Michael Sheen came to the Masters of Sex Q&A at PaleyFest and tried to class up the joint with a lot of talk about playing Hamlet, and reading Arthur Miller as a teen only to discover Miller’s plays had no bad characters — just people making bad choices. Fortunately, he was greatly outnumbered on stage at the Dolby Theatre by the women of Showtime‘s 1950s-set drama series about real-life pioneers of the science of human sexuality, Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson. They wanted to talk about the drudgery of maintaining a ’50s hairdo and the best way to pee in a girdle.
Related: ‘Masters Of Sex’ Team Has Sex Talk With TV Critics
Sheen, known for playing David Frost in Frost/Nixon and Tony Blair in The Queen, said playing Masters was the “perfect combination” for an actor, because he was a famous historical figure but was little known as a man and so “private” and “secretive and mysterious” that, “by necessity you have to invent a lot as well.” And while he was not looking to do television, Sheen said he was receptive to the idea, because “you can tell a story over 12 hours [that] really opens the door, as an actor, to explore character in a different way.” Pay cablers like Showtime are “a stratum of filmmaking that’s not being done in film any more. … Writing is so strong in television at the moment … the sophistication of the audience … the bar is very high, and that pushes you to do the best work you can.”
Related: PaleyFest 2014 Schedule
Annaleigh Ashford, who plays prostitute Betty in the series, said: “Undergarments can change everything about how you walk, you talk, you move. Also, it was really hard to pee back then. You had to ask someone to help you pee. I haven’t done that since I was, like, 4.” She and Lizzy Caplan, who plays Virginia Johnson, discovered in the course of the conversation that they had very different strategies for peeing while wearing a girdle — Caplan pulled it down, while Ashford pulled it up, being careful to unclip the stockings from the garters.
Related: Showtime Renews ‘Masters Of Sex’
“The truth is, women would run everything but we’re too busy getting ready,” joked Caitlin FitzGerald, who plays Masters’ wife Libby. “We show up at 5 AM and it’s a solid two hours getting hair and makeup. These women did it every day, and that’s crazy – crazy! And they were also cleaning their house and taking care of children and cooking three hot, well-balanced meals – sometimes out of a can – for their husbands. That’s a full-time thing.”
The clothes and dialogue helped Caplan define the period. “I realized how much I rely on saying ‘like’ and ‘um’ and having terrible posture, and mumbling. … My posture changed tremendously, and making sure to say every word” was a challenge. The role, she said, has “made me much more disciplined.”
“That shit don’t fly with me,” Sheen jumped in.
“Hamlet – bleccch,” Caplan groaned in response.
Related: Showtime Picks Up ‘Masters Of Sex’ To Series
Asked what was his favorite scene of the first season, Sheen finally settled on the one between the glass dildo, named Ulysses, and a prostitute, “in which she had to lie on the bed with the dildo and “go mental – go like bonkers with it for a really long time … and she started doing it and I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. It was the most extraordinary performance — the most extraordinary human behavior, aside from the acting. It was, like, ‘What just happened?!”
Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy.