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RD: Sometimes people are moved to ambition by an early personal challenge. Tell me a bit about the problem with your arm.Sheen: My left arm was smashed from the forceps at birth. They put me aside to work on my mother. They didn't think I was going to survive. They baptized me, even. My arm never got tended to and it grew withered. My left arm is half the size of my right. It's about three inches shorter. I've learned to carry it so that it doesn't look that way.
When I was in New York, I decided to have it fixed. I went to a clubfoot clinic in New York Hospital. They were very excited. Never saw anything like me before. They were going to cut the tendons so I could turn it. I can't turn it any further than that, see?
I went to the clinic that first morning and was the first one there. Soon the room filled up with people who were really suffering. I got up and left. I said, "I don't have a problem. These guys are the ones who have real problems." I never went back.
RD: Did your father want you to become an actor?
Sheen: He didn't. We would fight all the time. I was in plays and I had made it known that I didn't want to go to college. He'd saved money for me, putting a few bucks aside every week for me to go. And I would try to assure him, "Look, I'm making a living on the golf course. Let me go -- "
"No. You're the one I'm worried about. You've got to work with your mind. Your body's not up to it." The arm really bothered him.
RD: So you went to New York, early '59. Did he try to dissuade you?
Sheen: I almost had to crawl over him to get out of the house. Finally, when he saw that I was determined, he blessed me.
RD: Apocalypse Now, which came out in 1979, marked a big turning point personally and professionally, didn't it?
Sheen: After Apocalypse Now. I nearly died over there. I had a drinking problem I had to come to grips with. My career shot up and I was getting a lot of offers and my life was changing. But I was three sheets to the wind. I had not been a Catholic for many years, so the children were not raised Catholic. They had no spiritual values. They had moral values, they were good people. But they had nothing to fall back on. So for lack of a better word, I went on a journey to try and unite these parts of myself.
RD: Was there a sudden revelation?
Sheen: It was a cumulative thing. In 1981 I was shooting the film Enigma in Paris. I was just back from India, it was winter, and I was very depressed. I ran into [director] Terrence Malick. He was on his own spiritual journey, and he knew something was going on with me. We talked, and talked, and he gave me books and other things to read. One day he gave me The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. At the end of the book I realized I was in need of a faith, of a grounding, that I was still really a Catholic, and that I must return.
I was starting to go to a little church in the Avenue Hoche. On May Day, 1981, I went down to the church and pounded on the door. The priest came and I said, "I've been gone for a long time. I want to come home." He said, "You come on Saturday, and you better be early because I've got a wedding at 4 o'clock. We'll look after you." And he did. I've been a Catholic ever since.
The next twenty years were the most difficult of my life, but by far the happiest. I came back to the church of [Catholic activists such as] Mother Teresa, Daniel Berrigan and Dorothy Day, and began to get involved in social-justice issues.
RD: Why were the next twenty years the most difficult?
Sheen: Because religion, if it's real, can't be a sometime thing. It can't be a Sunday thing. Christ was killed because -- well, because he was a rebel. They didn't kill him because he was a nice guy. He was a troublemaker. He was changing the law, the letter of the law, because he changed the heart.
Martin Luther King said the church is the place to go forth from. Even his fellow preachers said, "Hey, man, what are you doing in the streets?" He said we've got to take what we believe into the streets. If it has moral value, we have to live it and lead.
You know, I was praying that our church would condemn the violence in Afghanistan, and not give the imprimatur to the war, and remain nonviolent, as Jesus was. And they did not. But still we have to go on.
RD: But what do you say to some guy who writes you and says that to respond to September 11 with non-violence means that the violent people will eventually take over the earth?
Sheen: I wrote a prayer the day of the attack, it's here on my door. It says, "Let us pray. First let us choose our enemy well, for he is who we will become. Therefore, let us not pray for vengeance. For surely only darkness and despair are the gods of such idolatry. Rather, let us pray for justice and that we may become worthy of the long promised blessing reserved for the merciful. Amen."
I only have one enemy. That's me. I'm the only one that I fight to change, and I have very little success. The bottom line is, I don't know anything. I believe a lot of things. Do they work? I haven't really had enough faith to move that mountain. There's that old saying, "We shouldn't be critical of Christianity. We've never tried it."
RD: So what does it say that there's a big audience for The West Wing?
Sheen: It's very gratifying that viewers do care, that politics is not a sometime thing, that people are deeply concerned about major issues. A lot of young people have been inspired by the show and are getting interested in public life as a result. We like to think we have an influence there, that we have made people feel it's an honorable profession to be a servant for your country.
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