Martin Sheen names the only movies that he’s actually proud of: “Most of them weren’t good”
Between the President of the United States, Peter Parker’s uncle, and a dedicated police captain in The Departed, Martin Sheen has a monopoly on playing honourable, heroic characters, but he doesn’t see it that way and thinks that a majority of his work has been unsuccessful.
While his sons Charlie and Emilio have gone on to become massive stars in their own right, the patriarch is undoubtedly the best actor in his family. There aren’t many movie stars who can say they experienced the New Hollywood wave of the 1970s while it happened, hopped on the prestige television train before it became popular, and still managed to pop up in recent hits like Judas and the Black Messiah and The Amazing Spider-Man.
Sheen’s most famous role is President Jed Bartlet in The West Wing, in which he embodied the type of humble, reasonable commander-in-chief that audiences wished was actually in office. Apparently, that humility isn’t that far off from his actual personality, as he once told Yahoo that 90% of his film work “is basically trash”.
“I have only done a handful of feature films that I am proud of, that are good, that stood,” he told the outlet, claiming, “Most of them weren’t good. I did them for the money. I didn’t want to do anything else, and that was all I was offered.”
Sheen’s lack of vanity is refreshing, but it’s also a bit confusing when considering the all-time classics on his resume, so thankfully, the Emmy-winning actor was quick to point out the few films he was actually proud of. “Apocalypse Now scared people,” he said of the beloved Francis Ford Coppola war epic, famous also for the disaster that it was behind the scenes, adding, “It was only [one where] the Vietnam veterans themselves who started to go to it repeatedly and tell people, ‘That’s what it was like. It was insanity’. What you see in that picture is what it was for an American soldier to experience in Vietnam.”
Apocalypse Now was considered a major star vehicle for Sheen, but it wasn’t his breakout, having previously starred in the neo-western Badlands from debut director Terrence Malick, who would go on to become one of the most influential filmmakers of the next several decades. The actor certainly didn’t throw him under the bus when talking about his pride and joy of titles, and said that Badlands joined Apocalypse Now as “the main two” films he felt had held up.
One of the reasons that Sheen’s work on The West Wing felt so authentic was his dignity and passion he had for real-life politics. As a lifelong advocate and political disruptor, he has adamantly chased topical issues and spoken his mind about controversial topics, so it should come as no surprise that he looks back fondly on films that “made a difference in people’s lives or, at least, made them aware of another possibility”.
Many of these projects that Sheen admitted he “was proud of” have endured for their sensitive approach to important issues: Wall Street looked at capitalist corruption in the heart of the Reagan era, Gandhi brought to life the story of a peaceful thought leader, The American President offered a compassionate look at the Oval Office, and The War at Home documented anti-war movements before they became mainstream.
Still, he might have been a bit too tough on his career, considering the love that exists for David Cronenberg’s nail-biting sci-fi thriller The Dead Zone, Steven Spielberg’s entertaining con caper Catch Me If You Can, and the political drama Bobby, which was directed by his son, showing that even the films Sheen made “for money” have managed to stick around in the collective consciousness, and a lot of it is to his credit.
