Rory Kinnear on Playing the Villain with a Thousand Faces in 'Men'

Every so often, an actor stumbles into a cinematic niche, whether it is playing a string of judges or being cast as a teacher over and over again. It's not something that performers want to do, but if you're a character actor, it can happen.

Over the past six years, the British actor has played multiple characters in the same production four different times. He took on a pair of seaworthy twins for Our Flag Means Death and another set of twins for Inside No. 9.

Kinnear's most recent act is perhaps his most impressive. Kinnear plays nine or 10 different characters in Alex Garland's latest movie, Men, each of which he spent time teasing out and developing. Each of Kinnear's characters acts as an increasingly real threat to the sanity and livelihood of Jessie Buckley, who has come to what she thinks is an idyllic country town after the death of her ex- husband. Garland's Men is a film that luxuriates in its layers of naturalism, gender politics, and horror. All of Kinnear's characters are not good.

Kinnear talked about Men, makeup, and whether or not there is an Our Flag Means Death triplet out there. This interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

How was the idea of Men pitched to you?

They wanted you to play all the male parts, but I didn't read it.

That's going to get someone's attention. Playing all those parts had a point, rather than being a sort of variety act or an attempt to show off your acting abilities. I wanted to make sure that it meant something. When Alex and I talked about it, we seemed to get on well, and I could tell that there was more to it than just the audience.

You have played multiple characters in the same project four times in the last six years. Why did you land in that niche? It is a fairly specific one.

I don't know.

The first one was calledPenny Dreadful. Within that, I played the creature from the movie, but within the episode, I was also playing who the creature was before he died. If I recall correctly, he also turned into Satan and Lucifer. All of them were in the same padded cell. It was the first time I did it, and I know that John Logan wrote that episode for me and Eva Green, so maybe there was something that he wanted to see stretched in me.