It’s Independence Day, and Michael Shannon is hosting a party. “July Fourth is not a significant holiday,” he told me the week before, by way of invitation. “It’s not like you’re encroaching on sacred time.” Forty guests are expected and side dishes are in short supply, so he leads me down to the grocery store that occupies the first floor of his building, a converted nineteenth-century cotton storehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He lives there with Kate Arrington, a stage actor and his partner of eleven years, and their two daughters, Sylvie and Marion.

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As he lumbers down the grocery aisles, detailing his wariness of drone delivery and his partiality for jarred salsa over fresh, the other customers gawp. It’s unclear if his obliviousness to their attention is genuine or self-protective. For years, he’s been a guy most of the moviegoing public recognizes from somewhere, even if they can’t always place him. Being sorta recognized, he says, happens regularly, even today: “This morning, I took Marion to a nearby park, and a woman on a bench said, ‘You’re an actor! What have I seen you in?’ ” Shannon, forty-three, says he’s stopped answering that question, but you’re forgiven if you asked it, too. Despite a twenty-five-year career that’s included more than sixty movies, more than forty stage productions, and all five seasons of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (2010–14),he’s often lurked on a film’s fringes: as Kim Basinger’s deadbeat boyfriend (and Eminem’s punching bag) in 8 Mile (2002); as Kim Fowley, the sleazeball record producer who discovered Joan Jett, in The Runaways (2010); as General Zod, Superman’s Kryptonian foil, in Man of Steel (2013).

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Too often, he’s been pigeonholed by uninspired casting directors as the go-to misfit/killer/psychopath, stereotyping that has much to do with his appearance: penetrating eyes, an ample brow, a nose parenthesized by deep lines, a rail-thin frame, spindly legs and spindlier arms. Mention his name to your friends and the rate of response involving “scary,” “weird-looking,” or both will likely hover around 100 percent.

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But Shannon’s reputation as a villain-for-hire is rooted in something deeper than aesthetics: His intensity is to audiences what tinfoil is to a magpie. “No matter what dark dimensions his characters possess,” del Toro says, “he always brings a humanity, almost a vulnerability. I’ve never worked with anyone that combines precision and emotion to such a degree.” Shannon’s range, remarkable and verified with each new project, extends far beyond the base and brutish. He can storm through a scene like a tornado and leave a path of emotional debris in his wake: As a mental patient in Revolutionary Road (2008), he unravels Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio’s marriage in under three minutes. Though Shannon is in less than 10 percent of the movie, he received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, his first of two.

He can just as easily captivate you with the curl of his lower lip: As a principled, terminally ill Texas lawman in Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (2016), he breaks a murder suspect by sidling up within inches of the man’s face and calmly responding to his one-word answer with “ ‘Who?’ What are you, an owl?” The way Shannon delivers the line is at once hilarious, cathartic, and magnetizing. The performance earned him his second Oscar nod. “He’s an extraordinary actor,” says Werner Herzog, who’s directed him in three movies, “arguably the most important of his generation.”

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We return to the apartment, drop off our bounty—goat cheese, paprika-dusted almonds, and salsa, both jarred and fresh (“let the people choose,” Shannon decrees)—and head up to the roof, which affords views for miles in every direction. At this distance, Manhattan looks laminated on the horizon. Shannon unfurls his limbs onto a weathered wooden lounge chair. Last night’s rain has kicked up an earthy scent that surrounds us. He has not yet put on the Hawaiian-print button-down that he’ll wear to the party, but his shoes are ready to mingle: white Chuck Taylors covered in red and purple paint, the left one by Sylvie, nine; the right—“the one that looks scatological,” Shannon says—by Marion, three.

Shannon and his family have just returned from a long weekend in Miami. These few days between projects are meant to be his time to unwind, but his brain does not comply. “I think the most terrible, awful things,” he confesses before giving me a list: The environment is screwed; the iPhone is a narcotic; the sheeple can’t control their own brains. When he tells me that “a catastrophe is approaching,” he sounds eerily like his possibly prophetic, probably schizophrenic character in Take Shelter (2011), who flips a table at a Lions Club dinner and roars at the stunned crowd, “There is a storm coming like nothing you have ever seen!”

Shannon has proselytized about such beliefs before. But he’s convinced that right now, in 2017, we’re stumbling through a singularly troubled time, and his rhetoric has adjusted accordingly. He says things like “It’s simple: The Republican party has zero compassion for human life.” And: “The people who voted for Mitch McConnell”—the senator from Kentucky, Shannon’s home state—“have shit for brains. I have no interest in understanding them. I don’t care if they see my movies or my shows.” And: “I can find more excuses for what Richard Kuklinski did”—a real-life Mafia hitman with a body count in the hundreds who led a double life as a family man, and whom Shannon played in The Iceman (2013)—“than I can for people who voted for Trump.”

He peppers his diatribe with a curious concern: This whole acting thing is starting to feel, well, silly. He uses the word multiple times. “Considering the state of the world, I cannot do stuff right now that feels silly.” “I can’t quite square the silliness.” “It’s hard not to feel silly.” Creative pursuits are tough for him to defend when it seems like the world is falling apart. “If I was told, ‘We’re not making movies anymore,’ I’d be fine.”

His gaze drifts upward; he points to the sky and says, “Drone.” A four-propeller bot buzzes over us, heading westward toward the Statue of Liberty, which juts up from the flat expanse of the New York Harbor.

Two hours before the party, Shannon is sitting cross-legged on the oak floor in the capacious room that serves as an all-in-one living room, dining room, and kitchen. He’s selecting CDs to soundtrack the party. Talking Heads, his favorite band, will make repeat appearances; Nirvana he reluctantly sets aside. Light tumbles in through the two arched windows that nearly span floor to ceiling, framing the harbor and the cloud-speckled sky. As he flips between albums, he identifies his two contributions to the space: a painted wooden angel hanging from a pine ceiling beam that he purchased several years ago from an antique shop in Arizona after scattering his father’s ashes; and a huge poster, in French, advertising his favorite film, Martin Scorsese’s dark 1983 satire The King of Comedy, a birthday gift from Arrington.

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It’s very much like Shannon to call into question the validity of his career just as his success is reaching new peaks. Last year, he was in ten—yes, ten—acclaimed films, and he received a Tony nomination for his performance in the Broadway production of Long Day's Journey into Night. Later this year, he will star in two of his biggest films to date: del Toro’s The Shape of Water (December 8), a fantasy about a mute woman who falls in love with an amphibious creature during the cold war (Shannon plays the antagonist), and The Current War (November 24),about the battle between George Westinghouse (Shannon) and Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) over electricity in the late nineteenth century. Shannon will then star opposite Chris Hemsworth in Horse Soldiers (January 19), based on the true story of a team of CIA agents and U. S. Special Forces that, in the weeks after September 11, laid the groundwork for the war against the Taliban. Rounding out the list are three television projects, including an as-yet-untitled David O. Russell–directed Mafia series for Amazon that will costar Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore; three plays with A Red Orchid Theatre, a Chicago-based group he helped found twenty-four years ago (he’s directing one of them); and four more movies in postproduction.

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“Waco was a motherfucker,” Shannon says, referring to the Paramount Network miniseries he recently wrapped. It’s about the federal government’s botched 1993 raid of the rural Texas compound occupied by a fringe religious sect, the Branch Davidians. Shannon stars as the FBI agent who negotiated with cult leader David Koresh, played by Taylor Kitsch. “The physical conditions were brutal,” Shannon says. “The air was dry; we were at a high elevation; nearly every scene was a crisis.” In a week, he’s taking off to film HBO’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic Farenheit 451 in which he plays a state-sanctioned book-burner alongside Michael B. Jordan, whom he calls “an actor I respect as much as any other right now.”

Shannon views his work as work, something that should be taken seriously. He doesn’t come with the trappings of some actors: no riders with outrageous demands, no ornamental copy of Bhagavad Gita, no vapid small talk with the cast and crew. On set, he’s focused, sedulous. “During the shoot, he never breaks character,” del Toro says. “There’s never ever a moment where you say to him, ‘How ’bout them Yankees?’ He wants to be working or in silence.”

That doesn’t stop colleagues from trying to win him over. As filming began on Midnight Special (2016), costar Joel Edgerton says, “I looked up to Mike, and I had this desperate need to be accepted by him. It became my mission to make him laugh uncontrollably.” Nichols, the director, says, “I want to please him. I want him to think I’m making good decisions.” Jessica Chastain says, “I remember when Jeff introduced us” on the set of Take Shelter. “I was scared to meet him—he’s intimidating because he’s so powerful onscreen. I went in with open arms, and he immediately stuck his hand out to shake. I said, ‘Nope!’ and hugged him. He melted into it. As I got to know him, I understood that there’s a tenderness, a sensitivity, a fragility that goes along with his strength. It’s the reason he’s so gifted. I don’t think I’ve had a more fulfilling connection with an actor.”

What appears as stoicism is in fact Shannon’s hedge against self-doubt: “Every day on my way to work, I get this sinking feeling in my stomach: I'm gonna blow it all today. I don't know what I'm doing.” He likens it to skydiving. Just because your parachute opened on previous jumps, who’s to say it’ll do so the next time around?

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But he’s learned to cope. “A lot of it is Pavlovian,” Shannon says. “If they just drove the van up to the set and threw me out of the door and yelled, ‘Start!’ I wouldn’t be able to do it. Somehow, in the period from showing up to getting your makeup, your hair, your costume, you’ve gone from being a nervous wreck to ready to go.”

Even the word Action! has become a trigger, what Shannon describes as a “hypnotic suggestion.” In the moment before the clapperboard snaps, his mind may be cluttered with minutiae—that his shoes hurt or what he’ll have for dinner. But once the director starts the scene, Shannon’s only thought is what his character is trying to accomplish and how he intends to pull it off. His delivery, he says, comes from his subconscious. “You can’t dictate your reactions, like, I'm going to say my line this way, and when she responds I'll look over there and make that facial expression. Nobody would watch that. Nobody would care.”

Once a scene is over, Shannon’s doubts come crashing back in. He says he has a tough time walking away. “I suffer a wave of depression, albeit brief, when the director says, ‘We got that!’ Those are my three least favorite words.”

Given the emotional toll movies demand, why does he bother? Because in ten or fifty or a hundred years, if civilization survives and the electrical grid is still up and running, people will be able to experience the same heartache and pain and joy that we now see Shannon express. And the impulse to maximize the number of people he reaches, who connect with him and learn something about themselves along the way—isn’t that devotion worthwhile?

"My mom and dad had fucking less than nothing to do with the choices I made in life,” Shannon tells me. We’re standing by a low bookcase near the front of his apartment, the top of which is covered with dozens of photographs. He pulls one out and says, “This is where it all began.” It’s a sixteen-year-old Shannon onstage for a regional-theater production outside Chicago. Around that time, he knew he wanted to pursue acting as a career; when he told his parents about his decision, he says they didn’t understand why and questioned how he’d ever be successful.

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One close friend describes Shannon’s childhood as “a shitshow.” Both his parents were married five times, and he yo-yoed between Kentucky and Illinois as a result. When he was sixteen and had permanently settled in the Chicago suburbs with his father, he told his high school teachers that his mother had died—she’s still alive. He got straight F’s one semester and dropped out. (He eventually got his GED.) Rather than engaging with the therapist his father asked him to see, Shannon trashed the man’s office. When he was fired from one of his first professional gigs for his lack of training, he told the director to fuck off and stormed out. “Mike reminds me of Holden Caulfield,” says Guy Van Swearingen, who was coming up through the Chicago theater scene at the same time as Shannon. “He finds it difficult to suffer the fools of the modern world.”

Shannon moved to Chicago and worked odd jobs—pet-store clerk, subway bongo busker, bagel-shop schmearer—but those didn’t always provide enough to survive: For two years, he slept on Van Swearingen’s floor. In 1993, the two friends and occasional roommates cofounded A Red Orchid Theatre, where Shannon buffed his rougher edges into a potent, bewitching stage presence.

His first film was Groundhog Day (1993), in which Bill Murray gives him two tickets to WrestleMania. Shannon landed movie gigs at a steady clip through his first manager, Lee Daniels, who went on to direct Precious and The Butler and to cocreate the television series Empire. But the actor’s biggest early successes were onstage, in two plays by fellow Chicagoan and future Pulitzer winner Tracy Letts: Killer Joe (1993), which was staged in Chicago, London, and New York; and Bug (1996), which premiered in London before moving to the U. S. In a review of the UK staging of a critic for The Guardian wrote, “The acting is sensational in that full-throated, loose-limbed, dangerous kind of way that only Americans seem able to pull off.” For the first time, Shannon gained international notice.

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Since the beginning of his career, theater has played a central role, the space where Shannon can best scratch his psychic itches. Acting is a sloppy, unpredictable process that requires consideration and refinement. Moviemaking, however, is a creative autocracy helmed by the director and enforced by the cinematographer and editor. The stage allows for tweaking—if you’re irked by how you said a line one night, you can try something else out the next. Then again, plays burn bright and disappear when the show closes; film is forever.

Of course, Shannon has appeared in a few movie duds along the way—as a drug-dealing Ku Klux Klansman in Bad Boys II (2003); as a mobster on the hunt in the Outback for a CGI kangaroo who’s absconded with a large wad of cash in Kangaroo Jack (2003); as a white-supremacist inmate who pours lighter fluid on a milquetoast Will Arnett and snarls, “You’re not part coon, are ya? I’d have a lot more fun doin’ this if you were part coon” in Let's Go to Prison (2006). But he didn’t always take a part for the paycheck; more often than not, it was because he had a hard time saying no. “I’m a real sucker for other people’s passion,” he says. “Directors say, ‘This is my baby. If you do one thing with me, do this one.’ I always think, I said no to this and I said no to that, but this one seems worthwhile”

Often, it is: In 2002, he got a call from a first-time filmmaker from Little Rock named Jeff Nichols, who’d written the lead of his debut film, Shotgun Stories, with the actor in mind. Shannon was so moved by the script that he agreed to do it for as close to free as the Screen Actors Guild would allow. “If he responds to something in a story,” Nichols says, “he doesn’t care if you’re Martin Scorsese or some kid from Arkansas. He’ll work with you.” When Nichols needed money to shoot additional footage, Shannon wrote him a game-changing check. The two have gone on to work together on all five of Nichols’s films, most recently Loving (2016).

In 2006, Shannon entered another kind of partnership. He met Arrington while she was in a Chicago production of King Lear. They fell in love, moved to New York, and started a family a couple years later.

Guests start trickling in. On the wall to the left as they walk through the front door is a giant bright-red heart. On one side of the space is Sylvie’s “bedroom,” a corner of the room that’s been sectioned off with curtains; on the other is Marion’s. A nearby bathroom has a litter box in the shower and a caricature of Trump as the main villain from the Harry Potter series with a tweet by J. K. Rowling about the president written above it: “How horrible. Voldemort was nowhere near as bad.” The party is further in. It’s Tracy Letts’s birthday, and cake will later be served in his honor. For now, Letts is chatting with Paul Sparks, who acted alongside Shannon in all five seasons of Boardwalk. Adults sip the house specialty—Arrington’s spicy margarita—and graze the potluck spread on the dining-room table while a gaggle of children runs from one room to the next. Shannon leans down to Sylvie, who’s playing a board game with her friends, and whispers in her ear. As she giggles, a smile stretches across his face; it’s the most content and unguarded I’ll see him this evening.

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When Shannon became a father—or, as he describes it, “when it was thrust upon me”—he felt thoroughly unprepared. Between his untethered youth and his vagabond adulthood, “I didn’t think parenting was in my skill set,” he says. Before meeting Arrington, he never thought he’d have children at all. “Because of the course our civilization is on, I’d been afraid to bring a human life into it. Some people say, ‘That’s a cop-out. Every generation feels that way.’ For me, it was genuine.”

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A few seasons into filming Boardwalk Empire, Shannon faced a personal crisis: Sylvie required emergency surgery. She was okay, though her recovery was long, and Shannon didn’t want to leave her side. But he was contractually obligated to film the show, on which he played a morally corrupt federal-agent-turned-bootlegger. He’d signed on for the series partly because it was shot in and around New York, near his family; instead, it was preventing him from being with them. Besides, he says, “I wasn’t a huge fan of that period of the show. It had already gotten perfunctory.” In that moment, “I never cared less about work in my life,” Shannon says. “I was like, ‘What are my lines? Can I go now?’ ” He clarifies that he didn’t let his ambivalence get in the way of his performance. “I know how to fake it like any good hooker.”

The experience reassured Shannon that he possessed the tools for parenting. But he learned that being a family man comes at a cost: Doing his job now, he says, is “more angst-ridden, honestly. If I didn’t have a family, I wouldn’t have the gnawing sensation when I’m at work that I’m missing something.”

It’s no surprise that protecting one’s family is a core theme of his favorite film he’s done, Nichols’s Take Shelter. Shannon plays a man who foresees the apocalypse. Unsure if he’s prescient or insane, he plows forward with plans to build a bomb shelter in his backyard to safeguard his young daughter and increasingly concerned wife (Chastain). “Jeff was experiencing a lot of the same things as me at that time,” Shannon says. Both he and the director have young children and a penchant for doomsaying. Nichols says the story germinated from “a free-floating anxiety Mike and I both felt: What kind of husband and father am I going to be? Am I able to hold the weight the world is going to place on me?”

Before last year’s presidential election, the world was enough of a minefield to make a man want to burrow underground with his family to protect them. “Whoever the president is—Obama or Clinton or fucking Abraham Lincoln—people get frustrated,” Shannon says. “If you think kicking out Trump will make anything different, you’re off your rocker.” But he does believe our president’s ascendancy blew the lid off a pot of national discontent that’s been stewing for decades. To prepare for next week, when he starts filming Farenheit 451, Shannon is reading the book. In it, he finds eerie parallels to today: state-sponsored attacks on facts, a citizenry that abhors intellect and is consumed by televised half-truths. “Bradbury saw all this shit coming,” he says. “It was gestating back then. It was inevitable.”

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Over the past several months, Shannon has reshuffled his priorities. He’s not exactly stockpiling dry goods and mapping out escape routes, but he feels the urgent need to tell stories he thinks might shake viewers’ consciousness, even if only a few are so moved. “I have to think there’s a chance that five people will watch something I’m in and make a radical change in their lives,” he says.

Though he doesn’t require every film or play he does to tie in directly with politics and social justice, it just so happens to have (nearly) worked out that way for the foreseeable future. Del Toro wrote the screenplay for The Shape of Water with Shannon in mind for the part of Strickland, a yes-man for the feds. “To me, he represents America,” Shannon says of the character, whose rotting body is concealed under impeccably tailored suits. “It’s a deeply American story.” Of his Current War character, George Westinghouse, Shannon says, “Here was a man who was filthy rich, but who never surrendered his compassion. Not all rich people have to be assholes.”

New York’s official Fourth of July fireworks show is scheduled to begin shortly after sundown. At 8:30, most of the guests make their way to the roof for what we’re promised will be an epic view. Shannon remains planted on the couch, debating the ethics of consuming meat. (“Cows are dumb. They’re meant to be eaten.”) ESG, an early-’80s post-punk band from the South Bronx, jitters on the stereo. Empty bottles and used paper plates dot the countertops. Board games are splayed across the floor. A friend asks if Shannon would like to head upstairs. “I don’t give a shit about fireworks,” he replies, then kicks back the remains of his rye, served neat. Through the arched windows, the only light show he can see comes from the pulsing of navigation lights on the boats gliding through the harbor, faint declarations of warning.

This article appears in the F/W '17 Big Black Book from Esquire. Buy It!

Marc Hom