Your mother and father were married five times each. Did you enjoy all those weddings?

I wasn’t around for all of them. I would have rather skipped Mom’s wedding to a fellow she met while she was working at Eastern State Hospital, a rather famous mental hospital in Kentucky. He was a chiropractor who had been in for a nervous breakdown. They tried to open a chiropractic to get him back in the game, but nobody came. Mom did the front desk; he cracked the necks. It’s very hard to get people to come to a chiropractic office even if you haven’t recently been released from a mental hospital.

Image Michael Shannon Credit... Christian Oth for The New York Times

That is very funny, but I can’t tell whether you intended it to be because you haven’t cracked a smile.

I have a very dry sense of humor.

You were nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2009 for your role as the unhinged son in “Revolutionary Road.” You didn’t look too homicidal the moment you lost to Heath Ledger.

I’d had a lot of gin. I was pickled. From the time I was nominated to the awards, it was like a steady litany of every human being on Earth telling me how I wasn’t going to win. It was like being beaten by broom handles. The bus driver being like, “You’re not going to win.” The guy selling me my paper, the guy giving me my coffee, my publicist. By the time I got there, I was like, If I win I’m going to have to say something like “praise Satan” and talk like Linda Blair from “The Exorcist.”

Tracy Letts, the playwright, suggested that when you first started doing plays in Chicago, you were sleeping in the park.

I never slept in the park in Chicago, not a single night. I was actually in a little studio apartment that my father was very kindly helping to pay for. Tracy is one of my oldest, dearest friends, but these are fibs; they’re exaggerations.

You don’t think this feral mystique has helped your career?

I don’t really. I’m not some wild animal, some freak. If you tell stories about sleeping in the park, then you can’t get on “Letterman.” How many movies do you gotta do to get on “David Letterman”? All I’ve wanted since I was 15 freaking years old was to be on “David Letterman.” I mean, I’m in “Man of Steel.” I think they all think I’ll be violent.