“A prodigal son story with God as the father,” is how actor Paul Bettany describes Amadeus, the Peter Shaffer play that became a celebrated film in 1984. Both depict the rivalry between Austrian court composer Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a former child phenomenon whose towering talent exposes Salieri as mediocre and stuck in his ways. Salieri, who believes a composer’s gift to be divine, is so affronted by this upstart that he renounces God and sets about destroying Mozart.
Now Amadeus has been remade for TV, with Will Sharpe in the title role and Bettany as Salieri. The series, which begins with Mozart arriving in Vienna in a rickety carriage and promptly throwing up in the street, is written by Joe Barton, the Black Doves and Giri/Haji writer known for his leftfield approach to genre TV. Little surprise, then, that Amadeus takes liberties with the classic period drama, injecting it with modern-day dialogue and gloriously anarchic flourishes. While I won’t divulge the details of an early sex scene between Mozart and a young soprano, safe to say you won’t look at a macaron the same way again.
Sharpe and Bettany are both talking via video call. From his kitchen in New York – and wearing a T-shirt with the word “Amateur” on the chest – Bettany, 54, is voluble and funny, given to hoots of laughter, while 39-year-old Sharpe, at home in north London, is quieter and more contemplative. Filming for Amadeus took place in Budapest, a city that Sharpe notes “has lots of beautiful performing arts spaces and a strong opera scene, meaning the interior shots could be done there, too”. Less good was that they were shooting in the height of summer in wigs and full period costume. “There was lots of joking about how it was a character choice for Mozart to be covered in sweat the whole time,” he says. “But there was no other way, even in the scenes before Mozart becomes unwell. Someone would come and pat me dry and in about six and a half seconds I would be soaked again.”
If the heat weren’t bad enough, Bettany had to deal with spending five and a half hours in the makeup chair having decades added to his face. As with the film, the story is framed by the elderly Salieri, who has been committed to an asylum, looking back with remorse on his old life. Where the movie has Salieri confessing to a priest, the TV series finds him spilling his guts to Mozart’s widow, Constanze (Gabrielle Creevy). “All the hair that you see on his face and neck is real human hair [applied] individually, so there was nothing comfortable about it,” Bettany recalls. “It was fascinating because beforehand I thought I had an idea of [how to play] old Salieri – or old hairy Sally, as I call him. But there I am in front of the mirror with all this stuff glued to my face and when I started speaking, I realised: Oh God, it’s completely different to what I had in my head. I could push the character so much further.”
For the actors, much of the appeal of reprising Amadeus lay in the freedom of having five episodes in which to tell the story. “I think that allowed us the space and bandwidth to explore it from different points of view,” says Sharpe. “We’re still driving the story with Salieri’s manic 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, made the move into big-budget TV relatively recently with Marvel’s WandaVision. He says he still finds the frantic schedule of a TV show “baffling … When I get to the end of the day when I’m making a movie, 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 began.”
Sharpe, who is also a writer and director – a decade ago, he directed, co-wrote and starred in Channel 4’s Flowers, about a depressed children’s author – has risen to fame in the era of prestige TV, 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 filming “adds to the 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 starting the project, both actors knew Amadeus the movie well. Bettany calls it “the last great Miloš Forman movie. I don’t have a problem with going back and watching other performances [as research], but I didn’t need to with this. I’ve seen it so many times. If [ours] had been a film, I might have gone: ‘Well what’s the point? It’s already been done.’ But because it was for TV, it felt different.” The Forman movie, which won the Oscar for best picture in 1985, also earned F Murray Abraham an Oscar for best actor. Did that make him a tough act to follow? Bettany shakes his head. “I’m quite practical about these things. There have been lots of great Hamlets, so why not have a new Salieri? And I think he’s eminently relatable. We’ve all had some venal, mendacious, awful instincts and then hopefully not acted on them. It’s quite fun to have the opportunity to just let go of it all and go to war with God.”
Sharpe’s approach to playing Mozart was not to think too hard about him as a cultural giant and more as a man who “is literally trying to get through the day”. Even so, he says his entry point was the music, much of which “I was coming to afresh. I had never had my opera epiphany but, making this, I started to understand it. And it is extraordinary. Some of it’s so playful and light and kind of mischievous and dainty. And then in other places, it’s really dark and grand.” Those “seemingly conflicting elements” in Mozart’s music turned out to be a valuable resource, providing insight into the psyche of their creator.
To get to grips with the music, Bettany had the advantage of having a son who is a composer and studying for his master’s, and who explained to him that “operas were really composers’ money-spinners. They thought of symphonies as their serious work, and the operas were kind of like the seven-inch [singles].” Bettany’s son was also invaluable in talking him through other aspects of the life of a composer. Mozart is depicted as having a constant musical soundtrack in his head, something that Salieri desperately covets. “So I asked my son: what’s the truth of that? Do composers really have music in their heads?” Bettany says. “And he said he really does. Sometimes he’ll have two competing melodies and he’ll have to write one down, as otherwise his mind is absolute chaos.”
Amadeus is primarily about the relationship of Mozart and Salieri of course, making it the ultimate dramatic two-hander. Mozart’s first formal appearance at the court of the music-loving emperor, Joseph II (Rory Kinnear), is in a piano battle where he rips Salieri’s sheet music off the stand, exclaiming: “Oh yuck. Who wrote this?” Asked what sort of preparation goes into a portrait of a relationship powered by antagonism and envy, both actors’ answers boil down to: not much. “It wasn’t like we were conspiring heavily beforehand about how to play it,” says Sharpe. “We had never met before, so we were getting a feel for each other within the scenes, which brought an extra frisson. But I felt like we didn’t need to talk about the dynamic too much. Salieri is devising Mozart’s [downfall] while Mozart is largely oblivious, so there’s a degree to which we’re carrying our own agendas.”
Mozart may be oblivious to Salieri’s machinations, but Salieri never ceases thinking about and plotting against Mozart. “On paper,” Bettany says, “Will does lots of scenes without me in them, but every scene that I’m in has Mozart in one way or another. The ghost of him is there.”
“The fact is,” Sharpe adds, “that Salieri wants something that Mozart has, but Mozart doesn’t necessarily want it. And would Salieri actually want it if he knew what it meant? In Shaffer’s play and in Amadeus, the film, Mozart is presented as this absolute genius, almost like a superhero of music. But here we had the space to explore it, like: what would that have been like in the day-to-day? What is that in reality? From Amadeus’s perspective, the attention of God feels like a burden. It’s quite painful to have that responsibility.”
Mozart’s unravelling is not helped by his drinking and philandering, although it’s Salieri who pushes him over the edge. Following the death of Mozart’s overbearing father, whose approval the young Wolfgang had desperately sought, Salieri begins dressing up as a masked figure whom Mozart believes to be his father’s ghost. I wonder if Sharpe’s performance, especially in Mozart’s final weeks as he despairingly tries to compose a requiem, was informed by his own bipolar diagnosis, which he also knitted into Flowers. “I think it must do obliquely,” he replies, “but I wasn’t really wanting to approach it in an overly academic way. Going mad is not something that’s easy to play, because it’s quite an abstract thing. And so I wanted to approach it scene by scene, figuring out: what is he trying to achieve? Where is he trying to get to?”
In Forman’s film, Mozart’s latent instability is signalled by a mercurial nature and maniacal laugh that is deliberately insufferable. But for Barton’s drama, Sharpe says, “I did feel like maybe there was room for a more minor-key approach. Of course, he is insufferable when Salieri or Constanze are experiencing him. But I wasn’t going into a scene rubbing 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 simultaneously Mozart’s greatest enemy and his No 1 fan. Bettany may not believe an actor’s gift is God-given, but can he understand Salieri’s professional envy? Has he ever dreamed of bumping off one of his acting rivals?
“Well, as Gore Vidal said: ‘Every time I hear of a friend’s success, a little bit of me dies,’” he laughs. “Oftentimes, when you’re working with actors, it feels like a sporting event, like somebody is going to try and beat you at acting, whereas I want to come at it like a team game where we can be more than the sum of our parts. In Amadeus, I felt safe in the knowledge that Will approached it the same way as me. But if he gets all the good reviews and I start feeling a hot hatred towards him? Well, we’ll see what happens.”
Amadeus will air on Sky Atlantic and Now from 21 December.
