“There is absolutely nothing wrong with having no hair and a big oval face, thank you very much!” Rory Kinnear is on a mission to let everyone know how great it is to be bald. He is “evangelical” about it, he says. The actor, perhaps best known for playing M’s chief of staff Bill Tanner in the four most recent Bond films, is a proudly bald man. (He says some kind things about my hairless scalp, too.) “Everyone should see losing their hair less as the descent into ageing, and more as a passing into a phase of self-enlightenment,” Kinnear says.
He’s never been tempted to have implants, or wear a wig? Isn’t that what famous actors in their late 40s do? He rolls his eyes. “I congratulate everyone who is on the brink of baldness. When some might see that as the time to thread, or saw open, or whatever the latest surgery techniques are, I say no. I understand that people have all kinds of attitudes to their appearance and it can be very complicated, but I am really keen that everyone is OK with it.”
The only downside of hair loss for Kinnear is having to wear a hat in the summer to avoid burning. There is indeed a well-worn baseball cap to his left on the sofa of the central London hotel where we meet. I had wondered if it was an actorly disguise to throw on while walking through Soho, but after spending time with him, Kinnear, 46, doesn’t really seem like that kind of person. He is dressed sensibly – polo shirt, chinos, slightly battered trainers; shall we say extreme dadcore? – answers questions considerately and eloquently, asks a fair few of his own, and is prone to self-deprecation. When I mention the “big productions” he’s been involved with, he fakes surprise that I’m referring to the Bond films. “Oh, that! I thought you were referring to my work at the Plymouth Theatre Royal in The Tempest with Richard Briers,” he shoots back.
The son of actors Roy Kinnear and Carmel Cryan, he attended Balliol College, Oxford, and later Lamda. His early career was largely on stage, but he is now a TV and film staple, with credits including Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, Years and Years, Alex Garland’s eerie horror Men and as Winston Churchill in Guy Ritchie’s second world war romp The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Despite his real-life affability, he has carved out a niche for playing difficult or unlikable characters. In Southcliffe (“The most harrowing drama on TV”), he played a troubled reporter returning to his home town after a tragedy. In the first ever episode of Black Mirror, he played a spineless prime minister blackmailed into having sex with a pig, while in Sarah Solemani’s Ridley Road he starred as slippery fascist leader Colin Jordan.
Kinnear’s next appearance will be in the second season of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. He’s playing Tom Bombadil, a mysterious, magical, much-beloved character from JRR Tolkien’s classic, but one never before seen on screen. Viewed by Tolkien as a personification of nature, and the oldest being in Middle-earth, Bombadil doesn’t intervene in any of the goings-on in the books. Having been around since the dawn of time, he’s above the petty notions of good and evil.
That makes him a tricky character to adapt. Neither Ralph Bakshi, director of the 1978 animated retelling of the story, nor Peter Jackson, the film-maker behind the multi-Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, thought him worthy of inclusion in their versions. Bakshi said Bombadil “didn’t move the story along”, a view shared by Jackson. Even JD Payne, co-showrunner of The Rings of Power, told Vanity Fair that the character was “anti-dramatic … the characters kind of just go there [to Bombadil’s home] and hang out for a while, and Tom drops some knowledge on them.”
What drew Kinnear to a character so inconsequential no director ever wanted to go near him before? His partner, it turns out. Kinnear had been approached by the producers of the series in late 2022 about joining the cast. But having never read the books or seen any adaptations, he was in the dark about the significance of the character. He got off the phone and went downstairs to tell his partner, fellow actor Pandora Colin, about some character called Tom Bombadil.
“She looked at me and said: ‘You’re kidding?’” he recalls. “It’s her favourite part of the books. I usually like her taste, so I thought I’d better read them and start preparing. It was mainly from her reaction that I was interested. Inconsequential, dramatically, as Tom may be, he’s obviously left an impression on fans.”
The Rings of Power takes place during the Second Age, centuries before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and plays fast and loose with the lore so sacred to Tolkien heads. Bombadil’s appearance in the show is not based on anything Tolkien himself wrote, meaning the showrunners can pretty much do whatever they like with him. What we do know is that Bombadil will encounter the Stranger – a character very likely to be outed as Gandalf the Grey – and help him fulfil his true purpose. It isn’t possible to give more than that away: only four of the eight episodes were available to preview, in keeping with a show whose writers’ room reportedly had a fingerprint scanner and security guard sitting outside.
How does Kinnear deal with the secrecy on such big productions? “On The Rings of Power, and on Bond, there’s nothing in my emails that would be searchable if you were snooping. Scripts for Bond arrive in taxis, nothing is sent digitally. But once you’re in person people are a lot more open. And it’s all understandable when you consider people try to fly drones over sets, or take long-lens photographs.”
Reaction to the first series of Rings of Power bordered on hysterical, whether it was Tolkien scholars crying sacrilege, anti-Amazon folk objecting to the company’s association and giant sums of money involved (the budget was rumoured to be about $450m) or those delicate souls who needed smelling salts at the sight of an elf or dwarf being portrayed by a Black person. The series was heavily “review-bombed” (the practice of mass publishing negative reviews to tank a film or TV show’s rating on sites such as Rotten Tomatoes), so much so that Amazon suspended reviews on its own platform. It’s quite an environment to be walking into, but none of this particularly bothers Kinnear. As with most things, his approach appears to be entirely sensible.
“It reminds me of my first day on Quantum of Solace,” he says. “I was about to do a take with Judi – Dame Judi Dench, I mean – and we were walking across a hallway. A thought went into my mind: ‘Everyone is going to see this.’ I immediately messed it up and couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. What an amazing time to have that thought. And why hadn’t I had it before? They were already quite popular films. It’s not as if we were going to chuck it out and hope it found an audience. It’s similar with The Rings of Power. People are going to watch it. You have to recognise that and do your job well.”
Indeed, for all the negative online chatter, Rings of Power is Prime Video’s most watched show ever, with more than 100 million viewers worldwide. Kinnear is sanguine about the discourse around it; however many people are commenting, there are more just simply watching.
“I can be well aware of what other people have said in the bubblespheres about a show, and then watch it, and none of that have any impact on my enjoyment of the show,” he says. “As long as the noise doesn’t put people off watching something altogether, which can happen, that attendant noise just creates more buzz, which brings more people to it anyway.
“And for every force there is an opposite. You could say that the opinion on TV shows and particularly theatre being held by three or four, normally white, men, throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s was no good either. You could say social media chatter is the democratisation of opinion.”
One project of Kinnear’s that proves his point is Bank of Dave, Netflix’s film about real-life Burnley businessman Dave Fishwick, who tried to set up his own equitable bank to help his community. Reviews were middling , but it became a word-of-mouth smash. Kinnear has filmed the sequel and it will be released in January. Another project in the bag with a similar campaigning spirit is Toxic Town, a four-part series written by Jack Thorne and due later this year, which tells the story of the Corby toxic waste case, one of the UK’s biggest environmental scandals. Both projects are part of a trend of dramas shining a light on real-world injustices and connecting with audiences in a way that, as with the hugely successful Mr Bates vs the Post Office, can help bring about actual change.
Starring in Bank of Dave and Toxic Town in such quick succession is mere coincidence, says Kinnear, not part of some grand plan to become a champion of the people. “People have to write them in the first place, and Jack Thorne has form in this area. A lot of his writing career has been about injustices faced by disabled people and maybe that’s why they were led to me,” he adds, referring to his sister Karina, who was disabled from birth and died of coronavirus in 2020. “But I don’t think so, I’m not seeking this work out. They are both just projects that have a resonance that chimes with me. I wanted to be involved.”
Although, with some affecting personal journalism for the Guardian in recent years – notably one piece about his anger at having to bury his sister on the same day one of the Downing Street lockdown parties took place – he perhaps has more power than he might think. Or at least has a gift for calmly articulating the public mood. I ask if he might become more involved in campaigning for social care reform, which he has also written powerfully about, perhaps becoming a James Timpson figure in that arena. He winces gently and stresses that no, he’s “fundamentally an actor”, and that he’s wary of it seeming as if he’s talking on behalf of people who would prefer to have a microphone or dictaphone put in front of them.
Still, he will assist where he can. “Just walking down the street, you will see lots of people with visible disabilities, let alone the people with invisible ones. So unless the rest of us are there to give support, to give voice to and advocate for those people, it’s easy for politicians to ignore. It takes an awful lot of time and effort to look after someone, or to be looked after or to advocate for yourself, let alone try to bring about change in the system. If you just leave it to the people who it directly impacts, then there just isn’t the time in the day for them to lead a campaign as well as everything else they have to do.”
Even if he isn’t ready to throw himself into social justice campaigning, Kinnear still has more than enough in his calendar. As well as Toxic Town and the Bank of Dave sequel, he will appear as Mozart’s patron Joseph II in a small-screen version of Amadeus, and of course there’s the potential for more Rings of Power. While he hadn’t read any fantasy fiction before swotting up on The Lord of the Rings – he’s more of a James Joyce man – he admits he can now see the appeal, noting that the best fantasy holds up a mirror to our world. Could this newfound love of Tolkien spark a midlife diversion? Is Kinnear about to enter his nerd era?
“It hasn’t started yet,” he says. “But who knows? I got into opera in my 30s, listening, then watching and then even directing some. Then I got more into cricket in my 40s. Maybe my 50s, fast approaching, will be my fantasy decade? Perhaps as I approach my own shuffling off, I will need something to help me escape.”
Season two of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is available on Amazon Prime from 29 August.