Michael Sheen Compares 'Wonderland' and 'TRON'

One of my favorite actors to fully emerge in the past few years is Michael Sheen. He was fantastic in The Queen and Frost/Nixon, which I group together because they're both Peter Morgan scripts and because Sheen probably could argue he deserved supporting actor nominations. But he's used those performances to launch himself into bigger movies that might also help extend his reach as a performer. This year, Sheen has key supporting roles in two of the biggest studio movies hitting theaters: Alice in Wonderland and TRON Legacy. You don't necessarily think of them this way, but Sheen tells SciFi Wire there are similarities between the basic stories behind the two. "Certainly in the first TRON film, [Jeff Bridges'] character gets kind of sucked into this Wonderland-type place. So there's a similarity to it," offers Sheen. "We go back to the world of TRON 28 years later, and technology has moved on. All the same things that we saw in the first TRON film will be there, but it's just, again, in a new light and with 28 years of technology." Details about TRON have been pretty closely guarded secrets, but Sheen tells us how he fits in: "I run the nightclub," Sheen said. "I am the host of the nightclub and a showman, this sort of very over-the-top character." I hope he studied Richard Dawson from Running Man and Jim Broadbent from Moulin Rouge. In Alice, incidentally, Sheen will be mostly unrecognizable as the White Rabbit. I always look forward to his stuff, and both of these movies could be really good even without him. That's a two-fer, then. He's also Tony Blair again, in Richard Loncraine's The Special Relationship, which comes out in May in the UK.