BSC You often play characters who see a collapse coming before everyone. Do you think fear, that specific perception of things coming for us, can be a form of intelligence?

MS Well, fear has been a big component of my life ever since I was a kid. When I was young, the big fear was our relationship with Russia and the inevitability of some sort of nuclear holocaust. I was a little boy trying to grapple with that information, and it really sent me into a tizzy, you know? And then in my adolescence, I really became super concerned about environmental issues, and I canvassed for PIRG, an organisation started by Ralph Nader, and I would knock on people's doors and try and talk to them about air quality, water quality and things like that. And the amount of apathy and complete disinterest in what I was talking about just seemed really confusing, because as far as I am able to ascertain, and I’m no Rhodes scholar, human beings need clean air and clean water in order to survive. I just couldn’t believe how little people seemed to care.

My understanding of fear is that there is a reason for it, not just in human beings but throughout the animal kingdom. It's one of the ways that we ensure our own survival. But I feel like a lot of natural and helpful instincts that seem to be embedded in human consciousness are disappearing in the modern age, or disintegrating anyway. So I always find value in telling stories where people are grappling with these concerns.

BSC In Take Shelter you play Curtis, a man who is struggling psychologically with how he is taking in information and seeing the world. Many people also read it as a film that deals with environmental and climate change issues without being overtly about climate change. Does art have any responsibility to share information or warn people about potential problems that are coming, even if they don't want to listen?

MS I don’t necessarily agree with the concept of art having a responsibility to anyone or anything. Ideally, I think the fewer rules there are in art, the better. Because to me art is just looking out into the darkness and seeing if you find something out there that somebody hasn’t seen before. And whether that thing is instructive or prophetic or maybe it’s just a colour… I think there’s room for all of it. I see value in telling a story that could be conceived as a warning of sorts. But I just went to Marfa, Texas, and saw 100 Donald Judd aluminium boxes. I don't know if they're trying to tell me something or not but I like looking at them, and I think that’s equally valuable. I know what's important to me and I know that, like I said, ever since I was a kid I've been really concerned about the fragility of life. So that's something that’s going to reappear in my work.

BSC A lot of the characters that you’ve chosen to play are men in some state of vulnerability or potential cracking point. What is your sense of masculinity now in the early 21st century? Do you think that there’s a rewiring happening?

MS Yeah, the idea of masculinity is very mysterious to me in a lot of ways. 
 I mean, in some sense it's not. I mean, there's some very obvious qualifications to masculinity. I don't want to speak on behalf of thousands of people that I've never met before, but I know for me, I've never been particularly proud to be a man or like an American man. The obsessions that are commonly related or linked to men haven't really moved me, you know? I'm not fascinated with trucks or cars or wrestling or hunting or skydiving or swashbuckling or any of that stuff. I guess since Covid there seems to be some sort of reckoning about the toxic nature of masculinity.  But I don't even know… The language has gotten so tricky surrounding gender that it's hard to even know how to put it. I think there's many different ways to be a man, just the same as I think there's many different ways to be a woman, or many different ways to be non-binary. I just don't think it should have as much significance attached to it as it seems to.

My parents split up when I was a baby, but when I was around five years old my mom remarried a guy we called “Big Mike”, because I was already Mike. And he was what I guess would come to mind if you talk about American masculinity; he was a jock, he was a stud, he was stoic and didn’t express much emotionally, and I just couldn't stand the guy. And he couldn't stand me. We sweated through seven or eight years in the same house, and then he split, which was both a relief and a disaster. But when he left my mom high and dry with three more kids,


I thought, well, if that's what masculinity is, I'm not interested.

BSC Do you think that rejection has shaped your own relationships?

MS Well, I've had a lot of very close relationships with people that would identify as queer. Several of my closest friends, and my oldest sister, Stacey, is a lesbian and happily married for a long time – they have a daughter and a non-binary child that they adopted. I don’t know… I haven’t had to put that much effort into it. I just love people, you know? The thing that turns me off of people is when I feel like they're inauthentic. That's the biggest way to get me to walk the other direction. 

When I was a very young actor in Chicago doing storefront theatre, I lived for a long time in a part of Chicago that at the time was referred to as Boys Town. It was basically the centre of gay culture in Chicago, with tons of gay nightclubs. Never bothered me in the slightest, you know? It just looked like fun. 

BSC You've said that theatre keeps you honest. What do you think that 
modern film culture has lost with its obsession about speed, scale and content?

MS I don't want to start bashing on movies too much in relation to theatre.

I mean, theatre is equally capable of being dishonest. You know, the quickest route to dishonesty really is money. Broadway is as commodified as Hollywood. Anytime somebody's making decisions based on how pleasing it will be to the consumer, then that's not something I'm super interested in.

I was on the F train, and this kid started talking to me, and he said, “What are you doing on the subway? You should be like, driving around in a Maserati.” I'm like, “Why? Why should I be driving around in a Maserati?” “Because you're in the movies. You don't want to be on this train. People might start messing with you.” I’m like, “Well, you're kind of messing with me. Frankly, man, I don't know how much money you think I have, but I don't have that much money. And even if I did have enough money to buy a Maserati, the subway is still the quickest way to get around the city.” For better or worse, he just could not understand this. Eventually, I just had to move down to the other end of the car because he wouldn't stop 
asking me why I didn't have a Maserati. 

But that doesn't really answer your question. I just think the decisions you're making as an artist, if it's the artist making the decisions, and if you’re making them based on how successful you think whatever it is you’re making is going to be, then that's a shame for you.

BSC There's often a subtext of capitalism being a silent villain in your films. Do you think that we're living through the collapse of a believable economic story? 

MS It feels almost startling that I would even need to say it… Capitalism is the number one problem. It’s asphyxiating us. One of my closest friends in New York is somebody who attempts to raise money for projects, for films and theatre, and he's had a long history of doing this for nonprofit work organisations. He told me about a conversation he had recently where the guy said, “Yeah, no, I'm not giving any money to anybody right now. I'm putting all my money in gold, and crypto, and offshore, because there's going to be a huge financial catastrophe. I'll be OK, because I planned ahead, and I have lots of money, but your average Joe on the street is going to be SOL.” 

I got so angry when I heard about this conversation. I think of people like that, and I think you're intelligent enough to make all this money and to know where to put it in order to protect yourself. So that means you must be smart enough to be part of the solution. You must be, so why aren't you helping people? Why are you telling my poor friend, who literally has one of the most thankless, difficult jobs on planet Earth, to f-off and good luck with your silly, inconsequential life? It just disgusts me. There's a special place in hell for those people.

BSC But on the other end there are some interesting things happening out there: Mamdani getting elected in New York, Bernie Sanders getting backing for some of his ideas, many states and cities have gone to a $15 or $20 minimum wage, more younger people are voting. Do you see any sort of progress or hope among those dynamics?

MS I actually have more hope now than I ever have. I have two kids, and I can definitely see both of them being part of a brighter, better future. I mean, it does seem to be a one step forward, two steps back kind of situation, unfortunately. I’d like just all the steps to be forward and to get rid of the backwards ones. But regardless of whether you live in a state of hope or state of despair, you're still alive. So as long as you're still alive and you're still here and you're still present, you can do something. 

And I find inspiration not just in the youth, but also in the past. You know, I’ve had two projects out this year, a film, Nuremberg, and a show on Netflix, Death By Lightning. And in both of those projects I play figures out of the past that were extraordinarily committed to doing things that benefited and furthered our culture. It gives me a real thrill to think that younger people could watch those programmes or that movie and be inspired by these men from the past that I was privileged to get to portray.

BSC How does the hope you see through your kids coexist with the fear you’ve described earlier?

MS Hmmmmmmm… if you go back to something like Take Shelter, it shows how the fear and the care are interwoven really. I think if my character didn't have family, he probably wouldn't be as anxious as he is. His fear comes out of his care or his concern for his family. If you really don't care about what happens in the future, then you can be pretty carefree, or fearless. They seem to be pretty linked to me.

BSC In the choices of the characters you portray, both on stage and in feature films, it feels like you’re not afraid of creating discomfort or sitting in tension. Do you see discomfort as an important tool for telling the truth?

MS Well, I just think life is extraordinarily complicated. I know that's not a particularly profound thing to say. But the complication of it oftentimes leads to discomfort, particularly when you're not sure what the solution is to a problem.


I think discomfort is inherent in drama anyway. I don't think people are compelled to watch happy, carefree people sit around talking about how happy they are. I mean, as much as that seems to be some sort of utopian aspiration for humanity, it’s not all that compelling to watch.

I guess for me, and I’m saying this as someone who has made a living participating in this activity, I find it so strange that so many of us, including myself, spend so much of our lives sitting around watching other people pretend to do things. I think it's so profoundly odd, and yet I love doing it, and I do it. But I sometimes wonder, instead of watching people we don't know pretend to be people that they are not, doing things that they're not actually doing, wouldn’t it be better for us to actually go do something ourselves? And why don't we do that? Now, the answer is, most people, they do both. They spend all day doing something themselves, and then at night they want to relax, zone out for a minute, watch something or whatever. That makes sense. But as far as I can tell – and I've had to grapple with this question because, like I said, it's what I do for a living – I think it's because we're all just trying to figure something out that could ultimately be impossible to figure out. But we can’t help it. We’re like insects drawn to light bulbs. It’s just how we’re wired.

BSC How much in your life do you feel a sense of being wired? Like, this is how my body works and how the place I live works, etc, and how much do you push against that? 

MS My dad used to say something to me which, every time he would say it, 
I found really nauseating, but it's stuck with me. He used to say, if you want to beat the machine, you have to go inside the machine. I was like, that's the cheesiest nonsense I've ever heard. But you know, he's kind of right.

Standing outside the machine trying to beat on it with a stick doesn't really seem to accomplish much. I'm not a rebel, really, despite all these concerns I've been talking about. But I'm also not a joiner, you know. So I'm kind of in this nebulous area. I'm not an old man, but I'm not a young person, I guess I'm in the middle ages. So I've been through some chapters of my life, and the point I'm at right now is that I really believe in leading by example. If you're going to be critical of systems or people, you need to present an alternative in the way you conduct yourself. Because if you just stand there saying, you're doing it wrong, and you don't show people another way of doing it, then you're basically just an asshole.

BSC Do you think we lose something when artists or performers become 
a product and become something that people consume that way?

MS When artists or performers make a product of themselves, I think the 
loss is ultimately for them, because I think they’re kind of walling themselves in. Is the general population losing out on anything? I really don't know. I guess what society as a whole would be missing out on is that person not going as deeply into that darkness as they potentially could, so that whatever they discovered could be a discovery for all of us.

BSC How do you find joy in your day-to-day life?

MS People. I love being with people. And nature. I think nature's so beautiful. And art… I mean, art is my day-to-day life. They're not separate things. You know, it's not like art is over here and my day-to-day life is over here. It's all mixed together.

BSC In your music and your acting, you choose noise, friction, and tension over beauty or ease. Why is discomfort the goal?

MS I'm just drawn to the spectrum of the endless possibilities that human beings are capable of. You listen to the music of John Coltrane, and it is highly combustible, volatile, almost radioactive. Coltrane said this was a spiritual quest: “I'm trying to find God. It's about my relationship with God.” There are parts of A Love Supreme that are easy to listen to, and there’s parts where he goes a little bonkers. But it's in those parts, and the catharsis of how hard he is playing his saxophone, that he's finding that connection with a higher power.

And that connection isn’t some sort of pastoral thing that happens in a quiet setting. The closest thing I can see to it in human experience is giving birth. That's not a quiet, contemplative experience. It almost feels like when Coltrane is playing that music, he's giving birth to something. That saying – the agony and the ecstasy? There's a reason for that.