Paul Bettany & Will Sharpe on Amadeus, Genius, and The Burden of Talent in New Podcast

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There’s a dangerous thing about revisiting Amadeus . The 1984 film directed by Miloš Forman has hung over pop culture for decades like some powdered-wig ghost, but the new Amadeus series from Starz isn’t trying to remake the movie so much as crawl deeper into the rot underneath it. Speaking with Kyle Meredith , stars Paul Bettany and Will Sharpe talked about stretching Peter Shaffer’s story across five hours, which gives the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri far more room to bruise, obsess, and spiral. Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts .

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Bettany, who plays Salieri with the kind of simmering resentment that could curdle wine, pointed out that the original stage play mostly lived inside Salieri’s head. “The play is very much from Salieri’s point of view,” he says, before explaining how the series opens things up to show “what the burden of genius was on Mozart.” He also offers maybe the best answer possible to the question of whether genius actually exists. “In the same way I believe in libraries and stuff,” Bettany laughs. “There are geniuses. Yeah, there are libraries.”

Sharpe approached Mozart like a contradiction wrapped in music notation. “I tried to play him as somebody who doesn’t believe in libraries,” he jokes back before getting serious about using Mozart’s compositions as a way into the character. “Some of it is very playful and frivolous and some of it is so grand and sad,” he says. “Trying to marry that all into one person.” Over the course of the series, Sharpe’s Mozart goes from ambitious chaos agent to something far darker, worn down by circumstance, ego, and Salieri’s fixation. The result lands somewhere between prestige drama and psychological knife fight, which feels exactly right for a story about two men trying to survive in the shadow of brilliance.

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Listen to Paul Bettany and Will Sharpe talk about Amadeus , the nature of genius, and more in the new episode above or by watching the video below. The five-part limited series debuts May 8th on Starz.

Keep up on all the latest episodes by following Kyle Meredith With… on your favorite podcast platform ; plus, check out all the series on the Consequence Podcast Network .

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_Originally reported by [Consequence](https://consequence.net/2026/05/amadeus-paul-bettany-will-sharpe-podcast/)._