The difference between a good actor and a great one is that the latter understands how they play onscreen to an audience and utilizes that self-awareness in their performances. Be it subverting their public perception as an avatar of cool (every time George Clooney plays a bozo) or leaning into Herculean good looks for comedic effect (the thing Chris Hemsworth always tries so very hard to do and Ryan Gosling pulled off ten times as successfully in the Barbie trailer), their performances work audiences with the deft hand of a stage magician or, perhaps more accurately, a professional wrestler.
This is all to say that Michael Shannon knows he looks like that. He knows he has the demeanor of a guy you’d go out of your way to not be stuck on a subway train with at 2 a.m. He knows he has resting Zodiac Killer face. He knows he’s six-foot-three. He knows he’s better at yelling than most of his peers. (Jon Bernthal is perhaps his only real competition). What he’s done with this self-awareness over the past 40-plus years in Hollywood is create one of the more singular screen presences of his generation.
Shannon is unmistakable. He’s developed his screen persona with a workmanlike spirit, the same he brings to acting for the screen at large. A generous writer might say Shannon approaches screen acting with an immaculate professionalism. This one will be a bit more blunt and say that Shannon treats screen acting like his day job. He doesn’t hate it enough to quit but definitely seems vaguely annoyed by it most of the time, especially when promoting superhero movies.
To be clear: This rules. More actors should talk about showing up to set the same way I used to talk about having to work the opening shift of my college Starbucks. By his own admission he prefers performing onstage to acting in film and television, once explaining to Adam Driver in the Actors on Actors series that the stage allows for continuous performance rather than one broken up by cuts and lunch breaks. He also seems to prefer ripping gigs with his indie band Corporal because of course Michael Shannon is in a band. There’s nobody quite like him, and he knows there’s nobody quite like him. He’s one of our best. With his directorial debut premiering at Tribeca and his return to the DCEU in The Flash, let’s give him his due with a tour of his essential onscreen performances.
Groundhog Day (1993)
Did you know Michael Shannon is in Groundhog Day? Michael Shannon is in Groundhog Day. Weird! He made his big-screen debut with a bit part in the film as Fred, one half of a newlywed couple whom Bill Murray’s Phil surprises with tickets to Wrestlemania. Again, weird! If you’ve never recognized him in the role when watching or rewatching (on loop during a day that repeats itself over and over) the Harold Ramis classic, it’s probably because Michael Shannon looks all of 20 years old in this movie and he’s one of those actors who’s hard to imagine looking younger than like, 47. Anyway, Groundhog Day is pretty good.
8 Mile (2002)
8 Mile isn’t technically Shannon’s first performance in a movie, but it’s the first time we see the fully formed version of Michael Shannon as we know and love him today: as an insane piece-of-shit maniac. He spent years honing that persona in underrated flicks like John Waters’s Cecil B. Demented and Joel Schumacher’s Tigerland before turning in a wicked performance as Greg, the abusive boyfriend of Eminem’s mom. Shannon’s take on Greg is, “What if there was a guy who was a world-title contender for Worst Dude?,†and he succeeds in full. In a career that serves as a study in the nuanced ways in which a person can be awful, Greg is sort of ground zero — transparently, relentlessly awful to everyone around him in an entirely uncomplicated way.
Kangaroo Jack (2003)
Remember that time there was a movie about Jerry O’Connell and Anthony Anderson chasing a kangaroo through the Australian outback because it steals a hoodie with $50,000 of mob money in it, all while said mob chases them, and the trailer seemed to imply that the kangaroo would talk? But upon seeing the movie you learn it only talks (and to be specific raps along to the Sugarhill Gang hit “Rappers’ Delightâ€) in a dream sequence, leading to millions of disappointed children and as many deeply annoyed parents?
Two-time Academy Award nominee Michael Shannon is one of the mob dudes in that movie. I don’t think you need to watch it, but wasn’t 2003 a funny time?
Bug (2006)
Bug,  directed by William Friedkin, written by Tracy Letts (adapted from his 1996 play), and starring Shannon and Ashley Judd, hit theaters on Friday, May 25, 2007. It’s a nasty thriller with a top-tier creative team behind it, which follows a woman named Agnes who becomes involved with an ex-soldier (Shannon) with a mysterious past. It had all the makings of a slow-burn hit, the sort of low-budget horror/horror-adjacent flick that can easily make all its money back in a single weekend if positioned correctly. So of course Lionsgate opened it against a movie called Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which raked in well over $100 million on that opening weekend. It isn’t fair to say Bug was forgotten when it never even got the chance to be remembered by the moviegoing public in the first place. Still, it’s never too late to make up for lost time. Bug is the sort of movie you’d watch once a year were it not for how hard it is to watch a second time.
Revolutionary Road (2008)
Sam Mendes’s 2008 drama is a two-hander starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, one of the more iconic onscreen duos of the last 40 years. Still, it’s Shannon’s turn as the erratic son of their neighbors who walked away with the film’s lone acting nomination at the Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, the first of his career. What a power move.
Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014)
After years as a reliable journeyman, Boardwalk Empire — and a film we’ll get to next — served as Shannon’s coming-out moment for the wider public. The show features a sprawling ensemble headed up by Steve Buscemi’s gangster Nucky Thompson, a politician–slash–mob boss in 1920s New Jersey. Shannon plays Nelson Van Alden, a Bureau of Prohibition agent with a puritanical streak and, true to what was becoming recognizable at the time as the Shannon form, a rubber-band ball of repression any therapist would have a field day with. The shape of the show’s ensemble ebbed and flowed over the course of its five seasons, but Shannon remained a reliable figurehead of it throughout the run. It stands today as some of his best work.
Take Shelter (2011)
Take Shelter isn’t the first collaboration between Shannon and director Jeff Nichols (they first joined for 2007’s microbudget Shotgun Stories) but it served as a main-stage debut of sorts for the pair. Nichols’s film stars Shannon as a man in rural Ohio who begins having dreams of an apocalyptic storm. Believing them to be premonitions, he erratically prepares his family for the horrors to come.
Take Shelter is a weapon. Shannon has turned in countless great performances guided by world-class directors in the years since its release. Still, to date, it feels like the greatest synthesis of his skills and the vision of a director who knows how to use them, a film structured around the specific energy of its lead performer. It is, if this makes sense, the most Michael Shannon movie the actor has ever starred in.
Premium Rush (2012)
Perhaps the most aggressively 2012 movie ever made, 2012’s mid-tier action thriller Premium Rush stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a New York City bike messenger who swears by fixed gears. Shannon faces off against him as a corrupt NYPD cop. Sony dumped the film into theaters in late August, and it quickly came and went with little fanfare. Today it feels like the sort of film ripe for a streaming run where it gets featured on some platform’s homepage and everyone spends a week and a half tweeting about how it actually kinda rules.
Man of Steel (2013)
If playing General Zod was supposed to be a paycheck gig, nobody told Michael Shannon. He plays the iconic Kryptonian baddie with his Michael Shannon dial cranked up to 11, if not, like, 14. In a divisive movie, he’s perhaps the one element everyone can agree is unequivocally great.
The Delta Gamma Sorority Letter (2013)
Around this point in his career you could be forgiven for assuming that in real life Micahel Shannon was the most serious, humorless man on the planet. His commitment to playing stiffs, bullies, and psychos seemed to lack a certain self-awareness. Was this guy acting? Was he actually just an all-time bad hang? The answer is and has always been no. Michael Shannon is a great actor precisely because of his immense self-awareness, and his recitation of the infamous Delta Gamma sorority letter is perhaps the single greatest testament to this.
In 2013, a letter from the president of a chapter of the Delta Gamma sorority to the rest of her sisters went viral for its aggressive profanity and threats of violence. It’s incredible comedy on its own, but when Funny or Die had Shannon recite it in its entirety, it became art. Shannon delivers the recitation totally straight, simmering with his trademark barely contained rage and letting it explode on only the choicest of lines, including “Newsflash, ya stupid fucking cocks! Frats don’t like boring sororities!â€
It may seem silly to call this one of the highlights of such a rich filmography, but it just is. Here we see an actor in total command of their presence, their audience, and the material in front of them.
They Came Together (2014)
Shannon is one of a dozen-plus excellent cameos and walk-ons in David Wain’s 2014 rom-com parody They Came Together, an exercise in relentless, often aggressive silliness. It’d be a shame to spoil when he turns up or who he’s playing so I’ll leave it at this: It’s perfect, and when he shows up you’ll almost certainly find yourself thinking, Oh, of course that guy is Michael Shannon.
99 Homes (2014)
This subprime mortgage crisis–set drama never really went anywhere, and it’s a damn shame. Clearly pegged as an awards-season contender, it garnered little outside of Supporting Actor nods at the Golden Globes and SAG Awards for Shannon, who co-stars as a seedy real-estate mogul opposite Andrew Garfield as his reluctant apprentice. They’re well-earned nominations from a potent drama that probably deserved more.
Midnight Special (2016)
Shannon earned his second Oscar nomination for his work as a father keeping his superpowered son out of the hands of the government and a mysterious cult in Jeff Nichols’s 2015 sci-fi adventure. He’s playing against type as a guy viewers generally don’t think should be in either prison or a psychiatric ward, and is wildly effective despite how out of his comfort zone the role may seem.
More importantly, the film is an underrated classic in the making. Much of Shannon’s best work happens in films that fail to make back their budget at the box office, and Midnight Special is no different. In an era when so much of popular media seems to be trying to re-create the feelings a bunch of 40-year-old men experienced the first time they saw E.T, it’s the rare film that actually feels like the heir apparent to those classics.
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
Okay, two things: One, Shannon never technically appears in this movie except as a rubber dummy corpse that later gets turned into a spiky gray apocalypse troll, but he’s credited, which means he was paid for this, and I spend more time than I care to admit wondering what number was on that check.
Two, the press cycle for this film included Vulture asking Shannon who he thought would win the titular showdown, which led to him saying this:
“I’m so utterly unconcerned with the outcome of that fight. So profoundly, utterly unconcerned. I can’t even come up with a fake answer. I guess I have to root for Superman because he killed me, so I would hope that he would continue his killing spree and become like a serial killer Superman. That’s a new take on Superman. We’d all be in a heap of trouble if Superman was a serial killer. He could just wipe us all out. But then he’d be lonely.â€
The Shape of Water (2017)
When Guillermo del Toro needed a guy to play a government agent full of sexual repression and anger issues, he knew exactly who to call. Shannon’s villainous turn as the guy who absolutely does not want Sally Hawkins to kiss her fish boyfriend is the perfect caustic counter to the film’s sentimentality.
The Flash (2023)
Zodheads, we’ve been vindicated. Shannon’s latest screen performance sees him reprise his role as General Zod in the Snyderverse’s swan song, The Flash. Why he appeared in this film seems a mystery even to him, as most of his promotional appearances ahead of its release have centered on how he doesn’t seem to think too highly of his performance in it. I hope he bought a very nice vacation home with the money.