On his day off in Boston Ben Kingsley holds class
From ferocious hit man to drug-using psychiatrist, the bard, now in 'The Wackness,' embraces all
It has been observed that the big movie stars have big eyes. On a recent Wednesday afternoon at a busy Boston hotel, there was plenty of time to see that Ben Kingsley's peepers are indeed big - bigger than expected. But so are his ears. And his nose. Needless to say, Kingsley is not, in the conventional sense, a star.
By his own admission, he is a character actor, meaning those features tend to disappear into a part along with the rest of him. So for the length of a movie, those eyes and ears and that glorious nose belong to someone else - Don Logan, say, the hit man Kingsley played in "Sexy Beast" or the astonishingly soulful Fagin he played in Roman Polanksi's version of "Oliver Twist."
"It's all a matter of perception, honestly," Kingsley said. "If I'm perceived to be multifaceted at the risk of being bipolar - I was called bipolar one time because I was so multifaceted - then hopefully producers and directors will allow me to pursue that: my addiction to change, rather than my addiction to any one particular type of character."
For months Kingsley has been in town shooting "Shutter Island," the new Martin Scorsese thriller that we're supposed to call "Ashecliffe" until it's released next year. And he spent a day off regaling a stranger with tales of whatever he fancied (the great directors he's worked with, his new wife, his great health and deep happiness) - although he was professionally obliged to fancy talking about "The Wackness," a sort of buddy comedy written and directed by Jonathan Levine that opens in Boston Friday.
His buddy in the movie is Josh Peck, the former Nickelodeon star, he of the junior slapstick and baby fat. The film is one of those last-summer-before-college stories. This one is set in the New York of 1994, is inflected with the hip-hop of the era, and revolves around a virginal drug-dealer (Peck) and the bond he forges with his psychiatrist (Kingsley), who also happens to be a client.
Kingsley wears long hair and flower-print shirts for the movie. He gets to act very stoned and be intimate with Mary-Kate Olsen. He's so lost in the part he seems like another actor entirely - Armand Assante, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Ben Gazzara. He said it was the character's recklessness that appealed to him. And there's an unexpected loveliness watching a man of Kingsley's eminence (the people in his retinue call him "Sir Ben" or simply "Sir"; sample: "I'll go and bring Sir down to you") share scenes with Peck, Olsen, and bags of marijuana, while R. Kelly and the Notorious B.I.G. play on the soundtrack.
Kingsley, though, is thoroughly an actor and, as such, he divined something lovelier at work between the teenager and the shrink. During the talk he and Levine had before shooting, Kingsley recalled saying to him: " 'Isn't this like the relationship between Prince Hal, who becomes Henry V, and Sir John Falstaff in the taverns of London, where all they do is joke about each other and drink beer?' And he jumped out of his seat and agreed with me almost before I got to the end of the sentence." So there you have it: "The Wackness" is just Shakespeare on the street.
At the hotel, Kingsley wore a black leather jacket, fine-wale corduroy jeans, and a dark-gray T-shirt. His head was bald, as it has been for years, and he had a goatee. He looked trim, at least a decade younger than his age (he's 64), and the slightest bit intimidating, less so than the pompous version of himself he played for one raucous episode of "The Sopranos." On this particular day, Kingsley could have been Don Logan's smarter, more reflective twin.
Lately, he's been on a roll. His assistant - a calm, accommodating young man named Todd - remarked that it's hard to keep all of Kingsley's current projects straight. By Todd's count, there were at least five in various stages of production or development. None of these include "The Love Guru," "Elegy," or "Transsiberian": movies that have opened or are scheduled to open by the end of the year. This particular day he'd just been sent three new scripts.
Kingsley blames Don Logan for these last eight, highly productive years. "It was an enormous corner I turned," he said. " 'Sexy Beast' was such a surprise." Not necessarily to him, but to people who never thought of Kingsley as a ferocious killer type. Again, he saw something loftier. "I recognized him as a Shakespearean villain, like Iago or Macbeth or Richard III, the perfect Renaissance, Machiavellian, Shakespearean villain in its purest form. I hugged and embraced him, I knew I had that possibility in me, but I was delighted to be offered it."
Kingsley shares the credit with the director Jonathan Glazer: "He filmed me really well. He placed the camera in the position of the person who was being threatened, what they saw in me." He calls Logan a "steel axe head flying toward you" and said he was resolute in that performance never to show a flicker of intelligence behind his eyes.
Given his talent for self-explanation, it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that Kingsley is passionate about teaching the craft of acting. He's taught four-hour master classes at, among other places, Oxford, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of New Mexico, and he desperately wanted to give a master class while he was living in Boston, but the random nature of the "Ashecliffe" schedule would have made that hard to pull off. Yet in half an hour, Kingsley gives you a sense of how some aspects of such a session might go: like extended office hours.
He managed to make his profession sound professional yet profound. "There is no more private moment than that moment between 'action' and 'cut,' " he said. "I know it's a paradox, because it ends up being very public. But between 'action' and 'cut,' the camera is zoning in on a very, very private experience between the actor, a fellow actor, and the character. The camera has to come round and share that. It's that zone of privacy I enjoy."
When asked, for example, how to block out all kinds of noise while acting Kingsley said, with a kind of spiritual enlightenment: "Don't."
"You shouldn't block them out," he said. "What I do often, if I'm doing a scene with you and there are people bobbing around behind you and the camera's on me, some actors would say, 'Would you please stop those people bobbing around?' I tend not to, because life is always going on. And rather than pretend it's not there, if you accept totally that it is there, maybe it'll help you relax. You can use that."
And with that, class was dismissed.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. 