David Tennant’s podcast with Michael Sheen
Michael Sheen: Eventually he [Neil Gaiman] sent me one of the scripts, an early draft for like the first episode of Good Omens, and we started talking about me being involved and doing it - he said ‘Would you be interested?’ and I said ‘Yeah, of course, oh my god!’ and he said ‘Well, I’ll send you the scripts when they come…’ and I would read them and we’d talk about them a little bit - so I was sort of involved.
But it was always at that point, ‘cause he’d always said about playing Crowley in it. And as time went on, as I was reading the scripts, I was thinking: I don’t think I can play Crowley, I don’t think I’m goint to be able to do it. And I’d start to get a bit nervous ‘cause I don’t want to tell Neil that I don’t think I can do this but I just felt I don’t think I can play Crowley.
David Tennant: Of course you could.
Michael Sheen: Just, on a sort of gut level - you now sometimes on a gut level you feel ‘I can do this or I can’t do this’. And I just thought: You know what, this is just not the part for me, the other part is better for me, I think. I think I can do that, I don’t think I can do that. But I was scared to tell Neil, ‘cause I thought: Well he wants me to play Crowley. And it turned out he had been feeling the same way, and he hadn’t wanted to mention it to me but he was like ‘I think Michael should really play Aziraphale’. And neither of us would bring it up, and then eventually we did and it was one of those things where you go, ‘Oh thank God you said that, I feel exactly the same way!’
And then I think that within a fairly short space of time, he said, ‘I think we’ve got David Tennant for Crowley’. And we both got very excited about that, and then all these extraordinary people started joining in.
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Michael Sheen: This is the only thing I’ve done where I really don’t think of it as ‘my character’ or ‘my performance’, I think of it totallly as ‘us’, ‘the two of us’. What I do is defined by what you do.
You can listen to the podcast here. :)
cucumber-s
