The Magic of a Creative Career | Michael Sheen | TED

I didn’t want to miss this opportunity to be able to tell you a couple of stories that I hope you might enjoy.

The first one is about the town where I come from. It’s called Port Talbot in South Wales. It’s sort of, I guess, famous for a couple of things. It’s got a steelworks. It’s a sort of mainly working-class town built up around the steelworks, big council estate to house the workers there that my grandparents grew up on and my parents grew up on as well. And it’s also, I suppose, known for, weirdly, actors. And I said that this story was going to be about the town. It’s actually about a couple of people who come from the town.

So this first story was told to me from the horse’s mouth. So one of the legendary sons of Port Talbot is of course, the great actor Richard Burton. And the story goes that Richard Burton, at the height of his fame, came back to Port Talbot and was staying at his elder sister’s house, Cissy, who actually raised him in Port Talbot. And they were there, in Cissy’s house in Port Talbot, and there was a knock on the door and Cissy went to open the door. And it was a young, young lad. And he said, this young lad said, “Is, is Richard Burton there?” And Cissy was like, “Richie, come, there’s a lad here to see you.”

So Richard Burton comes down and this young lad’s standing there looking at him, “It’s the great Richard Burton.” And Cissy says, “This young lad wants an autograph.” And Burton said, “Do you speak Welsh?” The lad was like, “No.” “Well, not a proper Welshman then.” And Cissy says, “This little lad is the son of the bakers round the corner, down from where the Regent Cinema is.” And Burton said to this little lad, “I used to work at the co-op just up the road from the cinema. I was hopeless.”

And this little lad couldn’t believe that he got his autograph. And this little lad grew up into a man who told me that not only was this an extraordinary moment for him, because it was Richard Burton who was doing on the biggest stage what he hoped that he would do when he grew up, but also because this little lad felt like — he was always told he was a bit stupid, a bit “twp,” as we’d say in Wales. And Richard Burton, the great Richard Burton, saying that he was always a bit hopeless as well, gave him such hope.

Now, that little lad grew up to be Anthony Hopkins. And Anthony Hopkins told me that story and I, me, myself, growing up in Port Talbot, it was knowing out there had been Richard Burton and out there now was Anthony Hopkins, two people who came from the same town as me, who sounded like me a bit, who looked a bit like me, but were out there. If it was possible for them, then maybe it would be possible for me.

Now, that is an incredibly important thing. To see your background, your experience, your history represented out there in the world, having a voice, speaking on a platform, doing the things that perhaps you hope that you would be able to do. If you can’t see yourself out there or anyone who looks like you or sounds like you, it’s very hard to imagine that you’ll be able to do that as well. And that’s one part of what was incredibly important, I’ve realized over the years, of what was incredibly important about me being able to have the life and the opportunities and the career that I’ve had. But it’s only one part.

I’ve realized more and more as time has gone on how much I owe everything, all the opportunities I’ve had, to other people and the work of other people. I come from an incredibly supportive family. All my family were into performing in some way, amateur performing in some way, so I knew from a very early age that it was something that you could do and that you got, sort of, brownie points for. So that was important. And as time went on, my family were always there to take me to school rehearsals in the evening, youth theater, whatever it might be. They’d come and see me in any performance I was doing, and that meant a lot. It’s meant a lot more to me as time has gone on, because, of course, I took everything for granted, didn’t I, at the time. But having that supportive family was incredibly important.

And coming from a community, a working-class community, like Port Talbot, a steel town, it’s not somewhere that you would expect to be that supportive of people going into the poncy arts, you know. But Richard Burton had done it, Anthony Hopkins had done it, and there was a kind of nobility to it. There was certainly a respectability to it and a respect for what they had done. And so that made a big difference.

But in some ways, I think the most important part was that I was able to do performances in school, drama in school, and then I auditioned for a youth theater, local youth theater. It was the county youth theater. And again, at the time I took it all for granted. But now I look back and I can see that there was an incredibly … powerful youth arts infrastructure that had grown up in the area. Not by chance. It hadn’t happened randomly.

It was because one man, man called Godfrey Evans, who was a teacher at the Comprehensive School on the Sandfields estate, that was the estate that housed the steelworkers families, he had created an incredibly kind of, progressive, liberal theater program in that comprehensive school and eventually that spread to the entire county. And he became the chief adviser of county … of drama and dance in the county and created the youth theater that I was a product of, that Russell T. Davies was a product of, many, many people. The youth dance company that Catherine Zeta-Jones was a product of, the orchestra, the brass band. It was an incredible diverse array of art, all funded through the education system. And I was absolutely a product of that.

And I joined the youth theater. And at a certain point, everyone in our youth theater just auditioned for drama schools, got in, went off to drama schools in London, went into the profession. I never questioned it. I didn’t think that was strange or odd in any way. It was just like, that’s what happened. And so that’s what I did. And I got a grant to be able to go to RADA in London and came to RADA and then left RADA, went straight into the West End doing a play with Vanessa Redgrave, never looked back.

As time has gone on, I’ve seen that pathway, let’s call it, disappear. So I know that if I was around now, starting off, that pathway wouldn’t be there. And I had tremendous advantages, I realize now, with family, community, all kinds of things. And it does make me worry that not only has my pathway disappeared, my school stopped doing drama, school closed down eventually, the youth theater lost its funding. Grants weren’t available anymore for people to go to drama school. So I’ve seen my footsteps kind of disappear. And if someone like myself, with all the advantages I had, wouldn’t be able to do it, what about the kids who are out there who don’t have those advantages, who don’t have maybe a family who can take them to youth theater rehearsals or you know, whatever it might be. Don’t have a school that pushed them, don’t have that kind of infrastructure there to create that pathway for them, what happens to them?

And then that leads to a bigger question, I suppose, of, if young people, coming from certain kinds of working-class backgrounds, aren’t able to come through into the arts, I mean, I was an actor, but it could be anything within the arts or creative industries or journalism, writing. The conversation that we have as a country, as a nation, as a community, what is that conversation like if we’re only hearing from the people who are able to afford to get through to the point where they get to speak, get to have a voice? It makes that conversation incredibly one-sided.

I mean, there are figures that I can quote you that I’ll just keep to a few. But the Office of National Statistics reported a few years back that of all writers in Britain, 47 percent came from the most privileged social starting points, compared to 10 percent coming from working-class backgrounds. The Sutton Trust report in 2019 said that of newspaper columnists — so these are people who’ve really got a big part to play in setting what our national conversation is, newspaper columnist across the political spectrum — 44 percent of those newspaper columnists come from independent schools, whereas only seven percent of the population generally go to independent schools. So there’s a massive overrepresentation there. And of those newspaper columnists, 33 percent, one in three, are part of that independent school, Oxbridge, pathway pipeline. And those are the people who are, you know, have an enormous part to play in setting what our conversation is. You know, who gets to speak, who gets to tell their story and how does it get told.

And if that pathway is there for people coming through independent schools and through Oxbridge, and that’s not just into acting or writing, that’s across the top jobs across our whole nation, where are those other pathways for people who are not coming from those sorts of backgrounds? It’s so important that we start early to create those pathways. In some ways, I feel like it’s too late by the time you’re 18, 19 out in the world. How do you get people, young people, young kids, to feel like there’s something out there for them, that they see themselves represented and know that it’s possible, as Anthony Hopkins did with Richard Burton, as I did with them?

And how do you then create the pathway from that moment? And let’s say that that moment happens where you see the possibility for you doing something. Where is that yellow brick road that goes from there all the way to actually getting into the industry that you want to be in? If that pathway doesn’t exist, because it certainly exists for some people, but it doesn’t exist for you because of some accident of birth and geography, what happens then? There will always be individuals who are able to break through in some way or get support and become the exception to the rule. But how do we change structurally our system so that it’s not just about individuals breaking through, that everyone gets the same opportunity?

So I found myself sitting at my kitchen table during the first lockdown, talking to Professor Katy Shaw about a project that she had been involved with, that I was incredibly inspired by, the Common People project. I suddenly had a grandiose vision of supporting people coming from working-class backgrounds, underrepresented backgrounds, in storytelling.

And we started to hammer out an idea for a project that could go out into communities and towns and look for those people. We started to think about a project where people were given the opportunity, asked to get involved and that were then supported through it and would get mentors. So people who’ve already made a mark in the industry and the areas that they wanted to, helping them, supporting them, advising them, giving them a bit of confidence and then to create a platform for what came out of it to be shared nationally and to try and influence industry. And, whether it’s publishers or, you know, broadcasters or whoever it might be, to open their doors. And first of all, to acknowledge the difficulties and the obstacles and then encourage people to come in. To renew us, to hear voices that we’ve not heard from historically. And to hear of those experiences and those stories told by themselves rather than having their story told at them or to them. That people are able to actually tell their own stories.

And we believed that that would be an incredibly powerful thing, not only for the individuals involved, but for all of us. And so A Writing Chance was born through that conversation, really. We have 11 people eventually who got through to be our first cohort who would go through the program and get mentoring and get the financial support and everything else.

And I remember reading Stephen Tuffin’s piece that he submitted, which was about … caring for his mother in her final days. And I remember thinking, not only is this one of the most moving things I’ve read in these submissions, this is one of the most moving things I’ve ever read. It was an extraordinary, searing, incredibly raw, beautiful piece of writing. And in that moment, I knew that this was going to exceed all expectations. And it did.

The 11 writers that we finally worked with for the last year, reading what they’ve done has been absolutely revelatory. Whether it’s reading about the experience of marginalized bodies by Grace Quantock. Lifting the veil on what it is like to live with a disability and how people relate to that. It’s extraordinary. Everything she’s written has been extraordinary. Stephen’s piece, about caring for his mother in her final days … I will never forget that piece. It will stay with me for the rest of my life.

There’s David Clancy, hairdresser in Ulverston, talking about how he turned having gibes thrown at him for being gay when he was younger, being kicked out of his own house by his parents for being gay and then having to move back into the house with his mum, or choosing to move back into the house with his mother and father, as the pandemic struck, in order to look after them. That experience. Whether it’s Maya Jordan, coming to write her novel about the goddess of the River Severn.

These are incredible pieces of writing from and with voices and experiences that I just never heard before. It’s absolutely revelatory to me. To see their writing in a magazine, on a national newspaper, being performed live on stage, being broadcast on BBC Sounds in a podcast. This is extraordinary stuff.

I remember Maya Jordan telling me that — the idea of being a writer on her estate, she said, “There were no writers on our estate. To say to someone that you wanted to be a writer was like saying you wanted to be an astronaut.”

It was amazing to be able to go up to Maya after the live performance that we did in Cardiff. And to say to us all, “How does it feel to be an astronaut?”