The Hot Press Interview: Robert Sheehan

What’s in a name? While arranging to speak to Robert Sheehan, beloved star of Misfits and Love/Hate, whose new film The Road Within screens at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival this month, I made the mistake of referring to him as Rob (as I have many times previously).

“Actually,” came the swift and firm response from his PR representative, “he’s going by Robert now.”
Ah Jaysus, I thought. After years of lively chats with the charming Artist Formerly Known as Rob, could he really have gone all Hollywood on me? However, five minutes in his company confirms he's as grounded as ever – an actor who has no interest in the extraneous bullshit.
Robert's latest film The Road Within is showing at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2015. A 'dramedy', directed by Gren Wells and co-starring Dev Patel and Zoe Kravitz, it finds Sheehan essaying a star turn as Vincent, a young man who suffers from severe Tourette’s Syndrome. Vincent stages a prison escape from a psychological clinic, with his OCD roommate and anorexic crush in tow.
The subject matter could have been played for cheap gags. In fact, however, the film is deeply moving. Rob – okay Robert – Sheehan’s performance in particular is impressively empathetic, shouts like “Amy Winehouse sucks my cock!” notwithstanding.
“It was absolutely terrifying,” he remarks. “When I got the script, I was initially gung-ho about playing someone with Tourette’s. However, there was a period of several months between being cast and filming. We had rehearsals which involved going out and about in LA acting like I had Tourette’s, which was scary!
"Then I came back to London and hung around with a girl who had out-there Tourette’s. I really had quite a deep relationship with the character before we kicked off; he was clacking around in my head for a long time. I truly didn’t want to misrepresent him, or indeed anyone with Tourette’s.”
Though Sheehan is used to attention from fans, having people stare at him and judge him was an entirely different proposition.
“We went to a mall in Palm Springs," he recalls, "and I immediately started ticking and screeching and stuff. The first person who looked at me was a person working at one of those mall kiosks, who went: ‘Aren’t you that guy from Misfits?’ I just said ‘Eh, no?’ and ran away!”
Apart from being recognised, the main problem was that California is supremely tolerant. If you want to run around shouting – well, who's going to judge you?
“It was quite disappointing!” he laughs. “No-one really reacted. I was up at a shop counter, screaming ‘Shit! Shit!’ in the face of this poor girl, and she didn’t flinch.”
Los Angeles’ acceptance of eccentricity is merely the start of the culture shock. He also laments that you can only have two pints before you're labelled ‘a drinker’.
“It’s very civilised. I miss the mischief. There is a strong Irish contingent here and so if I want a bit of mischief I turn to them.
“I do really like it here,” he adds, “but myself and a friend were chatting and I said, ‘LA is full of lunatics’ and he replied, ‘Not just lunatics – a lot of fucking eejits as well!’ I feel that’s pretty accurate! It’s full of the black sheep of the Western world.”
There's a lot of wheeling and dealing too. In Ireland, if people ask for a “meeting”, it’s because they want to work with you. In LA people want to meet you so that, on the off-chance you make the big time, they can name-drop like nobody’s business.
“You get damned with faint praise, constantly. You go into meetings and they go, ‘Oh you’re so funny, you’re great’ in a very generic way. They’re very sycophantic and it’s possibly for that self-serving reason: because, then, you never hear from them again.”
Separating the genuine artists from the professional lunchers thus becomes a skill – one that can backfire on occasion.
“I had that,” laughs Sheehan. “My director for The Road Within knows Jon Turteltaub [director of Cool Runnings, While You Were Sleeping, National Treasure]. So I asked to be put in touch with him. I wanted to meet and he agreed. I was so excited: I thought we’d chat for hours about art, philosophy. And he was like, ‘Yeah I can meet you in two weeks’ time, 10am to 10.45.’ My response was, ‘What? In all honesty Jon, I wouldn’t be done clearing my throat, so let’s just leave it!’ At the same time, I thought, fair play to him. There was me, trying to arrange a general meeting that was really just for the sake of ‘me’. And he was like, ‘I’ve got shit to do!’ I like that. There was an honesty you don’t often get in Ireland!”
The new movie is just the start of a good run for Sheehan. He will shortly appear in David Blair’s horror, The Messenger; and alongside Ron Perlman and Rupert Grint in the comedy Moonwalkers. After that comes Sway Lake, an experimental feature from Ari Gold and action flick Geostorm, with Gerard Butler.
The diversity of these movies reflects the breadth of Sheehan’s talent and ambition. He is clearly determined not to become type-cast, which could have happened following Misfits. Similarly, he might have milked his post-Love/Hate fame in Ireland for years. But he knows how not to wear out his welcome.
“The boredom aspect is a very big thing,” he says. “I’m quite impatient. I like life at a high tempo. I’m constantly seeking something that will excite, enthrall and engage me. I want a really varied body of work. The people I respect constantly stretch themselves. I don't want to be complacent. Complacency is a killer.”
This clarity of vision seems to have made him happier as a person. He is notably less twitchy than during our last encounter.
“It’s hard to find consistency as an actor," he reflects. "Contentment is always the goal. I think what keeps me from being content is being away from my girlfriend. It causes problems and stress for both of us, puts a strain on things. Once you conquer that, nothing else really effects you. Because the job is always fun as long as you’re happy generally. We’re working on that."
His girlfriend is French actress and dancer Sofia Boutella, who Sheehan met while filming Jet Trash in India over a year ago. He’s clearly besotted. It makes a change for an actor, who once told me: “Love isn’t for me – my lifestyle’s too nomadic. I’m a gypsy, I can’t stay settled.”
Explain yourself, Mr. Sheehan...
“Falling for her was like a rugby tackle,” he grins. “There was very little choice in the whole thing. We’ve been together for a year. For the first eight months, we were doing the long distance thing. Now we’re both in LA. It was really tough, going from being pen-pals to living with each other. It’s intense, and makes very little practical sense – you’re doing it because you have this mad knot of love in your chest. We drove each other a bit mad at the start of the relationship. We were striving for that contentment – and now we’re finding it.”
A stable personal life has inspired him to re-evaluate his professional goals.
“I’m realising what makes me happy,” Sheehan says. “Work makes me happy: the graft, the exploration. A lot of people are scared to just let themselves be happy. I’m learning to stop and smell the roses: go off camping for a few days, wander through the woods – not to sound too poetic about it!”
There have been disappointments too, of course. Last year, Sheehan exclusively revealed to Hot Press that he had missed out on a specially-written part in the rebooted X-Men franchise due to scheduling conflicts with Misfits. That was followed with the offer of a major role in a “really, really big televisual project”, that the actor nevertheless felt wasn’t quite up to scratch.
Eager to have Sheehan on board, the show’s creator met him, and offered to collaborate with the actor to create a richer, more dynamic character and storyline. Sheehan agreed, and was just allowing himself to picture his new life as a huge TV star and household name in the States, when it all went horribly wrong.   
“My agent – who is not my agent anymore – took this to mean that now, we could do whatever the fuck we wanted. They were really, overly aggressive in the negotiation with the network. Long story short, they fucked up the negotiation. I found out later the organisation felt that they had no option other than to stop even trying to talk to my representation, and hired somebody else. I thought, ‘Dear God’. It was a really frightening moment, because I went from looking at the next four years of my life, to realising that my agent, who I had trusted with the job, had just completely fucked me over.
“It was weirdly like being in an abusive relationship,” he observes, “because I was talking to my UK agent who was saying, ‘They really fucked up, we should consider leaving’ and I was like, ‘But they’re a big name, do we really have a choice?’ She had to literally tell me, ‘You always have a choice'. We tried to get them to explain themselves and they wouldn’t – there’s a lot of megalomaniacs out here who never have to explain themselves – and I just had this shock of ‘You’ve had my career in your hands’. So I sacked them immediately.
"That was really disappointing, and scary, because out here you’re in the hands of these lunatic egomaniac agents, particularly the corporate ones, who base their model on Wall Street. You’re a 'stock', nothing more, nothing less. It’s very inhumane how they work in LA.”
I ask him what the TV show was, and can feel his disappointment radiating.
“At the time, it was called Fear Of The Walking Dead. It’s watching the fall of humanity – The Walking Dead but before the virus took hold. Biggest show in the world,” he laughs bitterly. “Biggest show in the world.”
The actor also had a setback when his first opportunity at a blockbuster movie franchise fell through. The opening installment of Mortal Instruments hadn’t even hit cinemas before a sequel was greenlit, and again Sheehan found himself preparing for a potentially life-changing project. Alas, the movie tanked and Sheehan was plunged into limbo.
“The company were very gung-ho," he smiles. "They green-lit the sequel before it came out – even before we were finished filming. Two weeks before we were meant to start filming there were murmurs about script problems. Still, they were building sets and sending me apartment options to live in Canada while shooting – and then, boom. Nothing. Quietness. And the whole thing shut down. Sony didn’t want to take on the marketing costs and stuff, and no-one else would touch it. It just disappeared.”
Not that he was particularly shocked.
”When the first one came out, it didn’t make nearly enough, which was upsetting, because we were really involved in the numbers. We knew how much it had to earn in what territory by when. So we kind of turned into salesmen in the avalanche of press that we did. I didn’t enjoy that. I was thinking, ‘I’m an actor, I don’t want to worry about the numbers'. Johnny Rhys Meyers was the one who called it – he said, ‘There’s no way the next one’s getting made’ – even though it had been greenlit. He told me: ‘Unless it makes $10 million this weekend, it’s done'. I was so naïve, I was like, ‘Seriously?’ He was dead right.”
Again, Sheehan found that his representation had blown it – and the workaholic actor found himself unhappily unemployed.
“My agent – another former agent – hadn’t negotiated a pay-or-play deal. They didn’t have to pay me for the time I’d cleared in my schedule. I had no work for two and a half months. All lessons learned, but scary in the moment.”
These experiences have inspired him to take a more controlling role in his career, which is perhaps why he is also a producer on Charles Henri Belleville’s Jet Trash.
“You feel ownership over every frame of the film," Sheehan says of producing. "You're very protective. A lot of actors naively believe it’s all about them. You realise pretty swiftly that it’s not, at all: you have to accept you don’t have any control over the project you’re in. Even seeing how your performance has been manipulated for the good of the movie: that is how it should be, but it’s a learning curve. So if you want to creatively control your stuff, you have to create your own projects.”
Sheehan has been keeping a relatively low public profile – perhaps a reaction to the celebrity he attained in Ireland post Love/Hate. Not that he is exactly obscure – his semi-inactive Twitter account has amassed 260,000 followers.
“It seems to be a lot of inane crap," he says of Twitter. "I have a mate Adam, who I love dearly and he’s one of the funniest people I know. He ended up tweeting ‘Really stoked about my new duvet cover'. Where in people’s brains do they think, ‘I’m going to publish this’?”
He recognises the nasty side of Twitter and we end up discussing Jon Ronson’s upcoming book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which explores the experience of those who have been shunned, humiliated and harassed by the mass outrage Twitter inspires.
One person Ronson interviews is PR rep Justine Sacco, who was fired, threatened and ostracised after tweeting “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” to her 170 followers. An appallingly stupid thing to tweet, for sure, but the gleeful savagery with which people anticipated her fate was reminiscent of public floggings.
“That compulsion to pull people down has always been in the media. With Twitter, it’s so much more instant. It also brings out these people who want to vent rage, which is very odd – slamming a door and looking back in to see who was watching. It’s like wildfire. I find it so strange news corporations can’t keep up with Twitter – I’ve just accepted that I can’t either.”
For Sheehan, real human contact always takes precedence – for professional as well as personal reasons.
“You need to talk to people to mine them for material,” he jokes. “To exploit them for all they’re worth – in person.”
Meanwhile, he is enjoying everything America has to offer – even the stuff that is a little bit... out there.
“Me and Sofia went camping to Joshua Tree for Valentine’s weekend,” he tells me, giggling mischievously. “I kept the whole thing a surprise, and we went and set up our tent and it was incredibly beautiful. Then I said, ‘Alright baby, phase two of the surprise’ – and took out a big handful of magic mushrooms! We just wandered out into the wilderness on magic mushrooms. It was a fucking profound experience, it was glorious! Really, truly fantastic.
"It goes through several phases," he adds. "First it’s all ‘Ooh I feel a bit dizzy, and look at how all the Joshua Trees are beginning to vibrate!’ Then you start hallucinating – and because it’s in the wilderness it’s glorious. I think it’s the only way to take mushrooms.”
And so begins the most unconventional Drugs Awareness Announcement in history.
“Do not take mushrooms in an urban environment, or with anybody you don’t know, or people who aren’t on mushrooms,” Sheehan advises. “You have to be with people you know who are on mushrooms, in the desert. I was on my knees crying for about an hour and a half! It just completely distorts your perception of reality, and how you see the world. We came out of it just feeling really well... not hungover or empty. And with a newfound joy. I came out of that thinking, ‘We’re all innocent and we should all love each other because we all just want to get along!’ But, you know, in more of a profound way.”