it is realizing how many people are rooting for you.”

Including people back home.

Lexington memories

Lexington actress Leslie Beatty saw that an actor from Lexington had been nominated for an Oscar and thought, “That’s really great.” Then, she realized she had shared a stage with Shannon in 1990, when he was a teenager appearing in Actors Guild of Lexington’s production Home Fires.

“He was so sweet, and he was clearly smarter than everyone else his age,” Beatty says.

Patrick Donohew, who was acting in another show in a new play festival that Home Fires was part of, recalled a scene from the show. Shannon played a member of gang who held a couple in their home.

“I remember him holding a gun,” says Donohew, now a documentary filmmaker in San Francisco. “The way he held the gun was not like an action hero, really firm and pointing it at people to threaten them. He kind of flopped it around, and it made it a much more powerful scene, because you were aware the gun could go off at any minute.”

Donohew was struck by how Shannon instinctively knew how important little things such as casually handling a gun were to building a character.

The Actors Guild show was part of Shannon’s brief Lexington stage career.

After his parents divorced, he moved to Chicago with his dad, Donald Shannon, a college professor, for most of high school. He was only in Lexington for his junior year at Henry Clay High School.

Beatty remembered Shannon liked to hang around the theater and talk to the adults.

“He was quiet,” she said, “but when he said something, it was a zinger.”

In addition to the Actors Guild play, Shannon was in a production of Harvey at Henry Clay and a Lexington Children’s Theatre show.

Then, he went back to Chicago.

“I was worried about him going to Chicago,” Donohew says. “When someone is that young and talented, you hope they’ll be able to find their place in the world.”

Donohew wasn’t the only one worried. Like most parents, his mother, Lexington lawyer Geraldine Hine, was worried he was going into a risky career.

“What I saw was a hugely competitive career, and I’d think, ‘Why don’t you just go to engineering school?’ because he had the intellect for it,” Hine says.

But she realized that would be a losing battle.

“I have four children, but none of them were as sure about what they wanted to do as Michael,” Hine says. “I realized he had no choice.”

First stop: Chicago

“Chicago’s a huge theater town,” Shannon says, recalling those first few years as a professional actor. “You could find an opportunity to be in a play or make your own opportunities.”

A lot of that work was unpaid, say, in a coffee-house basement where the theater troupe split the ticket revenue with the restaurant.

Along the way, Shannon met actor and playwright Tracy Letts.

Letts wrote a play called Killer Joe that started at a small theater in Chicago but ended up on London’s West End and off-Broadway in New York.

While getting his theater career going on stages such as Chicago’s legendary Steppenwolf Theatre, Shannon was always making his first forays into film. A breakout moment came with a small role in the 1993 Bill Murray vehicle Groundhog Day.

After the success of Killer Joe, Shannon’s manager told him he should move to Los Angeles to take a serious shot at film. He stayed in L.A. from 1999 until 2001, and then returned to Chicago and the stage.

“I just really missed it,” Shannon says. “I had some phenomenal opportunities being in Los Angeles, just being on the sets of huge, blockbuster movies.

“But sometimes, I felt that was all I was really doing, standing round on set. I was really used to, in theater, dealing with challenging roles and challenging material and having to work hard. And I just didn’t feel like I was working all that hard, I just felt like I was on a field trip.”

So he returned to the stage, even coming to Louisville to appear in two plays at the 2002 Humana Festival of New American Plays. One of them, Adam Rapp’s Finer Noble Gases, even gave Shannon, a pianist and former bassist with the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestras, a chance to show off his musical skills, playing a member of a band that was falling apart.

Film and stage continued to intertwine for Shannon, whose roles have included Dave Karnes, an ex-Marine who walks back onto duty and into the wreckage of 9/11 in Oliver Stone’s 2006 film World Trade Center. In 2007, he co-starred with fellow Kentuckian Ashley Judd in the film version of Letts’ play Bug, in which Shannon had starred on Chicago and New York stages.

To make Revolutionary Road, Shannon had to choose between the film and being in the original production of Letts’ August: Osage County, which went on to win the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for drama and Tony Award for best play.
Shannon told The Associated Press he chose Revolutionary Road because of his love for Richard Yates’ book.

A year to remember

Revolutionary Road and the Oscar nomination have been part of an eventful year for Shannon, who also celebrated the birth of his first child, Sylvia, with his girlfriend, Kate Arrington, and mourned the death of his father in December.

This weekend, he will be doing the Oscar rounds with Arrington and his mom, who traveled to Los Angeles on Saturday for the ceremony on Sunday. (Hine shopped at Lexington boutique Isle of You for her draped red dress with short sleeves and rounded neck. “I’m ready for anything,” she says.)

Far from being a star worried about “who” he will be wearing, Shannon said he was anticipating eating a big breakfast and drinking a pot of coffee Sunday to prepare for a long day of red carpets, awards and parties.

His competition is thick: Josh Brolin for Milk; Robert Downey Jr. for a comic turn in Tropic Thunder; 2006 best actor Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman for Doubt; and the late Heath Ledger, the odds-on favorite to win for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight.

“I’ve been put in a group with four genius actors, so I don’t think the academy can go wrong, really,” Shannon says. “I certainly will not be offended if it is not me they select.”

That sentiment is part of something Shannon says has been a key to getting through the roller-coaster years from Tates Creek Junior High to the Kodak Theatre: humility.

“I never get too pumped up on myself or think I’ve conquered the world,” Shannon says. “I look at this as a real special opportunity, a dream part to play in a story that means a lot to me. Sometimes I worry if I’ll find something else that is such a perfect fit.”

But he says the performance and the Oscar nomination “will help me find more interesting roles to play elsewhere.”

Some of them might even earn Shannon more trips to the Oscars.