As he takes on his latest role as a northern community hero, Rory Kinnear talks about the traumatic early deaths of his father and sister – and the bittersweet joy of playing Tory MPs
In 2011, a Burnley businessman named Dave Fishwick established a lending company, Burnley Savings and Loans Limited. The 2008 financial crash had deprived the area of opportunity; small businesses were struggling to make ends meet. Fishwick, who grew up poor in Burnley, but who later set up a successful minivan business, began loaning money to locals, often people he knew by name. “It’s quite antediluvian in a way,” says the actor Rory Kinnear. “All the people he lends money to, he wants to meet them, see what they’re about.” Kinnear recently visited BSAL’s only branch, on a Burnley high street. “There’s a safe in the basement,” he says, incredulous. “Most of it is handwritten.”
Kinnear was in Burnley on a reconnaissance trip. When we meet, in a north London café that is blaring an up-tempo bossa nova playlist – an antidote to the December cold – it is to discuss his new film, Bank of Dave, in which he plays a lightly fictionalised version of Fishwick. “There was something about his tenacity of spirit and purpose,” Kinnear says, “as well as him being equally filled by rage and goodwill.” Rage at the banks, whose greed he loathed. Goodwill towards the people of Burnley, Fishwick’s people, whom he’d seen repeatedly passed over despite their promise and diligence. Fishwick’s father had worked two jobs to provide for the family. “That was Dave’s baseline,” Kinnear says. “You work really hard. But when you don’t see the benefits of that work flowing back through your community, when the success of the rest of the country doesn’t seem to trickle down, to use the phrase du jour, when you’re not treated fairly, or when you have the perception of not being treated fairly, that nobody gives a shit about you – that binds you as a community.”
