Will Sharpe

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Antonio Salieri.

The court composer?

Yes.

This is incredibly fortuitous.

The whole reason why I came to Vienna was to write for the Imperial Opera.

Hello.

Thanks for having me.

I guess there was something exciting in our very early conversations about the project of the possibility, because the shape of this is a five-hour limited series, that there's a little bit more space perhaps to sit with Amadeus and also sit with Constanza, his wife, and kind of see it from their point of view.

And I guess I was interested by this idea of apocryphally, certainly in the story of Amadeus,

There's this sense that Mozart was someone for whom like music just fell out of the sky into his lap.

But I was sort of curious to sort of try and imagine that.

But what does that actually look and feel like in his day to day life?

And to try and sort of humanize that somehow.

Yeah, I mean, I guess Paul and I would often sort of talk about... Paul Bettany, who played Salieri.

That's right, yeah.

We would often talk about the story, I guess, in trying to understand it in kind of like grounded terms or sort of playable terms.

We'd often think of it as two brothers to a common father in God.

And Salieri feels neglected by God and that Mozart is getting all of the attention and is having music showered upon him in spite of him being so much less pious than Salieri, who sort of like...

immaculately behaved and feels like in spite of that, he's not getting what he needs from God.