‘I was given the big picture early’: Rory Kinnear on love, drama – and how his father’s death changed his life

At first glance, Rory Kinnear is Mr Normal. Bald head, nice face, wholly unremarkable. As an actor, he’s not one for flashy tricks – no dramatic weight loss or gain, rarely disguising himself with prosthetics or CGI. Yet, somehow, whatever role Kinnear plays, he’s totally different.

So here I am in his dressing room at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London, face to face with the man I’ve just seen on stage, and whose films and TV shows I’ve pored over for the past week, failing to recognise him. For starters, at 6ft, he’s taller than he should be. And more hench. And, actually, hotter.

He laughs, and says he’ll take that. “It’s amazing how many people ask me if I’ve lost weight, and say they thought I’d be smaller. They expect I’ll be just like my dad.” His father, Roy Kinnear, small and squat, was one of the most beloved and talented comic actors of his generation. He died at the age of 54 after being thrown from a horse while filming The Return of the Musketeers in 1988.

As for Rory, 48, he is one of the most beloved and talented actors of his generation full stop. He inhabits roles so subtly, making them his own with the tiniest twitch, pinched smile or throat flutter. While his father tended to play working-class characters, Kinnear is more likely to be cast as upper-middle class, very British, a wee bit constipated. But give him northern working class or solidly middle class and he’s equally brilliant. So for every Lord Lucan (ITV’s Lucan), Bill Tanner (MI6 chief of staff in the James Bond franchise) or Nicol Trowbridge (bombastic Tory prime minister in Netflix thriller The Diplomat), there’s self-made Dave Fishwick (Bank of Dave) or broken investment banker turned bicycle courier in Russell T Davies’s apocalyptic Years and Years.

Today we’re pushing the posh on three fronts. There’s his press attache Graham Anderson in the BBC’s new comedic cold-war spy thriller Honey (an unofficial prequel to Killing Eve); a shockingly matter-of-fact neurologist in the affecting Parkinson’s movie Onwards and Sideways, and the celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes in James Graham’s play The Standard of Living. The first two parts don’t overly tax him, but as the Eton-educated, stiffly bohemian, ethically driven, voracious cottager who ended up marrying a prima ballerina and facilitating the NHS, he is fabulously nuanced. I never thought economics could make me cry.

Kinnear puts the kettle on and makes us tea. “I really like acting,” he tells me. The way he says it, with the whispered intensity of a confession, makes me laugh. What he loves about Graham’s play is that at its heart it has the biggest of questions – what makes for a good life, and how can we ensure most people have the opportunity to have one? It’s something he’s concerned himself with since childhood, though he might not have realised it at the time. “Even before my dad died, people thought I was an unusually oldish soul.” Kinnear says that as a little boy he felt like a 40-year-old. It’s not surprising, looking back.

He was 10 when his father died. His mother, the actor Carmel Cryan, was left to bring up three children, including his profoundly disabled sister Karina. His childhood was split in two – before and after Roy’s death. He tells me about early memories of accompanying his father to child-friendly TV shows on which Roy was guesting. “I went to the recording of Roland Rat with Dad. Enjoyed that. The Sooty Show – enjoyed that, too. Give us a Clue – lovely.” He could see how much his father was adored, and it made him so proud.

After his father died, he got on with life – winning a scholarship to the independent school St Paul’s, excelling in music and acting, and sailing through exams thanks to his photographic memory. He says he felt he was sustained by Roy, who had lost his own father at a young age in the workplace. Kinnear’s paternal grandfather, Roy Sr, was a renowned Scottish rugby player, who represented Britain at both union and league. In 1942, at the age of 38, Roy Sr died during a match while playing for the RAF.

Did Roy, who was eight when Roy Sr died, ever talk about his father? “I remember him talking about him once, and he welled up.” A few years ago, Kinnear discovered how different it had been for his father after Roy Sr died, when his aunt told him that they were ordered not to discuss it. “My dad and his sister, my aunt, didn’t see my granny for two weeks because she was organising the funeral and then they were told you’re going to meet your mum at the station and then go back up to Scotland from Wigan to start a new life. And they were told: ‘Don’t mention your dad, don’t upset your mum.”

Kinnear starts shaking with tears. He looks embarrassed and smiles. “It still makes me cry. And they’re just sitting on the train with my granny, and my dad’s eight and my aunt’s 10, and they’re looking out of the window trying not to mention anything. Then after about half an hour my granny goes: ‘So how have you all been since …’ and stops. And they lean forward: ‘Since what, Mum? Since what?’ And she finally says: ‘Since your father died.’” And that was that. His grandad’s death was done and dusted.

Kinnear’s grief at his own father’s death didn’t hit him for years. “By the time I was 16, I was beginning to be sad.” He was also angry because his father had died in such a stupid, unnecessary way. What went wrong? “He shouldn’t have been on the horse. The stuntmen refused to do it. It was a cobbled bridge in Spain. Someone said ‘You can’t put horses on cobbled bridges, what are you doing?’ They looked as if they were going to lose the day, so it was agreed that they’d just put some sand down and get the actors to do it.”

After his death, Kinnear’s mother discovered a letter that Roy hadn’t had time to send. “He’d written to my mum: ‘Just off to do a scene that the stuntmen said was too dangerous to do, so wish me good luck.’ It was also a hospital fuck-up. He broke his pelvis. He shouldn’t have died. He just needed a blood transfusion.” The family sued producer Pierre Spengler, director Richard Lester and the production company Falcon Films for negligence, and were awarded £650,000 in damages plus costs.

I ask Kinnear if knowing his father had gone through the same thing helped with his grief. He nods. “I went hand in hand into my grief with his grief. I felt supported and still do.” He wipes away a tear. “I’m a blubber,” he says apologetically. It also helped that he knew Roy had emerged from his grieving intact. “What I was going through he had done, and he’d become a lovely man.”

He thinks the tragedies changed them both in the same way. “There was a sense that he was unmoved by the little stuff because he had been given the big picture early. And I was given the big picture early, too. And that is in some ways a great gift.” What counts as the little stuff? “We didn’t sweat about the minutiae, the tedious irritabilities of life.”

Classical music proved a great solace, he says. When he discovered Mozart’s Dies Irae from his Requiem, he also discovered how to mourn. “I couldn’t believe how much it spoke to me.” He had played trumpet since he was four, but now he learned the piano to help to release his emotions. Did the trumpet not do the trick? He laughs. “It’s difficult to blub when you’re on the trumpet. A brass blubber, that would be a great party trick. On the tuba!” I can sense him choreographing the scene in his head as we talk.

He went on to study English literature at the University of Oxford. Did he enjoy it? “I didn’t love it, if I’m honest.” It’s not as if he wasn’t used to privilege. He’d come straight from St Paul’s, after all. But this was different, he says. “Everybody seemed to know what the plan was. I felt everyone had inherited the plan.” What was it? “Be in politics or law or business. And there was also a readiness to accept the historical tropes of the place, whether it be the rivalry between colleges or what you should do on this particular day because it’s been done for 500 years!”

From Oxford, he went to the drama school Lamda (the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art), where his mother had studied, and he couldn’t have been happier. “I realised I love working with other people, I loved having my day structured by someone else, so I instantly knew this is where I should be. You work off other people’s energies. That is what acting is. You are just searching within yourself doing a degree like English, whereas acting feels like a communal pursuit.”

Like Roy, he went from drama school to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), and before long TV opportunities came along. By his early 30s, he had played Hamlet at the National Theatre, hogged the headlines as pig-fucking prime minister Michael Callow in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, and written The Herd, a play about the 21st birthday party of a man with profound disabilities. In 2017, he added another feather to his bow, directing the world premiere of Ryan Wigglesworth’s opera A Winter’s Tale.

He says he’s not quite as work obsessed as he was in his early years, but you wouldn’t know it. In 2023, he joined forces with his real-life partner, the actor Pandora Colin in the Netflix drama The Diplomat: she played his wife, Lydia. He and Colin have been together for 20 years, recently had a civil partnership, and have two children, aged 15 and 12. Colin is the daughter of real-life diplomat David Ormsby-Gore who proposed to Jackie Kennedy (before marrying Colin’s mother) and died from injuries sustained in a car crash when she was only 12.

Kinnear is perhaps best known as Bill Tanner from the Bond films. I know very little about James Bond, I say. Me too, he replies with a grin. “I hadn’t seen Bond films before doing them. It wasn’t something I watched. But I’ve enjoyed being in them, and it’s a nice night out to see the premiere! It’s good fun.” He has been in four Bond films, three of them as chief of staff to Judi Dench’s M.

Is it true that Dench is his godmother? Not quite, he says. “Her husband, Michael [Williams], was my godfather. He and my dad became great mates when they were at the RSC together. I didn’t know him that well before, but when Dad died he really upped his game. Then when I was working on the Bond films with Judi, it was great not to be cowed by the legend that is, and also to be able to have those shared memories.”

He looks at a rotating deluxe Scrabble board in front of us. “She was a big Scrabble player. We played quite a bit.” A couple of days before Kinnear and I meet Dench announced that her sight was now too poor for her to work. Such sad news, he says. “Talk about people who love to act! Also, her extraordinary recall. We used to occasionally play a game where I’d give her a line from Shakespeare and see if she knew the next one. Even from roles she hadn’t played. She just knows the work inside out. I can’t remember a role two months after I’ve finished. It just goes.”

Kinnear loves words. It was obvious when he wrote about Karina for the Guardian after she died from Covid in 2020 aged 48. One piece was a beautiful tribute in which he said her kindness remained his anchor. Another was also beautiful but seared with rage after he discovered that the day he, his mother and younger sister gathered for Karina’s socially distanced funeral, Boris Johnson was indulging in a lockdown party.

What was Karina like? “Oh!” His eyes light up. “She was someone who laughed a lot. And each laugh had a slightly different meaning. As a non-verbal adult, that was her means of communication. She loved noisy things, she loved whacking things. Although her arms were quite stiff she loved to whack down on a drum, and a tambourine. She loved being pushed particularly fast in her wheelchair, and when she was younger she wanted to go on the fastest fairground rides that we were frightened to go on. She would just be laughing her head off as we were screaming.” He smiles through the memories. Throughout the day, he says, the house would be filled with Karina’s music (nursery rhymes and Abba) and when her nurses left after their shift, they would be whistling her songs.

He talks about the heroism of his mother, who not only brought up Karina but also bought a house and turned it into a home for others with profound disabilities. He says Karina politicised him. “I would see that my mum’s life as a principal caregiver was at the mercy of the decisions being made elsewhere.” Does he have confidence in Andy Burnham’s proposed social care service? “Yes, at least it’s being talked about. He’s only doing it because people are crying out for it.”

So much change is needed, he says. Not least in his own industry. He assumed that safety on film sets would have been revolutionised since his father’s death, but he discovered it hasn’t been. He is a patron of the Mark Milsome Foundation, named after the award-winning cameraman killed in 2017 when a car stunt went wrong on the Netflix and BBC drama Black Earth Rising. “The industry’s predicated on the hope of the worst not happening rather than ensuring that the worst is eliminated.” Today, cast and crew are still under pressure to cut corners, he says.

Has that happened to him? “Yay!” he says as if it’s a ridiculous question. And has he resisted the pressure? Yes, he says, but he’s in a stronger position than most. “If someone had the same qualms about safety that I could see, they might not have had the courage to say it or the lifetime experience to know that you can say no.” Has he been asked to compromise his safety more than once? “It’s probably happened four or five times. In one of my first jobs, a biblical epic, we were filming in the desert and they said today we’re going to have you riding at the top of this hill, and I was like: ‘I’m going to need riding lessons.’ They said: ‘The horse will just be walking,’ and I was like: ‘What if the horse starts going faster? I don’t feel comfortable with that.’ And it was like: ‘Mate, it’s your first job, fucking wind your neck in.’”

When he told the producers his father had died riding a horse on location they finally backed down. “I guess I have the cards to play to say no shot is worth anything as important as human life. None of it is worth what happened to me.” So you say what happened to you, not your father? “Yes because I’m standing in front of them and I’ve lived 40 years of this accident affecting my life. I’ve made it work in the best way for me, but both Dad and I would have preferred it not have happened.” Kinnear is a master of understatement.

He found it devastating in the pandemic how disabled people such as Karina were written off; their lives, and deaths, dismissed as insignificant. That’s why he was so keen to write about her. “A lot of her life was missing out on stuff or having things prodded or poked, but she was joyful and remained joyful.” Karina taught him so much, he says. “The most cherished relationships we have are the ones that most surprised us or changed us in a way we didn’t expect. Karina cherished joy despite getting the shitty end of the stick, which is a good lesson for life in itself, but she also made people around her so much happier.”

Kinnear thinks of Roy Sr who he never got to meet, Roy who was only there for his first 10 years and Karina who he knew best. They might have died young, but all three enriched, and continue to enrich, the lives of those around them. It goes back to the issue he’s spent a lifetime pondering. And he asks himself the question one last time. “It’s that thing isn’t it, what is a good life?”