Every so often, an actor will kind of stumble into a cinematic niche, whether it’s playing a string of judges or being cast as a teacher over and over again. It’s not something performers necessarily want to do, but if you’re a working character actor, sometimes that’s just how things shake out.
Rory Kinnear has found one of those niches, and it’s a doozy: Over the past six years, the British actor has played multiple characters in the same production four different times. He took on John Clare and The Creature for Penny Dreadful, a pair of seaworthy twins for Our Flag Means Death, and another set of twins for Inside No. 9.
Kinnear’s most recent many-faced act is perhaps his most impressive. In Alex Garland’s latest movie, Men, Kinnear inhabits “nine or 10” different characters, each of which he says he spent time teasing out and developing. Each of Kinnear’s characters acts as an increasingly real threat to the sanity and livelihood of Jessie Buckley’s Harper, who’s come to what she thinks is an idyllic country town after the death of her ex-husband. To say more would both spoil the film and do a disservice to Garland’s Men, which luxuriates in its layers of naturalism, gender politics, and horror. But suffice it to say that all of Kinnear’s characters are creepy as hell.
WIRED talked to Kinnear about Men, makeup, and whether there’s an Our Flag Means Death triplet out there. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
WIRED: How was the concept of Men pitched to you?
Rory Kinnear: It was pretty much a full script arriving with the instruction “they’d like you to play all the male parts barring one.” I think I didn’t even read “barring one” when I first read it so I was slightly disappointed that I wasn’t being asked to play the boyfriend as well.
So that’s going to pique anyone’s interest. Then reading it and seeing that playing all those parts had a point, rather than just being a sort of a variety act or an attempt to show off your acting abilities or lack of ... I wanted to make sure that it meant something or that there was a reason for it. I sort of felt like there was and then when Alex and I discussed it, we seemed to get on very well, and I could tell that there was a greater purpose to this multiplicity of me other than an audience going away going, “what a lot of characters he played.” That’s how I knew I was up for it.
This is also the fourth time in six years where you have played multiple characters in the same project. Why do you think you’ve landed in that niche? It’s a fairly specific one.
I don’t know.
I mean, the first one was Penny Dreadful. Within that, I played Frankenstein’s creature, but within the episode, I was also playing who the creature was before he had died. Then he also turned into Satan and Lucifer, if I’m recalling that right. They were all within the same padded cell. That was the first time I did it, though, and I know that John Logan wrote that episode really for me and Eva Green, so maybe there was something that he wanted to see stretched in me, I don’t know.
I did it in a previous show called Inside No. 9, where I was playing separated-at-birth identical twin brothers, who are different from the twin brothers that I played in Our Flag Means Death.
I’d love to say that it’s because people are inspired by my elasticity, but maybe it’s just because I’m cheap.
How did you find your way into each of your Men characters? Were there some that were harder than others?
I knew they were going to have to be distinct from each other, and Alex had been clear that he didn’t want it to be a sort of prosthetics show. We wanted it to come from the acting.
Obviously, quite a few of the characters don’t have that much to say, so I knew that the only way in was to do what I do with any part that I play and create a backstory. You create who that character is by the experiences of their life and the various influences on them to the point that; when you meet them as an audience, you know who they are.
Once I had written those biographies, I sent them off to Alex and then sent them off to Lisa [Duncan] and Nicole [Stafford], the head of costumes and the head of hair and makeup, and we had a back and forth. I wasn’t writing “I think they look like this,” because I knew that was their skill rather than mine, but I said, “This is who this person is. This is where they came from. This is their relationship with their parents,” all that kind of stuff. Then they’d come back with various mood boards and look boards of how they saw things progressing.
The vicar wears contact lenses, and he’s the only one to do that. There was something about those contact lenses that occluded me as Rory from the screen a bit in a slightly darker way.
There was a bit of, “let's throw it against the wall and see what sticks,” but I was always aware that I wanted to make sure I kept to who they were inside rather than becoming too worried about what they looked like on the outside.
It’s one thing to play a bunch of different adult men, but the movie also uses some CGI trickery to make you into a child. Is there a difference in the way a child’s face moves and in the way an adult’s face might react?
Well, there’s an element of leaving things on trust to the people that are going to do the work after you. I don’t fully understand how it is all done. I was kind of taken through what I needed to do and what would be done. So, the way I played the boy was similar to the way I played anyone else. You absorb who they are and their characteristics and their personality, and then you act with the other person opposite you.
I was reading a story in Screenrant and they said “as is almost always the case with Kinnear, he manages to create a man who is at once both deeply unpleasant yet almost impossible to look away from …”
What a headstone!
Well, you have played quite a lot of awful guys in your career. What do you think it is that makes casting directors and even viewers look at you and go, “that guy’s horrible.”
I think that with some of the rotters I’ve played, you needed to have or at least wanted to ask for an ambivalence of response from an audience, where their feelings are complicated, whilst I maintain I’m actually quite nice.
I don’t know why I am cast, essentially, but I think quite often, it’s for the niceness rather than the nastiness. The words do the actual nastiness, but maybe my cherubic soul makes it more complicated for an audience.
You’d always rather work with the good soul who can play bad versus the bad person who’s just a terrible actor.
Certainly on set, it’s easier.
There’s a scene near the beginning of the film that’s almost entirely silent, and we just see Harper exploring the natural world—and then coming to fear her surroundings. Without giving away too much, I’ll say you do appear in that scene, but also you’re kind of there in presence as well. What did that scene mean to you?
We’re very lucky to see Jessie playing the part because I think she could carry an entire film of silence. Having that 12 minutes without lines, I think it allows us to really absorb ourselves in Harper and her story and who she is, as well as seeing her against the elements.
The film is a sort of a gradual accretion of event and interpretation. The way it gets more hallucinogenic and crazy toward the end is that sense of the momentum building from these interactions that she has. So you have to give her a space to breathe and try and remember herself before you see the provocations or the way that she is forced to react to protect herself.
As a woman watching the movie—and I’ve seen this echoed in reviews written by women—I felt Harper’s terror on a very specific level because I know what it means or feels like to be alone in a house by yourself or have to look behind you as you walk alone. I can understand why it would be viscerally terrifying to realize you’re the only woman for miles.
How did you try to understand that feeling, and how do you think Alex understood it?
It was there in the script, and we knew the sensation that Alex was writing about, but we also had two weeks of basically chatting before we got filming, the majority of which was just myself, Alex, and Jessie sitting in his dad’s living room talking about our own personal experiences. There was a lot that was drawn out from the script and what it provoked in us and the themes that it inspired.
I think we always were aware that this film was about Harper and her experience post a traumatic event at the end of what we perceive to be an abusive phase of her relationship. All the interactions she has are seen through the prism of that.
I don’t think the film is necessarily saying, “Aren’t all men assholes?” but certainly [an experience like that] can happen after a traumatic event. It’s the way we are more sensitive to trauma being repeated and therefore, how do we protect ourselves in the aftermath of trauma? I think that was the stuff that we were picking up on and trying to bring to life.
Without giving a ton away, I’ll say that the last scenes of the movie are pretty brutal, and that you had a major part in those scenes. What was that process like for you, because I read that those took a week to shoot, which is kind of a long time to be going through all of that.
It was an unseasonably cold April, and when Green Man emerges, that was seven and a half hours of makeup. So you’ve already done a day’s work before your day of work even started. But I guess you can just sit down and close your eyes, it’s fine.
I realized as the week went on, the treats that I was being offered were getting nicer and nicer, which meant there was obviously guilt there on behalf of the production in regards to what they were putting me through.
Last question: People really loved Our Flag Means Death, which you were a part of. What did you think of the response to the show? I’d say “but your characters can’t come back for season two,” but given what we’ve just talked about, you never really know. You’re a man of many faces.
Exactly. They could have a triplet, who knows?
I had a great time doing it. It was such an incredibly strong as well as large cast. It was so, so much fun to see everyone’s characters over time because I was doing one of those parts where you’re in and out. You’re doing one day a week or two days a week here and there, but everyone else is seemingly working all the time, so I’d feel a bit guilty. But I got to see their understanding of their characters and the dynamic within the crew develop as you go through the shoot. So I thought it was great.
It’s so open-hearted and inclusive. I’ve been really thrilled, particularly for [creator David Jenkins], obviously, but for the rest of the cast as well, just because of how much it seems to have resonated with people. It’s not been shown over here in the UK yet, so it’s all refracted from what I hear, but I’m thrilled that it’s gone down so well and it’s found a place in people’s hearts.
