‘It’s fun to go to war with God’: Will Sharp and Paul Bettany talk about their sweaty, profane take on Amadeus | television

“A “The story of the prodigal son and God as Father,” is how actor Paul Bettany describes Amadeus, the Peter Shaffer play that became a popular film in 1984. Both depict the rivalry between the Austrian court composer Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a former child phenomenon whose towering talent reveals Salieri as humble and set in his ways. Salieri, who believes that the composer’s talent is divine, is so insulted by this upstart that he renounces God and begins to destroy Mozart.

Now Amadeus has been remade for television, with Will Sharp in the lead role and Bettany as Salieri. The series, which begins with Mozart arriving in Vienna in a rickety carriage and then promptly vomiting in the street, is written by Joe Barton, the writer of The Black Doves and Giri/Haji known for his left-wing approach to genre television. It’s no surprise, then, that Amadeus breaks free from classic period drama, injecting it with modern-day dialogue and gloriously chaotic flourishes. Although I won’t reveal the details of an early sex scene between Mozart and a young soprano, it’s safe to say you’ll never look at macarons the same way again.

Sharp and Bettany speak via video call. From his New York kitchen – wearing a T-shirt with the word “Amateur” emblazoned across his chest – Bettany, 54, is articulate and jovial, eliciting howls of laughter, while Sharp, 39, at his home in north London, is quieter and more contemplative. Amadeus was filmed in Budapest, a city that Sharp points out “has a lot of fine performing arts spaces and a strong opera scene, which means interior shots could be taken there as well.” What’s less good is that they were shooting in the height of summer in wigs and full period costumes. “There was a lot of joking about how it was the choice of Mozart’s character to be covered in sweat all the time,” he says. “But there was no other way, even in the scenes before Mozart got sick. Someone would come up and wipe me dry, and in about six and a half seconds, I would be soaking wet again.”

If the heat wasn’t bad enough, Bettany had to deal with spending five and a half hours in the makeup chair after decades of age were added to his face. As in the film, the story is framed by an elderly Salieri, who has been sent to a sanitarium, and looks back with regret on his old life. In the film, Salieri confesses to a priest, while the TV series finds him spilling his entrails to Mozart’s widow, Constanze (Gabrielle Creevy). “All the hair you see on his face and neck is real human hair [applied] “Individually, so there was nothing comfortable about it,” Bettany recalls. “It was cool because I already thought I had an idea [how to play] Old Salieri—or Old Hairy Sally, as I call him. But here I was in front of the mirror with all this stuff stuck to my face and when I started talking I realized: Oh my God, this is completely different from what I had in my head. I can push the character so much further.

For the actors, much of the appeal of recasting Amadeus lies in the freedom of having five episodes to tell the story. “I think this gave us the space and bandwidth to explore it from different perspectives,” Sharpe says. “We’re still driving the story with Salieri’s obsessive jealousy, but you get Constanze’s perspective on their lives as well.” Bettany, who made his name in the early 2000s in Gangster No 1 and the medieval comedy A Knight’s Tale, moved to big-budget television relatively recently with Marvel’s WandaVision. He says he still finds the hectic schedule of a TV show “baffling… When I get to the end of the day when I’m shooting a film, I can think about the day’s work. When I’m making a TV show and I get to the end of the day, I can’t remember how it started.”

Sharpe, who is also a writer and director – a decade ago, he directed, co-wrote and starred in the Channel 4 series Flowers, about a depressed children’s author – has risen to fame in the era of prestige television, earning an Emmy nomination for his performance as a wealthy tech entrepreneur in the second series of The White Lotus. For him, the speed of shooting “adrenaline, you just want to keep moving. It can be very helpful to be in a place where you have to be instinctive.”

Long before the project began, both actors knew the film’s Amadeus well. Bettany describes it as “Miloš Forman’s last great film. I have no problem going back and watching the other shows.” [as research]But I didn’t need this. I’ve seen that many times. if [ours] If there had been a movie, I might have said, “Well, what’s the point?” It’s already been done. But because it was for television, it felt different.” Foreman’s film, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1985, also earned a Best Actor Oscar for F. Murray Abraham. Did that make him a difficult act to follow? Bettany shakes his head. “I’m very practical about this stuff. There have been so many great Hamlets, so why not have a new Salieri? I think it’s eminently related. We’ve all had some corrupt, false, terrible instincts and then hope we don’t act on them. It’s so exciting to have the opportunity to give up everything and go to war with God.

Sharpe’s approach to playing Mozart was not to reflect on him as a cultural giant, but as a man “literally trying to get through the day.” However, he says his entry point was the music, which “I was coming back to a lot of. I’d never had my own opera epiphany, but when I made this, I started to understand it. And it’s extraordinary. Some of it is very playful and light and kind of mischievous and wonderful. And then in other places, it’s really dark and great.” These “apparently conflicting elements” in Mozart’s music turned out to be a valuable resource, providing insight into the psyche of its creator.

To learn about music, Bettany had the advantage of having a composer’s son studying for a master’s degree, who explained to him that “opera was actually a moneymaker for composers. They thought symphonies were their serious business, and operas were kind of like seven-inch symphonies [singles]”Bettani’s son was also invaluable in talking him through other aspects of the composer’s life. Mozart is depicted as having a constant soundtrack in his head, something that Salieri greatly coveted. “So I asked my son: What’s the truth about that? Do composers really have music in their heads? Bettany says. “He said he really did. Sometimes he would have two competing tunes and he would have to write one of them down, otherwise his mind would be an absolute mess.”

Amadeus is primarily about the relationship between Mozart and Salieri, of course, which makes it ultimately dramatic. Mozart’s first official appearance at the court of the music-loving Emperor, Joseph II (Rory Kinnear), is in a piano fight in which he rips Salieri’s sheet music off the podium, shouting: “Oh disgusting. Who wrote this?” When asked what kind of preparation goes into a picture of a relationship fueled by hostility and envy, both actors’ answers boil down to: Not much. “It wasn’t like we were conspiring too hard beforehand about how to play it,” Sharpe says. “We had never met before, so we were feeling each other out backstage, which brought more frisson. But I felt we didn’t need to talk about the dynamic too much.” Salieri creates Mozart’s piece [downfall] While Mozart is largely oblivious, there is a degree to which we have our own agendas.

Mozart may be oblivious to Salieri’s machinations, but Salieri never stops thinking about Mozart and plotting against him. “On paper, Will does a lot of scenes without me being in them, but every scene I’m in has Mozart in one way or another. His ghost is there,” Bettany says.

Sharpe adds: “The truth is that Salieri wants something that Mozart has, but Mozart doesn’t necessarily want it. And would Salieri really want it if he knew what it means? In Shaffer’s play and in Amadeus, the film, Mozart is presented as this absolute genius, almost like a superhero in music. But here we had space to explore that, like: What would it have been like day to day? What is this in reality? From Amadeus’ point of view, God’s attention feels like a burden, and it’s very painful to You bear this responsibility.

Mozart’s unraveling is not helped by his drinking and flirting, though it is Salieri who pushes him over the edge. After the death of Mozart’s overbearing father, whose approval young Wolfgang desperately sought, Salieri begins dressing up as a masked figure who Mozart believes is the ghost of his father. I wonder if Sharpe’s performance, especially in the final weeks of Mozart desperately trying to compose a Requiem, was informed by his bipolar diagnosis, which he also emulated in “Flowers.” “I think it should be done indirectly,” he answers, “but I didn’t really want to approach it in an overly academic way. Madness is not something that’s easy to play with, because it’s something abstract. So I wanted to take it scene by scene, to find out: What is he trying to achieve? Where is he trying to get to?”

In Forman’s film, Mozart’s latent instability is indicated by a mercurial nature and a deliberately insufferable maniacal laugh. But as for Barton’s drama, Sharp says, “I felt that perhaps there was room for a more secondary approach. Of course, it’s insufferable when experienced by Salieri or Constanze. But I wasn’t going into a scene wringing my hands and thinking: How am I going to be insufferable this time?”

It is one of the central ironies of Amadeus that Salieri is at once Mozart’s greatest enemy and his greatest admirer. Bettany may not believe that an actor’s talent is a gift from God, but can he understand Salieri’s professional envy? Did he ever dream of beating one of his acting rivals?

“Well, as Gore Vidal said: ‘Every time I hear about a friend’s success, a little part of me dies,’” he laughs. “A lot of times, when you work with actors, it feels like a sporting event, like someone is going to try to beat you at acting, whereas I want to treat it like a team game where we can be more than just the sum of our parts. At Amadeus, I felt safe knowing that Will handled it the same way I did. But if he gets all the good reviews and I start to hate him so much? Well, we’ll see what happens.”

Amadeus will be broadcast Sky Atlantic and NOh December 21st.