As a kid, actor Will Sharpe moved from Japan to England and says he never quite felt like he fit in.
"People who have lived in different countries or who are mixed race, you do sometimes end up with this feeling that you're not really sure where your home is or how to identify," Sharpe says. "If I go back to Japan, I can speak the language, but kind of in a very wobbly way ... like a very Western version of a Japanese person."
Sharpe brings some of that outsider energy to the limited Starz series, Amadeus. The show, which was adapted from the 1979 stage play, tells the story of 18th-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — an eccentric genius who uses music to express what he isn't able to say.
Amadeus tells a fictionalized story of the rivalry between Mozart and the court composer Antonio Salieri. Sharpe likens the relationship between the two men to a brotherhood — except that the pious Salieri feels "neglected by God [while] Mozart is getting all of the attention and is having music showered upon him."
To prep for the role, Sharpe spent months learning specific piano pieces and practicing the art of conducting. "There's this sense that Mozart was someone for whom music just fell out of the sky into his lap," he says. "But I was sort of curious to try and imagine: What does that actually look and feel like in his day-to-day life?"
Sharpe previously played a newly wealthy tech bro in the second season of The White Lotus. He also appeared in Lena Dunham's series Too Much and the Oscar-winning film A Real Pain.
Interview highlights
On playing Mozart as socially awkward
He doesn't know how to read a room. There's a lot written kind of speculatively about neurodiversity. And I tried not to be too literal about that or to retro-diagnose him, but [I] definitely wanted to play him as slightly "other." And he doesn't understand social norms or can't understand why people are offended. ... Things that are simple to everyone else he can't do, and he can communicate successfully in a kind of ordinary, normal way.
On working with Mike White on Season 2 of The White Lotus
I think Mike is just so precise in his tone and in his writing and how he kind of crafts anything that he's the author of. It feels very deliberate. And that is something that I admire and something that I respect, but also he's managed to make a show that feels elevated and kind of true to him as a creator, but has reached a really wide audience.
On collaborating with Lena Dunham on Too Much
It did feel like we were always working together to find who [the character] was even from our very first cup of tea ... in London. She has this incredibly fast story brain and is able to retain information and encounters in a very formidable way. And sometimes we'd have a very offhand conversation about a scene or an episode that was coming up, and then I'd see rewrites that seemed to kind of work that conversation into it.
On acting opposite Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain
[Kieran] is an electric performer … Jesse [would come] in with a very specific plan about how to shoot it and where everyone would be and how it was going to be choreographed … and Kieran was like, hang on a minute, "Why would I stand there?" or "Let's rehearse it. Let's see what happens." And so even before we'd started rolling in a kind of meta-dramatic way they'd fallen into the same dynamic as the characters. And Jesse would very wryly be like, "Well, this is perfect because you have no respect for me as a director and nor does the character have any respect for you, so this is going to work great." And it did work great. …
It was exciting to act opposite Kieran. … You know he's always going to bring it and it's always gonna work. But then he's also very playful and doesn't mind pushing the edges of it, which I think sometimes makes for really unexpected choices that can lead to interesting things happening on camera.
Therese Madden and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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