Michael Shannon
Michael Shannon
Michael Corbett Shannon is an American actor and musician. Shannon first received attention for his performance in 2002's 8 Mile, where he portrayed the boyfriend of Eminem's character's mother, played by Kim Basinger. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Revolutionary Road in 2008. He played Nelson Van Alden in the HBO period drama series Boardwalk Empire. His performance in the 2011 film Take Shelter led to further critical acclaim, gaining him...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth7 August 1974
CityLexington, KY
CountryUnited States of America
You can't escape this feeling of disintegration. The world is fragile. But you also can't let it ruin your life. I'm actually a pretty composed person. I guess people imagine I spend my life thinking about crazy, sinister things but I don't, really. It's not like I'm trying to exorcise any demons.
If Mother Theresa went to Atlantic City, I don't think she'd start playing Blackjack.
Everybody's constantly being destroyed and rebuilding themselves, some more drastically than others.
The thing about New York is, more than any other place I've ever been, you run into people on the street that you would never imagine you'd see, old friends, people just like there for a day or two. I find that all the time when I'm walking around Manhattan, running into people that I had no idea were even there.
One of the reasons I got into acting to begin with is that I was trying to figure out how life worked. It was interesting to me to try and follow how other people, real or imaginary, would deal with problems, because I was trying to deal with my own problems.
They're almost tripling the size of the floor area.
Children eat 10, 20, 30 times greater in amount than adults, and they have smaller bodies. So in a milligram-per-pound body weight, they are exposed to much, much more of the pesticide placed on these products compared to an adult,
Children are being exposed to large amounts of pesticides daily throughout their diet -- cumulatively, over the first 5, 10, 15, 20 years of their lives, when they are trying to have their brains, their kidneys, and their liver become perfectly functioning organs, ... These chemicals can interrupt this process.
A lot of times the characters I play tend to be kind of loners or they don't have best friends or best buddies.
If you are only getting two takes and you are on a crazy set where there is a lot of noise and distractions and it is hard to focus - that is frustrating. But I don't mind two takes if there is a healthy respect with the work going on with the actors.
If you are going to be on TV for however many years, you want to make sure that you have writers that are giving you something to work with, and I got that in spades.
I just look at it as a real group activity when you are making movies. There are so many different artists doing so many different things, and they are all interconnected. So I like to see what everybody else is going to bring to the table before I make up my mind too much about anything.
Humility in this business [acting] isn't just a matter of being polite, it's kind of a matter of survival. You can't ever afford to think that you're the bee's knees, because you could always afford to be better. You have to always be searching for something better.
I guess if there's one thing that might surprise people about me, it's that I'm very obedient. I'm kind of like a dog. I look at acting as kind of a service industry. You're there to serve the writer and the director. I don't really look at it as an act of self-expression, like I'm going to say what's on my mind.