The Sheenant Chronicles: Six Degrees of Michael and David

Let’s celebrate the special connections that Welsh actor Michael Sheen has with his Scottish friend David Tennant

The strand that winds its way through the careers of Michael Sheen and David Tennant may not seem incredibly obvious at first however as Patricia Browning at A Tennantcy To Act and I have discovered, once you start down the rabbit hole, you eventually come back full circle.

[This is an expanded edition of a thread I posted on Bluesky in January 2025.]

---

David: “If I throw a stick for you, will you chase it?”

Michael: “Woof.”

David: “Good boy.”

Michael: (growls)

---

Sonya Walger. Michael was broadcaster and journalist David Frost and Sonya was Frost’s girlfriend Caroline Cushing in the 2007 Broadway staging of Frost/Nixon. Here they are in April 2007 at the after-party for the film Fracture in NYC. The movie starred Anthony Hopkins (who like Sheen, was a Port Talbot, Wales native) and Ryan Gosling.

In 2013, Walger was cast as Helen, Michael’s ‘other’ woman in the Tina Fey/Paul Rudd comedy Admission. As Helen, she ends up pregnant with his character Mark’s twins, thereby initiating an awkward and excruciatingly funny breakup with his longtime partner Portia, played by Fey.

But earlier…

In 2010, Michael was the superficially charming (and equally exasperating) Wesley Snipes (trust me, it all makes sense) on Fey’s NBC comedy TV series 30 Rock, in a hilarious four-episode arc as “settling sweethearts” in a storyline tied to several ex-boyfriends, including… pre-Good Omens Jon Hamm, who played a disabled (with hand hooks… again, trust me) ex of Liz Lemon.

Liz and Wesley argue in the cinema lobby on their movie date about the merits of the broad farce movie Hot Tub Time Machine:

Liz: “I’m sorry, you have a problem with the science of Hot Tub Time Machine?”

Wesley: “Yeah, not the time travel. It’s the hot tub. You don’t just turn one on and it’s immediately hot. I should know. I’ve been in a hot tub two times.”

HTTM had a character named April Drennan, played by…

Lizzy Caplan. Caplan was cast as Virginia Johnson to Michael’s Dr. William Masters in the 2013–2016 Showtime series Masters of Sex. Here’s Michael and Lizzy at the Pacific’s Cinerama Theatre on August 21, 2013 in Los Angeles for the premiere of the film The World’s End which starred FOS (“Friends of Sheen”) and future Staged guest doppelgangers…

Nick Frost and Simon Pegg. The two – who have worked together since 1999 –played themselves in a 2021 episode of the UK lockdown series in an over-the-top arc that saw several well-known actors (including Phoebe Waller-Bridge… a co-star of David’s in Broadchurch; Samuel L. Jackson… who starred with Michael in 2010’s Unthinkable; Ken Jeong and Jim Parsons, among others) conducting Zoom auditions for casting in a US version of Staged.

Pegg (who was auditioning for the role of ‘David’) ultimately wanted the role of ‘Michael’ as he was more “interesting.”

Bonus points: all four actors also appeared — at different times — in Doctor Who.

I rest my case.

---