It’s always nice to find out that a celebrity’s real-life attitudes are just like their on-screen persona, like learning that Tom Hanks is a good guy with a very cute typewriter fetish, or that Keanu Reeves really is that pleasant and laid-back. Or, say, like finding out that Michael Shannon may really be kind of an awesome weirdo, the sort of guy who’ll shove two bucks in loose change up his nose on a whim.
Hence this very odd, very delightful video from Vanity Fair, showing the Boardwalk Empire and The Shape Of Water star doing exactly that. (While tinkling on the ivories in his spare time, of course.) It’s fascinatingly on-message for Shannon’s public brand, in that it’s deliberately, provokingly weird—what the fuck is up with that bird?—and pretty much exactly what you’d want from a guy like Shannon “opening up.”