Michael Sheen on Masters of Sex: 'We have an idealised image of what sex should be' Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson in Masters of Sex The married Masters would eventually begin an affair with his new assistant, who was 10 years his junior. He wooed her with the prospect of observing the "superficial vasocongestive skin response to increasing sexual tensions." They had sex with electrodes on and without. He would eventually leave his wife and marry her. They stayed together for 21 years. To complicate matters further, Masters appears to have struggled with intimacy. In fact, Sheen says, the show is "not so much about sex and sexuality as it's about intimacy. I think, in some ways, as difficult as we find it to talk about sex, what's even harder to talk about is intimacy. The drama's themes, he believes, are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago. "It often seems as if our culture and our psyche are so different now to back then," he says. But, really, the essential problems are just the same. Just because we know more about it all now, because we can pick up a magazine and find out how to have a better orgasm, or go on the internet and watch porn all day long, it doesn't mean that we've got any better at dealing with the other person, at connecting in a meaningful way with someone through sex. "In fact it's got worse," he believes. Now, we have this idealised image of what sex should be, and if we don't look like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie having sex - whatever we picture that to be - then somehow we feel like we are not measuring up. The worst thing we could ever do is to do a show about sexuality and make people feel less normal, to perpetuate the myth that sex is perfect. It is a baking hot August day when I meet Sheen in Los Angeles, the city he currently calls home. "But it's only home because my daughter is here," he explains. Sheen has a 13-year-old daughter, Lily, with the actress Kate Beckinsale, his girlfriend for eight years until 2003, now married to the American film director Len Wiseman. My home is Wales, but then my second home is London, and this is my third home. Not," he quickly adds, "that I actually have three homes." Sheen has spent much of the past decade acting in film. "When I started working, if you wanted a film career, then you didn't do TV," he admits. Then, suddenly, HBO changed everything, and now TV is the thing to do. That is what's exciting people. That's where the real source of creativity is, particularly on the cable channels. His well-practised approach to playing prominent figures, though, translates easily between the mediums. It involves a lot of background reading - "trying to work out if there was, perhaps, some event in their life that may have motivated them in certain ways. There is an element of detective work that I enjoy; I am the amateur psychologist trying to work out what's going on with this person. "I was very interested in this man who is a mystery to himself," says Sheen of the somewhat inscrutable Masters. On the surface, he appears very hard and forbidding, aloof and arrogant, and yet his experience of himself is very different to that. I think we all have a sense of that. We all are troubled to a certain extent about how much our life outside doesn't necessarily match up with our life inside. In the drama, Masters comes across as a bag of contradictions: clinical yet passionate, driven and dedicated yet wildly unprofessional in some ways. He has an oddly detached relationship with his wife, Libby (Caitlin Fitzgerald, whom Sheen is reportedly now dating in real life), who creepily calls him "Daddy" - this is deeply ironic considering that he is trying and failing to get her pregnant, while (in his professional life) helping countless other women reproduce. Nor was his remarriage to Johnson a cloudless union. They struggled to understand one another emotionally. The series is based on a biography of the pioneering pair by Thomas Maier, who conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with Masters, who died in 2001, and Johnson, who died only last July. "Who knows what they would have made of the show; it must be a shocking thing to watch your life being portrayed," says Sheen. To know that people are making judgments about your life based on somebody else's version of what happened - that's hard. Not that he would have attempted to get to know them, had they still been alive - generally, he says, he avoids meeting the people he is playing, at least during pre-production. "I don't want to feel compromised in what I can do because I have a relationship with the person," he admits. I met David [Frost] but I was already rehearsing by then. I knew what I was doing and wasn't going to change that. What, I ask, did Frost think of the portrayal? He said 70 per cent of it was true. But even him saying that means he was being generous, and he probably really thought only about half of it was true. He's met Blair too, just the once, after The Deal and The Queen, but before The Special Relationship. "He said he had not seen any of them, which is exactly what I would say," nods Sheen. "I wouldn't want people to ask: "So did that really happen then?" I'd just say "I didn't see it, sorry." With Masters, Sheen wanted to capture the force that Johnson's uninhibited attitudes had on his life as much as his research. He has something inside him that he is aware that he has no control over. He has spent his life fixing that down and then this woman comes along and somehow she starts to unravel that. She starts to create a reordering of who he is, causing him to implode, and that's terrifying to him. He is a man so frightened of not being in control of things and is suddenly becoming aware that there is something out of control inside him that is starting to grow. Sheen's co-star Lizzy Caplan, I learn later, has her own view of the taboo-breaking nature of the woman who changed Masters's life. It was quite in line with her liberated sexuality. At that time, she was doing something very feminist and self-possessed. She is doing it for a greater good, sacrificing societal norms for something she truly believed in. And it's not like it was him just trying to have sex with this girl; what came out of their relationship changed the world. Masters of Sex begins on Channel 4 on Tuesday, 8 October at 9.00pm