Vogue: What drew you to this project?
Will Sharpe: Having worked with Joe [Barton, writer of Amadeus] on [the 2019 BBC-Netflix miniseries] Giri/Haji, I was curious to see what he had done with it. And because the story is set across five hours, there’s more space to see it from different perspectives than in the play or the film. Mozart is painted as someone for whom music just falls into his lap, and I was curious to understand how others saw him. What does it actually look like to be that person in their day-to-day life? He could write this extraordinary music but didn’t really seem to understand social norms and communicated in quite an unusual way—which in the show often ends up offending people, and he can’t understand why.
Did any aspect of Mozart feel unexpectedly contemporary to you?
There’s a kind of punkness to him. In those days, composers would have been seen as servants of the court, and by all accounts, he didn’t like being seen that way, so he tried to have more agency over his position and his music. The Marriage of Figaro was based on a banned text, so he wasn’t afraid to challenge authority. Also musically, you’d start to notice pop chord progressions in his music. You could really feel his influence on every genre of the present day.
You are probably the first actor of Asian descent to play Mozart, certainly for English-speaking audiences. What did you first think when envisioning yourself as him, and what are your thoughts about diverse casting and period projects generally?
The story is so famously fictionalized—we’re playing versions of these characters that aren’t biographically accurate. Even if it were, there would be a case to be made. I always think, with things like that, it’s to be taken on a case-by-case basis. More than anything, as I would with any role, I was just trying to see what’s on the page, trying to find my way into him and make him feel as human as possible. But the one thing that was quite unusual was that I did have this great resource of his music, and I found that really helpful, particularly because there was such a diversity in the music that, like in the scripts, reflected how he seemed as a person. Sometimes he’s so silly and frivolous and playful, and then at other times and increasingly over the series, he has this kind of grander, darker, operatic side to him. Trying to marry that all into one human being, the music was really helpful because it all comes from the real person. It’s not a tool you normally have, so I found it a really helpful way of meditating on the character.
Photo: Adrienn Szabo
