To play Mozart, Will Sharpe had to mine the contrasts of his life and music

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LONDON — If there was any sense of outside pressure associated with portraying Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart onscreen, Will Sharpe didn’t feel it.The actor, 39, accepted the role of the iconic composer in “Amadeus” because he was interested in excavating the man underneath the imposing historical legacy.“There’s this apocryphal interpretation of Mozart that suggests the music just fell into his lap,” Sharpe says, speaking on a recent Friday evening outside London’s Barbican.

The actor is in the middle of editing his forthcoming Apple TV series “Prodigies,” which he wrote, directed and stars in alongside Ayo Edebiri, and this was the only time he had available.But it seems fitting that the ever-busy Sharpe would take a break from his own creative process simply to discuss that of Mozart.“I thought it was interesting to imagine: What is that in reality? What would that feel like day to day? What was his domestic situation?” he continues.

“Who was he as a human being?”“Amadeus,” written by “Black Doves” scribe Joe Barton, dramatizes the tense relationship between Mozart and Antonio Salieri (Paul Bettany).The limited series, currently airing in the U.S.

on Starz, is a new adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 stage play of the same name, which in turn was inspired by Alexander Pushkin’s 1830 “Mozart and Salieri.” Shaffer’s play was previously adapted into Miloš Forman’s 1984 Oscar-winning film “Amadeus,” which starred Tom Hulce as Mozart and F.Murray Abraham as Salieri.

Here, Barton expands the story over five episodes, portraying more details of Mozart’s life, including the perspective of his wife Constanze (Gabrielle Creevy).“It’s not about the real Mozart — it’s a fictional version of him,” Sharpe says.“So I found that I was trying to capture some essence of who he maybe was.

The main thing was to track him from when ...