Will Sharpe

He's not getting the attention he needs.

Whereas Amadeus, I think, feels really run ragged and kind of like a vessel for God's music, sure, but at what cost?

So, I mean, the main preparation, I guess, was learning to play the piano pieces.

Yes, which you did.

Which I did, yeah.

And that was like six, seven months of piano lessons and, you know, just drilling specifically the pieces on camera.

And then also, I guess, preparing for the conducting scenes where we tried to...

come up with a kind of hybrid language where in the day it would have been very metronomic quite unexpressive and obviously now we're used to seeing you know slightly more freeform seeming very expressive conducting and so we tried to

find a language that blended the two I think because so much of what is expressed in the show for my character in particular you know he's not very good at communicating with words so a lot of the time the story or what is going on you know within him is expressed through the big musical set pieces so there was that kind of practical preparation which I actually found quite helpful because it was a way of meditating on the character without sort of getting in my head it was like

something very specific and mechanical to practice.

And you find yourself thinking about the story, but not overthinking it.

It was almost like a kind of meditative practice or something.

And then I did find that listening to Mozart's music was an incredibly helpful way of just kind of sinking into it.

And it's not like a resource that you normally have.

And even just thinking about the sheer range of his music, but also seemingly of his personality, where he's just very light and funny and...

playful at one end and super grand and dark and operatic at the other and trying to marry all of that into one person I found it just kind of you know if I had an hour free walking around Budapest with that in my ears was quite helpful too

I felt like it became a really important piece of it for me.

And actually that line, I think, just came out in the rehearsing of the scene or as we shot.

Trying to sort of get to the bottom, I think, of Mozart.

who he was and what his predicament was, I guess.