Will Sharpe: ‘I spent 6 months learning to play Mozart’s music for Amadeus’

‘I wonder if he could feel that he was writing something that would last forever?’

To get into the mindset of a famous historical figure, one who people across the world still know more than two centuries after his death, is a monumental undertaking.

But to embody a man regarded as one of the greatest musical geniuses in history? One could imagine many actors buckling under that pressure. But not Will Sharpe.

After receiving critical acclaim for his performance in the crime drama Giri/Haji, the 39-year-old had his global breakout starring in the second season of The White Lotus, before recently appearing as musician Felix in Lena Dunham’s Netflix rom-com Too Much.

Now, he’s taken on one of his most ambitious roles to date, playing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Sky drama Amadeus, opposite Paul Bettany as composer Antonio Salieri and Gabrielle Creevy as Mozart’s wife Constanze Mozart.

The new TV series is based on the 1979 play by Peter Shaffer, which was later adapted into the 1984 film of the same name, widely regarded as one of the greatest of all time.

While the story by Shaffer is based on real people, it is a fictionalised tale of friction between Mozart and Salieri, imagining them sharing a bitter rivalry – especially from Salieri’s envious point of view – before Mozart’s death at the mere age of 35.

In truth, the rivalry is based on rumours, and in real life they might have shared a respectful and civil relationship as peers. This blend of fact and fiction allowed the actors to run wild with their imaginations, rather than feeling restricted by reality.

‘For me, it was sort of like approaching any other role,’ Sharpe tells Metro. ‘You start with what’s on the page, try and find a way into it. I did some research about Mozart’s life, but I felt like anything that I found there was to be taken or left because it’s such a famously fictionalised version of the story.’

Bettany, who boasts an array of credits in his career, including the likes of A Knight’s Tale, The Da Vinci Code and WandaVision, admits that the more he read into the true history, the more he felt as though they were doing Salieri ‘a massive disservice’.

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‘So I stopped,’ the 54-year-old explains. ‘He seems like he was quite a great chap who helped a lot of young musicians, so I ignored that and just sort of dealt with he’s a great literary villain now, in the same way Iago is [from Othello].’

Despite Salieri being portrayed as the ‘villain’ of the story, who claims at the beginning of Shaffer’s play that he murdered Mozart, Bettany ‘found him quite easy to understand’.

‘Feelings of inadequacy and feeling oneself mediocre – I found it quite moving,’ he says.

When it was first announced that Amadeus was coming to TV, some fans of the film expressed their fury, questioning why it was needed, given how critically acclaimed the movie had been when it was released 41 years ago.

The legacy of the movie, directed by Miloš Forman and starring F. Murray Abraham as Salieri, was certainly on Bettany’s mind when he stepped into the shoes of the Italian composer.

‘I love that film. I think it’s Miloš Forman’s last great work, and I love it,’ he shares, praising Abraham’s performance. ‘It gave me pause, because that’s quite frightening. And then you think, why not a new interpretation?

‘Both the play and the film focus much more on Salieri than they do on Mozart or Constanze. We have a much more balanced narrative, I think that makes this particular iteration of Amadeus fundamentally different.’

One theme that the film and TV series do share is the merging of history with modernity. The movie was extraordinarily colourful, which felt especially fitting given the decade in which it was released. The drama also feels current, despite being set in the 18th century.

‘It’s definitely weaved through it. The language is a mixture of period-sounding English and modern English,’ Sharpe outlines.

‘Vickie Lang, in the designing of the hair and makeup, was grounded in period-accurate looks, but also using influences from rock and roll and jazz to give it a slight kink in it. So I think it was deliberate.

‘Even in the conducting style. In those days, it would have been very metronomic and formal, but together with Ben Holder, who supervised the music, we found a language that had a little bit of that, so it didn’t seem completely free-form in the modern sense, but it had a little bit more expressiveness in it, which was helpful for the storytelling.’

Constanze Mozart, portrayed by In My Skin star Creevy, is one of the most fascinating characters in the series. As the actress notes, there is very little information out there about the soprano singer, except for a ‘massive’ book.

While the 29-year-old doesn’t actually sing in Amadeus, she did still take singing lessons ‘on how to breathe’, because Constanze’s ‘exposing’ costumes meant that every single one of her breaths was on display during her very convincing miming.

The music in Amadeus is essentially a character of its own. Sharpe was taught to play Mozart’s pieces about six months before shooting began, which he says gave him ‘something very solid to do in preparation’. Bettany enlisted the help of his composer son, who helped keep him ‘on the straight and narrow’.

One of the most moving moments that Creevy experienced during filming was when Mozart performs The Great Mass, one of his most revered pieces of music. ‘Will was having an amazing moment. He made me realise that all of this music is how Mozart would have shown all of his emotion,’ she recalls.

‘Constanze and Mozart, there’s a lack of communication sometimes, and he doesn’t know how to talk to her. I then realised, oh, it’s through the music.’

As Salieri, much of Bettany’s role involved ‘watching in wonder and listening in wonder to this music that he is hearing and everybody is hearing for the first time’. Fortunately, this wasn’t a stretch for the actor to play realistically.

‘I had as much classical musical knowledge as my dog Wallis, so I was able to go to the beautiful basilica and purposely not hear it until the camera was on me,’ he says. ‘I’d never heard the Mass before, and it was unbelievable. It really, really affected me.’

Sharpe was struck by a realisation while filming a scene where Mozart was playing the piano. He and director Alice Seabright decided that in that scene, Mozart would be in the middle of composing the aria for the Queen of the Night in his opera The Magic Flute – his final opera before his death.

‘In the shooting of that scene, I suddenly had this feeling of, I wonder if he could feel that he was writing something that would last forever? If just in that moment, with all the noise shut out, is there a sense of the divine or eternity?’

Just like Sharpe, we can only wonder.

Amadeus will launch on Sky and streaming service NOW on 21st December.

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