The actor has found a niche playing multiple characters in one scene, never more so than playing five in his new film Man. He talks about grief making him old before his time – and why niceness is back
You can never be sure who you are going to meet when you interview an actor. Will it be the leery landowner with prosthetic teeth and nice little holiday mansion, the lank-haired, hand-wringing vicar, or perhaps the phantasmagorical green man who lets it all hang out? Rory Kinnear is all of these – and more besides – in his latest film, Men, a creepy symbolist horror mashup written and directed by Alex Garland. But the man who has just walked across London to be photographed and interviewed – no minders in tow – looks about as threatening as a fine spring day, and is so refreshingly personable that by the end of the photoshoot he has winkled a confidence out of the photographer that even her family don’t yet know.
Kinnear plays no fewer than eight men in the film, a sleight of hand, body and face that culminates in a pub scene with five of them drinking together at the bar. How is that even possible? “It was quite lo-fi actually,” he says. “It was basically a question of camera angles and having to stand in certain places, with five stand-ins for the characters that I was playing, all of whom were dressed similarly and aged similarly. We’d do the scene five ways and I’d only be playing one of the characters. But it also places a lot of limitations on you: like you can’t stray over there, because that will cost us another 20 grand in post-production.”
