Copious Notes

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• Click here for our story and interview with Shannon about Revolutionary Road and his upcoming projects.

• Check the LexGo version of the story for more photos and Shannon’s filmography.

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.”

Michael Shannon. Copyrighted Associated Press Photo | Matt Sayles.

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.

Michael Shannon (standing) and Dallas Roberts in Adam Rapp's "Finer Noble Gases," part of the Humana Festival of American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

“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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Shannon as John Givings in Revolutionary Road. Photo by Francois Duhamel | Paramount Vantage.

Lexington native Michael Shannon was nominated for an Academy Award Thursday for best supporting actor for his performance in Revolutionary Road.

Shannon’s competition is stiff, including Josh Brolin for Milk, Robert Downey Jr. for Tropic Thunder, 2005 best actor winner Philip Seymour Hoffman for Doubt and the late Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight. Ledger posthumously won the Golden Globe Award for his performance on Jan. 11, and Shannon was a bit of a surprise pick since he had not been a Globe nominee.

Louisville native Gus Van Sant was also received an Oscar nomination for directing Milk, a best picture nominee too.

Despite a strong showing in the Globes’ field, Shannon’s nomination was one of only three Oscar nods for the film, and the only major category pick. Revolutionary Road’s other nominations were for art direction and costume design. Kate Winslet won a Globe for her performance in the film, but in the Oscar race, her lone nomination is for best actress in The Reader.

Revolutionary Road opens in Lexington Friday at the Fayette Mall and Hamburg Pavilion cinemas.

On the Today show, Entrertainment Weekly writer Dave Karger cheered the nomination for Shannon, calling his turn as a mentally disturbed man, “a fantastic performance.”

We talked to Shannon Monday, and asked him about the possibility of being an Oscar nominee:

“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. Reflecting on three days he spent last week in Peru filming with acclaimed director Werner Herzog, he said, “Then I went down and got back to actually trying to make something work, and I felt a little rusty.

“It’s nice to have a performance recognized, but you’re only as good as your last thing, and you’ve gotta keep pushing yourself. You can’t get lazy, because then it can all disappear.”

That hardly seems to be a danger at this point in Shannon’s career. Right now, he has two films premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, Missing Person and The Greatest, and he is currently filming an Orestian drama, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, with Herzog.

Shannon attended Henry Clay High School and started his acting career on the stage, including stops at Actors Theatre of Louisville and the legendary Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. His film career has been marked by small but memorable roles such as Dave Karnes, an ex-Marine who spontaneously put on his uniform and walked into the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. Revolutionary Road’s John Givings, the only character to cheer Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet’s plan to chuck their 1950s suburban lifestyle and move to Paris, falls in line with that resume. But Shannon has also turned in lead performances, including playing opposite fellow Kentuckian Ashley Judd in last year’s Bug. Missing Person and My Son are lead performances.

This is his first major award nomination.

Read more about Shannon here. (Includes audio of interview with Michael Shannon.)

Check out the rest of our Oscar coverage at LexGo.

The New York Times’ Davis Carr got in touch with Shannon who is at Sundance.

Bug, starring Kentucky’s own Ashley Judd and Lexington native Michael Shannon is out on DVD today.

See it, without preconceptions.

There are some moments of Ashley Judd’s performance in Bug that set you on the edge of laughter, and those are the moments that make it great. Specifically, there is a segment in which she connects all the dots in her life
and that of her paranoid companion to validate a vast conspiracy theory. That monologue ends with her declaring, "I am the mother bug!"

If Bug gains any traction at the box office and in pop culture, it’s a line that could wind up a punchline on the order of "I’m the king of the world," or "Damn you all to hell!" Yes, it’s absurd.

But Judd (Copyrighted photo, above, by Anthony Friedkin for Lionsgate) delivers it with the conviction of a woman who firmly believes her declaration. Bug asks a lot of Judd. As Agnes, she’s a character who runs opposite most of our impulses. When casual acquaintance Peter Evans, played by Lexington-native Michael Shannon, starts to tell her his belief that he is infected with bugs and is on the run from the military, instead of calling a doctor or the police, she begins to buy into his theories and even takes on his psychosis. It is a profoundly disturbing film, due in part to the best performance of Judd’s career.

Judd immerses herself in Tracy Letts’ script without an ounce of self consciousness. What makes it really frightening is that she starts the film as a hard-drinking Southern woman, a familiar part we’ve seen Judd in before. It’s a part she’s often revered for because so many of us have met this character — maybe some of us are her. And then she takes her on a tragic journey, slowly slipping from the tethers of reality. Along the way, we are frequently reminded of the tragedies and sadness in Agnes’ life that have brought her to this path, not because Letts reminds us in word, but because those things are in her eyes as she clings to Peter.

In the character and the performance, Agnes is a part remininscent of Halle Berry’s role in Monster’s Ball or Charlize Theron’s turn in Monster, and we know how those choices turned out.

Bug obviously has huge competition at the box office this weekend. But if you have followed Judd’s career, and felt she had tremendous promise, you’ll want to see that promise fulfilled here.

(Do be warned, Bug is a grisly, disturbing film.)

~ Just in case you think we’re being homers on this one, check out this review from New York Magazine.

~ Check out Friday’s Herald-Leader for our take.