Ben Kingsley names the single biggest regret of his career: “To this day”
One of the most impressive things about the way Marvel movies have managed to take over the cinematic landscape over the last couple of decades is not just the tens of billions made at the box office, but the standard of actors they manage to get involved; from Ian McKellen to Patrick Stewart to one of the best to ever emerge from the UK, Ben Kingsley.
To have that calibre of actor willing to don latex and capes and act opposite green screens is probably something to do with the enormous budget involved, but it’s also recognition that some of these films are genuinely of the highest quality, and they’re certainly where the audiences go; the four Avengers movies alone have grossed close to $10bn.
Kingsley, who was an Oscar winner as far back as 1982 for the historical epic Ghandi, first stepped into the world of superheroes in 2013 when he took on the role of Trevor Slattery, also known as ‘The Mandarin’ in Iron Man 3 opposite Robert Downey Jr, a part he has now played on four different occasions, including in 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
He’s also playing Slattery in the Disney Plus series Wonder Man, alongside another Hollywood great in Joe Pantoliano. The story of Wonder Man, who was originally a villain in the Avengers world, is now a Hollywood actor who finds he has superpowers. Kingsley plays another washed-up actor who also happens to be a shadowy member of the Department of Damage Control, protecting humans from any superpower-related mishaps.
It’s a part that shows the Royal Shakespeare Company-trained Kingsley can still genre-hop with the best of them into his seventies, having played terrifying gangsters, chess teachers, magicians, a driving instructor and most recently an ageing amateur detective in Netflix’s Thursday Murder Club.
One of his most famous roles remains that of Holocaust survivor and accountant Itzhak Stern in Steven Spielberg’s harrowing, multi-Oscar-winning Schindler’s List in 1993, a film that saw him alongside Liam Neeson in the face of remorseless Nazi SS officers, including one played by Ralph Fiennes. Kingsley won a Bafta nomination for his work on the film, but according to an interview with The People’s Movies, you might think he would have taken a character on the other side of the fence instead.
Back in 2013, as he prepared to start work on his first Marvel movie, he spoke about the roles he hadn’t managed to play in his five decade career explaining: “To this day, I still regret never having had an opportunity to portray a commanding officer in uniform with the responsibility that goes under him and having to face a crushingly difficult decision”.
He added, “I did have an opportunity to have dinner next to (decorated British Army officer) General Sir Michael Jackson, and I had the temerity to say, ‘You and I have one thing in common.’ He raised these amazing eyebrows and said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Nobody knows what you and I do for a living. They don’t know what the soldier does. They don’t know what the actor does. They’re two areas of great mystery, for very different reasons.’”
Kingsley’s regret finally came to a close in 2018 as the veteran actor portrayed a character on the other side of the atrocities of World War II in Operation Finale. He played former SS officer Adolf Eichmann, captured by Israeli forces and taken to Jerusalem in order to face charges of crimes against humanity in a drama-thriller opposite Oscar Isaac.
