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May 2010 

Return to Table of Contents May 2010

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Interview: Ben Kingsley
Game for Anything

Academy Award-winning thespian Ben Kingsley may not be the first man you think of when casting a blow-’em-up blockbuster based on a videogame franchise. But the elegant Brit  says actors should be able to bring their skills to any role, including his villainous Nizam in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time


By Jim Slotek

Imagine a time when thousands of people on a movie screen really were thousands of people on a movie screen — not a single computer-generated humanoid among them.

Fresh from the Moroccan set of the videogame-based movie Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Sir Ben Kingsley is bemused as he compares epics, then and now.

“It really has changed, hasn’t it?” he says when he considers his most famous role, that of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma, in director Richard Attenborough’s 1982 Oscar-winning film. “There was no blue screen in Gandhi. All those people at the funeral were there. It was the last of the great non-CGI epics.”

Which is not to say playing the villain in a mammoth action film is all fakery. The scale of Prince of Persia’s Moroccan set still impressed him. “It was massive... Massive! I mean, we’re out in Morocco in the desert with huge sets and hundreds of extras and camels and horses and swordfights and battles.”

But that was then. As we spoke at the Toronto International Film Festival, Kingsley was preparing for the second half of the film’s production, and it would involve all sorts of acting head games. He was off to the soundstages of Britain’s legendary Pinewood Studios, where he’d be working “with lots and lots of blue screen.”

Developed in Montreal at Ubisoft, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was one of the most critically praised videogames ever, spawning a massive franchise, including a new title — Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands — to be released this month.

Ben Kingsley (left) seems agreeable
enough alongside Jake Gyllenhaal
(centre) and Richard Coyle

The movie, which incorporates elements from the original game and its sequels, stars a pumped-up Jake Gyllenhaal as Prince Dastan, a noble accused of murdering his adoptive father King Sharaman. The real murderer is scheming Nizam (Kingsley), whose ascent to the throne of Persia is small potatoes alongside his real plan — to acquire a dagger which holds the Sands of Time, an artifact of the gods that allows its owner to control time and rule the world.

Prince Dastan is thus charged to wrest the dagger from Nizam’s control and return it to the Secret Guardian Temple where it belongs — with the lovely Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) by his side.

Got all that? For Kingsley, keeping the plot points straight isn’t the only problem. “My dilemma is how can I make something out of nothing? It doesn’t matter what the source is. It’s just print on the page. How can I make something on the screen that is a human being?”

He did have role models in the form of old friends who’ve gone “blue screen” on him — including his old Royal Shakespeare Company castmate Patrick Stewart (a.k.a. Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Picard and The X-Men’s Professor Xavier).

“If the conditions are right, you can hope to bring [Shakespearean] skills to the material,” Kingsley says. “Jerry [Bruckheimer, the producer] and the wonderful [director] Mike Newell in Prince of Persia have allowed the film to breathe. Of course, it’s going to have great visual effects. Of course, it’s going to have great action sequences. But they’ve also allowed it to be character-driven. And because it’s character-driven, we can really breathe life into the characters.”

Shooting opposite hot young actors has become a normal working condition for Kingsley of late, with Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia, Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island and British “It” boy Jim Sturgess in Fifty Dead Men Walking.

“Young actors are so brave,” he says. “They are the poets of the 21st century in the best sense. I love to be around that energy...tapping into some mythology and the urge to tell a story.”

He’s especially proud his own sons, Edmund, 27, and Ferdinand, 21, have entered the family business.

“I love them dearly and see their workshops. I went to RADA [the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] when Eddie was there and I went to Guildhall when Ferdinand was there. And I watched Ferdie’s Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and found it intensely moving.”

Of course, the Kingsley boys’ life with Shakespeare is far removed from the realities of movie-star life that engulf Gyllenhaal and DiCaprio. Having seen how it affects those stars, “celebrity” is a word that rankles Kingsley.

“I think celebrity is a strange word,” he says. “By definition it means one who is celebrated. An employee is employed, an interviewee is one who is interviewed, and a celebrity is celebrated. But it’s become reversed. A celebrity is lampooned, leered at, and debased, sneered at, trivialized. It’s ludicrous.

“I think in order to stay healthy, you have to detach from that as an actor — step back and not be constantly on the laptop wondering what the last blogger said. It’s death.”

Jim Slotek writes for the Toronto Sun.


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