Filming may have wrapped up on The West Wing five years ago but Martin Sheen, who played US president Josiah Bartlet in the hit US show, still exudes all the gravitas of his most famous incarnation.
The 70-year-old is in London with his director son Emilio Estevez to promote their new movie The Way, but the politically switched-on actor and campaigner can’t help getting distracted by events further afield.
Despite their pressing schedule and the gaggle of journalists waiting outside the plush hotel room, he and Estevez insist on catching the news about the unrest in the Middle East and North Africa.
Finally beginning the interview, Sheen muses on global events, with Estevez listening intently, his respect and admiration clear.
“It’s a great reflection of dissatisfaction,” Sheen says of the turbulence.
“The world is hungry and in desperate need of justice, peace, harmony and sharing. I don’t think you can say it enough – we’re desperate to find ourselves and to share it with humanity.”
Finding oneself is a key theme of The Way. Half Spanish, half Irish Sheen stars as US doctor Tom, who embarks on the 500-mile Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in the present day while grieving the death of his son – played by Estevez, who also wrote and directed the film.
Along the well-trodden route from the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in the north west of Spain, Tom befriends a handful of international fellow pilgrims, among them actor James Nesbitt, who plays a garrulous writer.
The quiet and unassuming Estevez, who penned and directed the Golden Globe-nominated 2006 film Bobby that also featured his father, reveals he looked at the film like a retelling of The Wizard of Oz.
“Martin’s character is Dorothy, Nesbitt’s is the scarecrow, and they’re looking for the wizard. Instead of Oz, they’re going to Santiago de Compostela.”
The initial idea for The Way came eight years ago when Sheen undertook the Camino by car with Estevez’s son Taylor and “an old dear friend” Matt Clark, who also makes an appearance in the film as a priest.
“The first miracle and the most powerful one was that Taylor met his future wife in a refugio (hostel) in Burgos. He’s been living in Spain for eight years now, and so that really started the whole personal interest,” Sheen recalls.
“I came back with stories and I begged Emilio to have a look at this phenomenon and he did, became entranced by it and started reading about it – finally ending up with a father-son story.”
Sheen and Estevez’s own father-son tale has not been without its drama. The Apocalypse Now star struggled for years with alcohol addiction before rediscovering his Catholic faith and eventually joining Alcoholics Anonymous in the mid-1980s.
