So it starts in that grief, and post-trauma, and I think it’s reflecting on what trauma does to the way that one person sees the world. “It’s a portrait of men through the eyes of a woman who’s just suffered a traumatic event because of what we see to be an abusive relationship. “It’d be a little bit too simplistic to say: ‘Gosh, aren’t men bad?’ I don’t think that’s what it’s doing,” he insists. But although both institutions have seldom been far from the headlines in recent years as agencies of an out-of-control patriarchy, Kinnear is loth to pin the film down to any one political message. Among them are a priest and a policeman, the very people to whom women in danger are most likely to run. Kinnear’s co-star in the film is Jessie Buckley, who plays Harper, a woman haunted by the fallout from an abusive marriage, who seeks sanctuary in an idyllic Cotswolds hideaway, only to find it besieged by personifications of her worst nightmares. “Then I walked into a makeup truck on the set for Our Flag Means Death and there was my skull, sent to haunt me again.” For Men, there were several such trucks, draped with wigs and prosthetics. Among other things, it meant being stalked by his own 3D printed skull, through a succession of makeup trucks. Immediately after Men, he hopped over to the US for a comedy series, Our Flag Means Death, in which he again played twins. In Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s black comedy Inside No 9, he was a Shakespearean pair of long-lost twin brothers.
It’s quite laborious, but also fun.”Īs “the Creature”, in one episode of the cult horror series Penny Dreadful, he played three versions of himself in a padded cell – “just me and Eva Green and no yellow contact lenses, which was nice, because it meant I could actually see her”. “Weirdly,” he says, “I’ve now done multiple multiple versions of myself in a scene it was my fourth time doing it, which is an odd niche to have found oneself in, but it means I sort of know the score now. It’s all in a day’s work for one of the UK’s most versatile actors. But it also places a lot of limitations on you: like you can’t stray over there, because that will cost us another 20 grand in post-production.” We’d do the scene five ways and I’d only be playing one of the characters. “It was basically a question of camera angles and having to stand in certain places, with five stand-ins for the characters that I was playing, all of whom were dressed similarly and aged similarly. How is that even possible? “It was quite lo-fi actually,” he says. Kinnear plays no fewer than eight men in the film, a sleight of hand, body and face that culminates in a pub scene with five of them drinking together at the bar.