Amadeus stars Paul Bettany and Will Sharpe talk Mozart drama's 'woke' accusations and the "strange" power of conducting

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

To paraphrase 1980s Austrian pop singer Falco: “Amadeus, Amadeus, let me shock you, Amadeus”. That’s to say, Sky’s five-part series, which flits between concert theatre, Imperial palace and brothel, contains some very naughty scenes. One particular encounter, on top of a (literally) groaning buffet, may or may not be narratively essential, but it’s certainly sexually ingenious. Was that really a strawberry? I ask co-stars Will Sharpe and Paul Bettany. “Oh, yes,” says Sharpe. “A stunt strawberry,” adds Bettany.

Based on Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play of the same name, Amadeus takes place in late 18th-century Vienna, where Antonio Salieri (Bettany) is court composer to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Joseph II. At the very height of his profession, the religiously devout Salieri is nonetheless plagued by one doubt: is he any good?

As if to confirm his fears, along comes young genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Sharpe), who is escaping his overbearing father in Salzburg and intent on having a good time in the capital of the Habsburg Empire.

Salieri is the one who kneels before the cross, the composer who dedicates himself to the Almighty. Yet it is Mozart, dedicated to orgies and wine, who writes music of divine beauty. Infuriated by God’s practical joke, Salieri sets out to secretly destroy Mozart.

Both actors are called upon to conduct and play the piano. “Will did an extraordinary job with his piano playing,” says Bettany. “I was more obsessed with the conducting, and specifically conducting the Requiem. It was an amazing feeling. A strange feeling of power.”

The Requiem Mass in D Minor, Mozart’s last work, is “exquisite” says Bettany, but is it actually coming from God? “Well, I had to believe it was,” says Sharpe. “There were occasionally mad things that happened during filming. We’d shoot a scene where Mozart mentions God in some way, and then the moment I say ‘God,’ there’s a huge thunderclap, lightning through the window, like it was theatrically managed. So occasionally there would be weird, ‘What’s happening here?’ moments.”

Shaffer’s play has, famously, been given a screen treatment before, in MiloŠ Forman’s 1984 film in which Tom Hulce played Mozart and F Murray Abraham was Salieri. But rather than the giggling manchild Hulce gave us, Sharpe’s Mozart is a roistering gadabout whose apparent ability to produce utterly sublime music on request increasingly becomes a burden. “One of the main ways into him as a character for me was the music,” says Sharpe. “Hearing all the different shades of Mozart, how sometimes he is super playful and light, but he can also be very grand and dark.”

Bettany seethes as the conflicted Salieri, visiting a prostitute to be beaten, doing something intensely personal over his keyboard – “I find that stuff very difficult to be honest, especially as I hurtle towards my dotage” – or simply staring at a score sheet, alone with the terrible thought that he might be mediocre. “And gosh, I have those same fears and make the same accusations,” he says. “I’m sure most people do, unless they happen to be Mozart.”

Sharpe, who will be 40 next year, won rave reviews and a Bafta for Giri/Haji in 2019 and co-wrote and directed Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain in 2021. In the same year he co-wrote and directed the Sky Atlantic/HBO series Landscapers. Then, in 2022, came his acclaimed performance as troubled tech entrepreneur Ethan Spiller in The White Lotus. Given all that, does 54-year-old Bettany, who first came to wide public attention in 2001 alongside Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale and, more recently, has starred as Vision in the Marvel films and Disney+ series, have any fellow feeling with Salieri and his jealousy of the younger man?

“It’s horribly revealing for me to say it, but this didn’t feel a massive stretch for me,” he says. “I think we all have these venal, mendacious, awful ideas that we hopefully don’t act on, so it was delicious to do it as actors.”

When the cast photographs were released in August, social media noticed that Sharpe, who describes himself as British-Japanese, isn’t a white Austrian. His casting was decried as “woke”, among other things. “Not many people mentioned how un-Italian I am,” notes Bettany.

Sharpe is inclined to play the furore down. “I’m only dimly aware of it, because I’m not really online. The play, and this show, is quite fictionalised, it’s not meant to be a historical biography of either character.” And that, of course, is key: this is a made-up story. In real life Salieri helped Mozart, and we have no evidence that he regarded himself as a failure. Rather, the plot was possibly a figment of an increasingly ill Mozart’s imagination, leading to rumours that were developed by the Russian writer Pushkin in his 1830 play Mozart and Salieri, and later reworked by Shaffer as a madcap morality tale about the high price that both jealousy and genius demand.

Thus, a series that began with much bawdiness resolves in a poignant contemplation of the meaning of art and reputation, as the ailing Mozart finally understands Salieri is the author of his demise and Salieri realises a second cosmic trick has been played on him – it will be Mozart that history remembers.

“There’s a moment where Salieri touches Mozart’s hand and suddenly, they hear music.” says Bettany. “I don’t know how it was for Will, but the whole way through the show, I was thinking, ‘How the hell are we going to convey this thing?’ And I hate to use this word , because you just sound like a ponce, but here we go. It just happened ‘organically’. There, I said it.”

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