Rory Kinnear

Born on February 17, 1978 in Hammersmith (London), Rory Michael Kinnear –full name of the interpreter– comes from a family dedicated to acting, since both his father, Roy Kinnear , and his mother, Carmel Cryan, played this profession, both successfully, and he had Michael Williams ( Henry V ) as godfather at his christening. It is not surprising that at the age of five he began his activity in show business, as one of the presenters of “Maths Counts”, an educational television program. When he was ten, his mother died after falling from a horse on the set of The Return of the Musketeers in Spain.. “Every time I work, I have a colleague who tells me a good story about my father. I’m lucky he wasn’t a jerk,” he recalls.

After graduating in Philology from Balliol College, Oxford – where he had Rosamund Pike as a partner – he studied acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Rory Kinnear began his journey in the theater from the year 2000, achieving enormous prestige, which was consolidated in 2014, when he won the Olivier Award for Best Actor, for playing Iago, in a production of the National Theater of “Othello”. . He combined the tables with numerous roles in British series, although on the small screen he triumphed above all as Denis Thatcher, husband of the protagonist in the telefilm Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley, which reconstructed the youth of the famous conservative politician.

On the big screen, Rory Kinnear made his debut as Bill Tanner, MI6 chief of staff and right-hand man to the boss, M, in Quantum of Solace , the second of the James Bond installments starring Daniel Craig. He repeated in the following,  Skyfall , Specter and No time to die . He had known the actress who played M, Judi Dench , since her childhood, as she was the widow of her godfather, the aforementioned Williams. It is perhaps the actor’s most internationally recognizable work, along with the first chapter of the series on the dangers of new technologies Black Mirror ., entitled “The National Anthem”, where he gave life to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, blackmailed by a guy who asks him to have sex with a pig, after kidnapping the princess.

The Skyfall writer , John Logan , had hit it off with him, so he went to see him at the theater. He remembered calling him when he was preparing the series Penny Dreadful , where he offered her the role of the creature created by Dr. Frankenstein. “I was amazed at his ability to reinvent iconic 19th century literary characters with great humanity. He wakes up at four in the morning to write; if I did it, he wouldn’t write anything, he would make me furious. But there’s something contagious about someone with such an appetite for his art. You wait for something to rub off on you,” confesses Rory Kinnear. Logan was so pleased with his work that he also recruited him for the sequel, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels., where he gave life to Dr. Peter Craft, a German pediatrician and leader of a mysterious organization. “He offered me the role in an email with the subject” no makeup “, which caught my attention, because my other role required hours of characterization.”

On his first date with the also actress Pandora Collins, they passed by some children who were selling used clothes. “I bought some children’s wellies for when we had children and I kept them.” Some time later they got married, and had two children, Riley and Hope, who used them. “I am thankful that despite my success I can still enjoy a certain level of anonymity, which allows me to do things like take my daughter to her first soccer game.”

In recent times, Rory Kinnear has caught the eye of one of his country’s most highly regarded filmmakers, Mike Leigh , who offered him the role of radical agitator, Henry Hunt, in The Peterloo Tragedy . He has also been the Russian diplomat Panin, the protagonist’s foreign minister, in Catherine the Great , and the financial adviser Stephen Lyons, older brother of the protagonist family in Years and Years .