Ben Kingsley

Spotlight By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Sir Ben Kingsley is an actor whose career has achieved almost legendary status. A chameleon who has played dozens upon dozens of different roles, knighted by the Queen, he is one of the living greats. Immortalized in high school social studies classes forever thanks to his titular role in 1982's Gandhi, Kingsley astonished critics a few years ago with his decidedly un-Gandhi-like portrayal of Don Logan, the sadistic and charismatic killer at the center of Sexy Beast.

Now he's back playing a guy prone to violence, but this time it's in the kindler, gentler, but nonetheless very darkly humorous You Kill Me. He plays Frank, a drunk hit man working for a Polish mafia family in Buffalo, NY. '[Don in] Sexy Beast is sort of a second cousin to Frank,' he says. 'I don't think that he's that profoundly dark Iago-type force that Don Logan is. Don Logan's a force of nature, a cruel force of nature, and that's why he's in that film. But there's definitely something redeemable in Frank, that does get redeemed later on. I think he's a decent man, but he had to suppress and disguise and drown his decency in alcohol, but then that stops him functioning as well, so it's a downward spiral.'

Yes, as we enter the world of You Kill Me, Frank's drinking is getting the best of him, and his uncle orders him to go to San Francisco to take some time off and attend AA meetings. There he gets a job at a mortuary, falls in love with a woman played by Tea Leoni, and makes friends with his AA sponsor, played by Luke Wilson. The film also stars Bill Pullman, Philip Baker Hall, and Dennis Farina.

'As I read it, I loved the consistency of the writing,' Kingsley says. 'In so many lesser screenplays, there's an inconsistency, or you get five characters in the scene and they're all written in the exact same way. So if you block out who's speaking, you can't tell, because they don't have their individual rhythms. In this screenplay, everyone has a beautiful individual rhythm. And what I really enjoyed about reading Frank was that he stays Frank from the beginning to the end. There's an interior shift, definitely, and a change, but he is the same child within, and the child stays the same throughout the film. He's very childlike, and that's what I really found very endearing about playing him. Somewhat monosyllabic, somewhat removed from society, not really grateful to the care and attention he's receiving from his uncle and his cousins, not really interested in that food his cousin brings him, would rather open a bottle of beer, you know' Keeping in a rather childlike way, keeping affection away, until his whole resistance crumbles, and he can't say no to affection anymore. And that's when Tea walks into his life. It's perfect timing.'

This obvious thought that goes into every one of Kingsley's roles is what has given him the reputation of skill and professionalism that he continues to thrive on. 'I think the alcohol is a way of coping with the complete dichotomy of being a decent guy who kills people for a living. Frank is a decent guy; he's almost innocent and childlike and has a sense of decency. But if his uncle says, 'go and kill somebody,' he'll say 'okay,' and he'll go and kill them. Almost naively.'

Yet despite his spot-on analysis of his character, he gives most of the credit to his interactions with the supporting characters. 'I think that 99% is how other characters respond to me and in turn how my character responds to them. It's not something that happens in isolation. And I honestly don't know how it's going to play out until I'm on the set and face to face with the director and the other actors. I don't have many preconceptions. I know who Frank is, but I don't know how Frank's going to react until Laurel [Tea's character] provokes me, or Philip, or Dennis, or Bill, or any of our great cast.'

He also speaks favorably of his director, John Dahl (Rounders, The Last Seduction), and the skill of the entire production. Instead of the usual platitudes, however, he tells an anecdote in which he credits Dahl and the production design team: 'I was thrilled with the AA meetings, when I walked into them as an actor. They were so detailed in their realism, even things that the audience would never see. I entered the church hall and to my right was the notice board. It was covered in AA help notices, and phone numbers; there was not one thing to distract me, because my first entrance started in the doorway, and I had to come into the room, I was full of the AA meeting information. I just stood there for two seconds and I realized they had done that whole wall, and it's completely genuine. The faces in the meeting, the characters, the lighting in the church hall, which was the rather odd lighting they use in churches which makes everyone look like they're underwater, the smell of the tea and the coffee and the cookies to one side; such an embracing environment. I thought, 'you know, you just walked into John Dahl's version of an AA meeting''[and] I imagine it's very, very close to the real thing.'

Kingsley has a host of other projects coming up, including the intriguing-looking War, Inc. with John Cusack, another dark comedy, although one on a much more global scale. Recently he just finished shooting The Dying Animal with Penelope Cruz. It's based on a novel by Philip Roth. 'I asked the director, and the team, if I could do it in my own voice,' he says of his character in Animal. 'Because I wanted it to be as dangerously close to me as possible. So that when I was performing in the character, I was using my own speech patterns and my own rhythms. There was no mask to hide behind. I had to create him out of me. Sometimes an accent can become a trick you hide behind, and I wanted Frank's voice pretty much to be, again, my voice, but with those Buffalo and those Polish tones in it, but not for it to overwhelm the character. And it can overwhelm the character sometimes. So [you] try and find the balance.'

Kingsley also took on producing duties for You Kill Me. He's asked about the cost-cutting decision to let Winnipeg double for San Francisco in many of the scenes. 'I had no second thoughts whatsoever. Once John was in place, and Tea, and the fantastic cast, and the script is so strong, I felt that we confidently could reconstruct the environment we needed to reconstruct'I was just glad we were going to make the film.' That enthusiasm ' his honest love of making films ' will no doubt continue to fruitfully serve him throughout his career.