If you’ve seen James Marsh’s “Man on Wire,” then you know of Philippe Petit’s dazzling tight-rope walk between the towers of New York’s World Trade Center on the morning of August 7, 1974. What you probably don’t know is that while Petit was criss-crossing back and forth between the towers for roughly 45 minutes, Michael Shannon was coming into the world down in Lexington, Kentucky’s Good Samaritan Hospital.
“I don’t think it means anything,” Shannon says. But it’s certainly an interesting aside to the Oscar season, drawing a connection, however meaningless, between these two contenders, one of them a thoroughbred frontrunner, the other deserving of that consideration but strangely under the radar this year.
I get a call from Shannon to kick off the morning. It seems he’s somewhat stranded at the hotel and will be late meeting me over at Hugo’s on Santa Monica Blvd. I later find out he was industrious enough to grab a cab rather than wait on a studio-provided car, probably the east-coaster in him. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m going to make sure we get a full hour.”
When Shannon walks into a room, his striking height seems to command at least a glance in his direction. A couple of brunching patrons stare for a bit, sure that they’ve seen him in SOMETHING before. And for a number of years, Shannon has been that kind of actor — the hard-working sort that AMPTP has certainly disavowed as SAG tries to find some sort of plan for sustaining the acting middle-class throughout the industry.
You’ve seen him in “Pearl Harbor,” “Bad Boys II,” “World Trade Center,” “Bug” and any number of bit roles that call for the unusual image he cuts. But you’ve never seen him like he is in “Revolutionary Road,” a two-scene wonder of a performance that cuts the the very core of a narrative already concerned with getting at the hardest of truths.