{"id":5472,"date":"2015-05-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-05-26T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/ben-kingsley\/"},"modified":"2016-01-15T18:25:08","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T23:25:08","slug":"ben-kingsley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/ben-kingsley\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Kingsley"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"This interview originally appeared in the MIPTV 2015 issue of <\/em>World Screen.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ben Kingsley mesmerized audiences with his nuanced and powerful performance in Gandhi<\/em>, which won him an Academy Award for best actor. Born in the U.K. and trained in the theater, Kingsley went on to earn Oscar nominations for performances in Bugsy<\/em>, Sexy Beast<\/em> and House of Sand and Fog<\/em>, and has received countless other awards in his prolific career. He has starred in such diverse films as Schindler\u2019s List<\/em>, Hugo<\/em>, Iron Man 3<\/em> and Exodus: Gods and Kings<\/em>. Like other Hollywood A-List talent, he has crossed over to the small screen and recently finished filming the miniseries Tut<\/em>, produced by Muse Entertainment. In it, he plays the calculating, cunning Ay, the Grand Vizier to the young Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. Knighted in 2002, Sir Ben shares his insights into the character Ay and the craft of acting.<\/p>\n

WS:<\/strong> How did you get involved in Tut<\/em>?
\nKINGSLEY:<\/strong> It was simply the good old nuts and bolts of the business: my agent rang me. They had approached him and talked through the idea and the script structure, and explained that it would be six hours. They were going to shoot in Morocco and Montreal. But let me say that where we shoot, for the most part, [does not impact] my decision. I barely know the landscape I am working in\u2014unless it\u2019s something as remarkable as Morocco. It\u2019s [usually just] a hotel room and a film set. But to film in Morocco was a delight because that landscape, I knew, would feed the actors, would feed the material. There\u2019s something about the North African landscape that is very suited to the mindset that the actor needs to portray notions of eternity, dynasty, gods, superstition. Anyway, my agents were approached and very quickly I read it and was delighted to be part of it. The director, David Von Ancken, came to my house. I liked him very much and liked his grasp of the material. We touched on certain other metaphors from literature [that could] act as tools to bring that extraordinary, almost inaccessible history alive and make it accessible. Then I met everyone else in Morocco. My wife also has a lovely role in Tut<\/em>, which was delightful. It was great to work together. They saw her for the role of Herit, the cousin and lady-in-waiting to the queen who gets sacrificed as a kind of war memento in the middle of the battles between the two warring factions. That was a huge plus. It did not determine whether or not I did the job, but it made it very delightful to know that we could both be working together. So everything was very swiftly resolved and off we flew to Morocco.<\/p>\n

WS: <\/strong>Tell me about your character, Ay.
\nKINGSLEY:<\/strong> He is ambitious. He is a social climber. He is an opportunist. He is a brilliant politician. It\u2019s extremely difficult to know what the man is thinking. He will never express any emotion to allow the other to gauge where he is. So in that respect, it was a wonderful role to play because my performance had to be very deep within his ambitious psyche. The series could be easily called Ambition<\/em> instead of Tut<\/em> because everyone in our scenario, and I\u2019m sure at the court at the time, was desperately plotting to access the throne and therefore access eternity and a place with the gods. They believed they were born with gods and would live with them in eternity when they died. Very strange concepts, but the actors had to come to grips with the various things that we in the 21st century find rather odd, like the gods and how to annoy them and how to appease them, concepts of eternity and being born a god, being a god on earth. All these things Ay was highly attuned to, and he knew how to manipulate people and turn them against one another without it seeming so\u2014so he was a wonderful character to play.<\/p>\n

WS: <\/strong>I remember your performance as Itzhak Stern in Schindler\u2019s List<\/em>, and part of the beauty was that there was a lot of non-verbal communication. Ay is such a manipulator and he holds back so much; did you find playing him to be somewhat similar?
\nKINGSLEY: <\/strong>Well it is related, absolutely, because I hold stillness as an attribute of any performing artist. In other words, economy of motion and accuracy of motion in word or in physical gesture, whether you are an actor or a dancer. It sounds paradoxical, but those moments of stillness where the dancer seems to be hovering in midair are extraordinary, and all the movements are built around those moments of stillness. They make us catch our breath, as Dame Margot Fonteyn used to do. The stillness was applicable to Ay, yes, but I try to make it applicable to every character I play, where it\u2019s appropriate. There are moments of poise and stillness where you don\u2019t know when he\u2019s going to strike next. With Itzhak Stern in Schindler\u2019s List<\/em>, in his moments of stillness you think, How is he going to survive this? And out of that stillness comes that act of survival, just as out of Ay\u2019s stillness comes that act of manipulation and ambition, which maybe is a form of survival in his context.<\/p>\n

WS:<\/strong> I\u2019m using the term \u201cbad guy\u201d very loosely, but for the sake of the question, how do you connect to a character when you are playing somebody whose moral compass is not pointing due north?
\nKINGSLEY:<\/strong> I\u2019m glad you put \u201cbad guy\u201d in quotation marks, because of course I don\u2019t see Ay as a bad guy. He is a survivor, the most intelligent person in the screenplay, pragmatic and all-seeing, and I must approach him as having his own righteousness and his own ethical compass. He does deliver the most wonderful speech to his son about entitlement and opportunity, which could be taken out of our script and used today as a guide for young people who feel that they are completely entitled. They feel that the world should come to them instead of seeking out opportunity and grasping it. So in that context, of course Ay becomes Pharaoh, because he is a magnificent survivor and hugely attuned to his surroundings. That is how I approach all my characters. I find their sense of righteousness\u2014that pulse within them. I never judge my characters.<\/p>\n

WS:<\/strong> Was it a luxury to be able to spend six edited hours on a character as opposed to doing a film that is two hours?
\nKINGSLEY:<\/strong> We still crammed in a huge amount of working hours into the day. We filmed six hours of film in not enough weeks. I think it was 10 or 11 weeks and we should have had 24, 25 for six hours of film. Good to live with Ay for that long, to explore him, yes, but I did six hours of filming in the time I would normally be given to do two. But sometimes compression is very good, because it forces you to make choices as an actor\u2014it was almost the opposite luxury in that there was a lack of time and I had to make decisions very quickly based upon the performances of the others around me, the needs of the scene and the needs of the larger sweep. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it. Making something out of nothing is thrilling, which is basically what we do in our business. We start with print on a page. It\u2019s a script. You can throw it on your desk or you can look at it on your laptop, and suddenly it\u2019s six hours of extraordinary television set in ancient Egypt with magnificent, stunning sets and vistas and costumes and extras\u2014it\u2019s a miracle how it all comes together.<\/p>\n

WS:<\/strong> Was it just this particular project that appealed to you, or have you been looking at the panoply of great television thinking it\u2019s something that might interest you?
\nKINGSLEY:<\/strong> Both. I look at the panoply of great television, as you rightly say\u2014let alone the osmosis between feature film and television\u2014and see that it is providing so many actors with so much work. You look at the channels available now in the world, in Europe, Asia, America, Australia, everywhere, and the amount of outlets open to actors, writers and directors is suddenly thrilling. That opportunity to have a different platform, starting in the theater and then going into animation, television, commercials, voice-overs, feature films, is very exciting. One can stay absolutely faithful to the original craft and yet diversify to such a remarkable extent. In fact, we have six films on our slate as producers, my wife and I at Lavender Pictures\u2014that\u2019s our company. Only the other day we realized that a feature film that we had been very keen to get mounted would be perfect as a TV mini\u00adseries. We just made that decision so effortlessly in the context you just so rightly described. It\u2019s a very exciting world, particularly for [projects that] involve history. All the great historical epics are now on television. Fewer and fewer are on the big screen; it\u2019s very interesting. You can have six hours exploring a suite of history, as opposed to two hours, and people love to watch because it\u2019s episodic, as history was and is. [Television] is a great broad canvas, and there\u2019s huge potential there, huge potential.<\/p>\n

WS:<\/strong> Some people in Hollywood bemoan the fact that so few character-driven original movies are being made. Yet you have found a way to work in a variety of such films.
\nKINGSLEY: <\/strong>The offers that come my way are tremendously stretching and exciting and varied. I\u2019m very blessed. I think it\u2019s because I am open to a very wide range of characterizations because of my first steps in the theater with Shakespeare, which gave me an enormous appetite for variety and for, as you say, narrative-driven, character-driven work. Shakespeare is unbeaten in that as far as I can see. And yes, all the films that my wife and I are producing are exactly that: narrative- and character-driven films. I was a presenter at the Critics\u2019 Choice Awards, and it was so beautiful to see so many wonderful narrative- and character-driven films being honored and applauded. There is still a great audience for them, and I am still determined to give them a great voice. We are determined to make them at our company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This interview originally appeared in the MIPTV 2015 issue of World Screen. Ben Kingsley mesmerized audiences with his nuanced and powerful performance in Gandhi, which won him an Academy Award for best actor. Born in the U.K. and trained in the theater, Kingsley went on to earn Oscar nominations for performances in Bugsy, Sexy Beast …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5473,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[135],"class_list":["post-5472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-interviews","tag-ben-kingsley","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"\nBen Kingsley - TVDRAMA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/ben-kingsley\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ben Kingsley - TVDRAMA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This interview originally appeared in the MIPTV 2015 issue of World Screen. 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