Michael Shannon on Living Life Like Iggy Pop

"People talk about leaving it all on the stage, but very few actually do it."

I’ve known Michael Shannon since 1991, when he starred in a play called The Cafe With No Name that I co-wrote and directed in Chicago. It was at a theater in a crime-ridden neighborhood where an audience of three was considered a packed house. The production also featured a guy in a banana costume, and most of it was written (and performed) while under the influence of cheap drugs and youthful confidence. I have only vague memories of the play. I remember that the banana costume was made by my mom, and constantly thinking Shannon was much, much better than what we were writing for him. But that’s about it.

I love that it's all just hearsay. Nothing but blurry memories and faded receipts. It was probably awful. Nothing you would've wanted to see. It's from back in an age when you could still make your mistakes in the shadows. There's no video of Shannon helping me carry a banana costume to the el, leapfrogging over passed-out junkies. And that’s how it should be.

Twenty-seven years later, Playboy magazine hired me to interview Shannon. I flew out to New York and met him at a restaurant in Gramercy Park, where we drank and talked for hours. (Remarkably, he remembered everything about The Cafe With No Name, even the banana guy.) Then I followed him to 30 Rockefeller, where he was a guest on Late Nite with Seth Meyers, and after the show, he and I and Common (the rapper) hung out in his dressing room and drank several bottles of red wine and talked about Thelonious Monk. Shannon and Common knew a lot about Thelonious, and I know almost nothing. I was terrified of saying something incredibly stupid, like “That Thelonious sure did know how to play the piano, amma right?” So I did more nodding than talking.

It remains one of my favorite interviews ever, and some of my favorite bits hit the cutting room floor. Here’s a brief exchange that Shannon and I had about music, leaving it all on the stage like Iggy Pop, and which Radiohead album is the best soundtrack for getting paranoid.