Ben Kingsley has one of the great voices. Trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company, it has earned him dozens of awards and a knighthood, but right now it sounds like he just finished cheering his favorite football team to an overtime victory.
“Yes, my voice is going,” rasps Kingsley, who calls from Los Angeles to promote “House of Sand and Fog,” which opened last week. “I have never talked so much about a movie in my entire career. The problem is that I only have one voice, and it’s leaving.”
Why is Kingsley hitting the circuit for “House,” which earned him Golden Globe and Independent Spirit nominations for best actor? Because it’s a sad movie, a difficult-to-market movie, a movie that could get lost amid the glitzier offerings of the holiday season.
“It is a tragedy, and that seems to bring with it connotations that are sad or depressing,” Kingsley acknowledges. “But if you listen to a tragic symphony by Beethoven or an aria by Maria Callas, it’s actually uplifting.”
In the film, Kingsley plays an Iranian colonel named Behrani whose circumstances are drastically reduced when he comes to America. Forced to work two low-paying jobs, he saves enough to buy a modest house, offered for sale cheaply by the government. But it turns out the house was erroneously taken from its owner (Jennifer Connelly), and their struggle over the house, which comes to represent the future for both of them, leads to tragedy.
Kingsley has seen the film with an audience and says he’s gratified by their response.
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“The woman in front of me, who was openly sobbing after the film, came up to me afterward with a huge smile on her face,” Kinglsey says, “which I don’t see as a paradox. It is absolutely the same set of emotions.”
In fact, Kingsley says he experienced the same set of emotions making the film.
“I think I have finally conquered the old need to do too much ‘acting’ on every take,” Kingsley says.
The result is a performance of great purity and force, a performance in which every detail registers.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Kris Karnopp ([email protected])