Copious Notes

• Click the play button to hear our interview with Michael Shannon talking about his career and his Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

• 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.

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Ashley Smith who plays Sister James, left, worked through a scene with Courtney Collier, center, who plays Sister Aloysius, and Jim Trujillo, playing Father Flynn, during dress rehearsal of UK Theatre's production of "Doubt." Photos by Mark Cornelison | LexGo.

Click the play button to hear a podcast of our interview with the director and actors in UK Theatre’s Doubt:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

There are different ways to see Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play about a scandal in a Catholic school.

You can say that literally in Lexington, this month.

The play will be presented by the University of Kentucky Theatre Dec. 4 to 7 in the Briggs Theatre in UK’s Fine Arts Building.

Later in the month, or possibly early next year (Lexington release dates are to be announced), the film version will hit theaters with Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Father Flynn and Meryl Streep playing Sister Aloysius, who accuses the priest of inappropriate conduct with a boy at the school.

Another couple of ways to see it are as a tidy mystery or a lingering question. Shanley and critics seemed to prefer the latter. New York Times critic Ben Brantley complained that when the cast for the Broadway production changed all doubt had been removed from Doubt.

Andrew Kimbrough.

UK theater professor and the play’s director, Andrew Kimbrough is certainly going for the less-certain interpretation.
“I don’t think Shanely wants the audience to reach a conclusion,” Kimbrough says. “I think he wants the process of investigating and formulating evidence and the difficulty of arriving at a conclusion to be at the forefront.

“In the introduction to the play, he points out a very common human phenomenon, and that is that all of us tend to be opinionated people. And we tend to make up our minds about what’s right and what’s wrong and what’s inappropriate and what’s not and stick by those opinions, even when fact should convince us to the contrary.”

That tendency is embodied in Sister Aloyisus, who is certain popular Father Flynn has stepped out of line but cannot build an airtight case. In just four years, the characters have become highly sought after roles.

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