Kaleem Aftab discovers the truth about Ben Kingsley's wig out in The Wackness
eeing Gandhi with crazy hair is even
weirder than watching 64-year-old Sir
Ben Kingsley snog 22-year-old Mary Kate Olsen. But fear not. the knighted actor hasn‘t had some innovative hair treatment to unpolish his famously shiny snooker ball, he’s simply wearing a wonderful scarecrow-style wig in Jonathan Levine’s coming-of—age drama The MIC/mess.
Whereas it was easy to dismiss the brushed- back boot polish that he sported in Schindler's List, this wig almost steals the show from right above him. The wiry angles the faux mop weaves seem impossible and are distracting as Kingsley plays a psychiatrist who swaps advice with a teenage dope dealer in return for some free narcotics.
So when he clasps my hand at a swanky London hotel, I’m glad to see the light is bouncing cinematically from his pate in the same familiar way it does in Gandhi, Sexy Beast and more recently. Elegy.
Once we’ve sat down and The Mic/mess star has courteoust poured us both a still water, I can’t help but ask him about his new hairdresser. ‘I needed the wig to play Squires,’ he says. ‘If I were to draw a lightning sketch of the character . . .‘ he begins before springing off at a tangent. ‘lt’s hard to talk about acting and there is a lot of nonsense spoken about acting, but I think I’m becoming something of a portrait artist as an actor because the camera really is portrait, it’s not a great landscape painting, theatre is landscape.‘
10 rue LIST 14—21 Aug 2008
Just as I'm starting to wonder if he is being ironic about actors speaking nonsense about their craft and what this has to do with wigs. Sir Ben adds: ‘I sort of saw Squires with wires coming out of his head, as if the madness couldn’t be
contained in his skull, that he had a halo of
unruly hair around his head. I put that to Jonathan and he liked the idea. I couldn’t go to him as I was filming Elegy at the time I was preparing for The MIC/mess so he sent a make-up
person over to design something for my head. When I came out of the trailer for the first time wearing a Hawaiian shirt he said. “There he is." I was really touched that the silhouette I presented to him was close to his vision of Squires. I think it‘s important to present a classic silhouette that you can really push into the audience’s memory. onto their retina or their perception. That is why I don't like to change my clothes very much in a film. I have one or two outfits. Gandhi is one.’