The Gospel According to David and Michael

Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s darkly comic novel about the battle between good and evil, comes to Amazon Prime this spring. To mark the occasion, the British stars of this hugely anticipated show – Michael Sheen and David Tennant – take New York in style. Hayley Campbell meets them.

British Airways HIGH LIFE magazine, March 2019

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It’s Sunday morning in New York City and it’s snowing outside the warm, jazz-filled Beekman hotel, where a 50th-birthday balloon has been trapped for months in the apex of the glass atrium at the top of one of the city’s first skyscrapers. One thousand New Year’s Eve balloons have risen and fallen in the time this one silver balloon has taken to not die. If the apocalypse were to arrive tomorrow, this balloon would survive along with the cockroaches, the deep-sea fish, and the angel and the demon who tried to avert the disaster. If the prophecies of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s cult novel Good Omens prove to be correct, this balloon would bob high above their heads as it is doing now – above Michael Sheen and David Tennant, light and dark, good and evil, an angel and a demon sitting either side of me in lower Manhattan, eating eggs.

I last saw these two together in 2017, in the middle of London’s Battersea Park, shooting some early scenes of their hugely anticipated television show. Good Omens is about the birth of Satan, the coming of the End Times, and an angel (Aziraphale – who has been living on Earth since the dawn of creation and is currently working in a bookshop avoiding selling books because he really just likes to collect them) and a demon (Crowley – who used to be known as Crawly, the snake who tempted Eve with the apple). The pair have spent so much time on earth that they’ve come to quite like it, and don’t much fancy the idea of it all ending. The novel was published in 1990 and has gone on to become so loved that it is rare to see a pristine copy in the world: copies of Good Omens almost always come pre-dunked in tea. Shortly before his death from Alzheimer’s in early 2015, Pratchett wrote an email to his collaborator Gaiman asking him to take it to the screen. “I’m making it for Terry,” says Gaiman. “I wanted to make the thing that Terry would have liked.”

Sheen and Tennant star as the angelic and demonic representatives of their respective head offices, Heaven and Hell, along with a knee-weakening list of stars including Jon Hamm as the Archangel Gabriel, Spinal Tap’s Michael McKean as the last of a once proud witchfinder army, and Frances McDormand as the voice of God. There’s Miranda Richardson, Jack Whitehall, three quarters of the League of Gentlemen, and Nick Offerman as the father of the Antichrist (sort of). The cast reads like someone collecting acting talent to put on an ark ready for a biblical flood.

For months, we have tried to get them together again to talk about the end of the world. But life and work had them circling the globe separately, unmatchable as opposing magnets. Sheen is currently in New York filming The Good Fight, in which he plays a Machiavellian lawyer, and Tennant has flown in on the red-eye from Phoenix, Arizona, where he was appearing at the Ace Comic Con, mobbed by Doctor Who fans. Both of them have, since they last saw each other, grown beards. Tennant is ecstatic about the beards, and both are thrilled to see each other, and New York, again.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in New York over the years now,” says Sheen. “But still there’s times where you look at something and you think it just looks so incredibly beautiful, or strange, or filmic. It never loses that sense of unreality. I love being able to take it in by walking through the streets. Los Angeles feels like everything happens indoors, whereas here in New York, everything happens outdoors.”

“I do like New York,” adds Tennant. “I love a big city, and I love a busy city.”

Tennant and Sheen have bumped into each other before, both appearing in Stephen Fry’s 2003 film Bright Young Things, but they were never in the same scene. Sheen voiced a character in an episode of Doctor Who written by Gaiman, but by then Tennant’s Doctor had regenerated. They tend to go for similar roles so there’s rarely a chance for them both to be cast – it’s usually one or the other. Gaiman, the author and showrunner of Good Omens, selected Sheen for the role. “I’ve known Michael for about a decade and one of the things that always impressed me about him was his goodness,” he says. “He’s just very good. He radiates goodness and lovability. I was always fascinated by the fact that he tends to play characters who, at least on the outside, are sort of brittle and perhaps a little damaged or dangerous.”

Selecting the actor to play the BMW driving, skinny-jeans wearing demon was an equally tricky task. “For David, I was writing episode three and there is a scene set in a church. I had to bring Crowley on and suddenly I knew exactly how I needed that scene to be done in order to work: with him coming down the aisle hopping from foot to foot, going ‘ow ow ow ow ow!’ like he’s at the beach in bare feet. Only David Tennant could do that right. People seemed baffled when it was announced that they were cast because they’re a similar kind of actor, but the similarities between them felt so incredibly right when you’re building this kind of thing.”

Tennant and Sheen joke that when the theatre production of Good Omens (hold your horses, there isn’t one) travels the world, they will swap roles every night, even though Sheen says he couldn’t imagine it the other way around. “Ultimately I don’t think I can pull off cool,” he says, as Tennant scoffs in disbelief. “I think it just suits my natural being, that I’m kind of a worrier, and a little bit too anal for my own good. Things annoy me if they’re not quite right. And yet I like to think of myself as being a good person. So all of that hypocrisy and finickiness seems to lend itself to the natural rhythm of Aziraphale.”

“I love that you describe Crowley as cool,” laughs Tennant. “I think he thinks he’s cool, but he isn’t.”

Tennant is adamant that having Gaiman as a showrunner is the pin that is holding this strange world together, one that is “tonally sort of nebulous”, but definitely very funny, and one that would benefit from a bingewatch to take it in all at once (all six episodes will be available on Amazon at once and later the BBC will broadcast them week-by-week). “I think if anyone else was running this they would’ve normalised it, would’ve made it saner, and would’ve ironed out some of the quirks of it,” he says. “Neil’s been fantastically clever at making it televisual where he had to, but it still has the madness, the impracticality of the book.”

Plus, there’s the fact that Gaiman is 50 per cent of the book. Because of that, his casting choices landed a little more softly in the world of Good Omens fandom. But Sheen and Tennant aren’t too worried about being unwelcome: they have in their short time as Aziraphale and Crowley discovered that Good Omens fans may be devoted to the point of madness (the cosplay and pornographic fan fiction has already begun), but they are certainly kind. “I have found that Neil’s work is almost like the Arthurian sword in the stone,” says Sheen. “You can only pull the sword out if you are pure of heart. And I think you only like Neil’s stuff if there’s something about you that means you won’t be mean to people on the whole.”

“I think that’s true of Doctor Who fans as well,” says Tennant. “If your mind is set in that way, then you have a generosity of spirit. And there’s quite an overlap between the two fandoms.”

They seem almost wistful until I bring up the airfield. Days after filming during a cold snap in Battersea Park, where we huddled like penguins around glowing heaters in tents, production moved to an airfield outside London where they had built a fake Soho to house Aziraphale’s bookshop. It was the place that changed everyone’s idea of what ‘cold’ actually meant, but it also became the ultimate green room of all time. Both of them look wide-eyed at the mention of the place, for both reasons.

“That blasted airfield! It was blasted in every sense of the word,” says Tennant. “But the great joy was you had all the cast together at once. Between takes we had this big trailer where they would blast the heaters and we’d go and recover.”

“We’d drink hot chocolate, tell stories, and watch TV,” beams Sheen, who says the thing he misses most about the UK is the fact that he can mention The Flumps and people actually know what that is.

“But the only TV channel that would work was some version of Turner Classic Movies,” says Tennant. “Ancient old movies on a loop. Michael McKean would just sit there telling us stories about people he knew or about some sort of terrible Hollywood lifestyle they’d once lived.”

Though it took months to get them both in the same room in the same city, it is a genuine treat to see Sheen and Tennant together. They seem to prop each other up, to fill the space where the other is not, in both acting and conversing. Neither steps on the other’s toes. Above all, they seem to have a deep respect for one another. “It genuinely made me sad when we stopped filming,” says Sheen. “I didn’t want to not be doing it any more.”

Good Omens makes you wonder why nobody thought of putting them together sooner. It is the strangest buddy story so far, the one just before the end of the world, starring the most unlikely pals who for some reason quite like each other – mostly because they’ve just been posted here a bit too long by their superiors so they have more in common with each other than they do with Heaven or Hell – and, crucially, quite like us. It’s the kind of thing that makes you believe the world is worth saving.