‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ Michael Shannon Was Initially “Uncomfortable” with His Role

In many ways Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers feels like a train wreck you can’t stop watching. As a group of people devote themselves to a wellness retreat in the misguided hope that its self-appointed guru will heal them, they’re drawn more and more to actual danger. No character illustrates this sickening run to inevitable disaster better than Michael Shannon‘s Napoleon.

The patriarch of the Marconi family, Napoleon responds to the tragic suicide of his son with relentless, jarring positivity. As a result he quickly becomes the most annoying member of Tranquillum House as well as one of its funniest guests. It’s a manically happy, borderline unhinged performance that wonderfully showcases the pain grieving father is hiding. Decider spoke to Shannon about why he was hesitant to approach the ever-cheerful Napoleon and how he mentally and emotionally prepared for this departure from his typical roles.

Decider: Your character Napoleon is such a brilliant example of toxic positivity in the face of loss. How did you get into that headspace?

Michael Shannon: I was uncomfortable with it at the beginning, I’m not gonna lie. I kept using myself as a point of reference and thinking there’s no way in a million years that this would be my reaction, if something like this happened to me. I went online, I did some reading and some research and tried to find people that had actually gone through this and devoured whatever they were willing to share about it with their writings.

But I had a friend, and I was telling him about the show, and I was saying, “I’m just so uncomfortable with this. This just doesn’t seem real to me.” And he said, “Oh, I know a guy just like that. I know a guy that the exact same thing happened to one of his children, you know, committed suicide And he had this very glib, strange reaction. And I remember thinking the same thing: Why? Why is he acting like this? This is so inappropriate.” Just hearing someone else say actually exists in the world, it was kind of the crack in the wall that I needed. Then I was able to engineer it for myself, in my mind. At a certain point, there was a basic equation that really made a lot of sense to me. When you’re in such an overwhelming state of agony, any glimmer of something that could be considered soothing, you’re just going to devour it, like Pac-Man. You’re just desperate for something that doesn’t feel like pain. Then all of a sudden it started to make a lot of sense to me, that reaction.

It’s fascinating and heartbreaking to watch Napoleon’s reaction alongside his wife Heather [Asher Keddie] and Zoe’s [Grace Van Patten] reactions. His need to try to make everything right just hurts them further.

Yeah, and it’s about invalidating their experience, saying, “Guys, come on, you should be able to get over this.” And they’re saying, “No, we shouldn’t.” That’s a fundamental thing. I think that’s, unfortunately, one of the things that people do when they when they commit suicide is they put people in that position of saying, “Are you willing to get over my death? Are you willing to move on from this? Or am I going to take your life as well?” It’s a horrifying and very difficult question.

Napoleon is one of the funnier characters in Nine Perfect Strangers. Do you always try to keep this core of sadness and trauma in mind and then work the comedy around that?

No, it’s there. I don’t need to — that gets established before I go to work. I had an interesting experience with this job where all of us had to spend two weeks in quarantine before we went to work. So I had this two-week period by myself in a hotel room where I got to focus on that. I got to focus on I’m creating that history and that trauma. I mean, two weeks isn’t that long, but it was long enough for it to take a hold of my psyche or whatnot so that I didn’t have to necessarily be reminding myself of it all the time it was it was there.

We were very scared. Hal [Cumpston], who plays Zack, we were very scared. He didn’t come until the end, and so we shot most of what we do without him there. I had a picture of him that I found, like the headshot, and I would just look at it all the time. Then it got close to the time where he was going to come and we were gonna start working with him. And I was terrified. I was like, “No, no, you can’t call me. I can’t handle it” because I had created this relationship, basically with a picture, and he was coming. I was talking to Asher one day, I was like, “Should I hang out with them or not? I don’t know what to do.”

But he got there, and I was like, “Oh, this is silly.” We went out, and we spent a day together, went walking and went to the beach and we had dinner and got to know each other. And it was intense, it was really trippy. His face broke my heart.

Speaking to that point, obviously, Nine Perfect Strangers is a work of fiction, but the cast had to go through so many intense trials while filming. I’m thinking of the scene where you had to lay in your own grave. Did you discover anything about yourself as you’re acting through a wellness retreat?

The whole experience felt very otherworldly to me, honestly, in large part, because we were in Australia. I just came from spending four months at my house in Brooklyn, doing nothing, because of COVID. And then all of a sudden, I’m in this beautiful Byron Bay, Australia, on the beach… it just felt like I was on another planet. It felt like I wasn’t even me. I felt like I had gone somewhere else and became someone else, because it was just so — there was no crossover in between the realms. And then my family came to Australia after I’d been there a couple of months. Then there was kind of like this merger of “Oh, yes this is my actual family. And these are the real people.” I’d have to juggle, like going to work being with the Marconis and then coming back, and that kind of brought me back down to Earth a little bit. But yeah, for a long time it didn’t really feel like there was any correlation between where I was and what I was doing in my own actual life.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

New episodes of Nine Perfect Strangers premiere Wednesdays on Hulu.

Watch Nine Perfect Strangers on Hulu