Sir Ben Kingsley never appeared as himself on the set of Roman Polanski’s upcoming film version of Charles Dickens’ classic novel “Oliver Twist.”
Even when the cameras weren’t rolling, the Oscar-winning British actor chose not to step out of character as Fagin, the seductively wicked leader of a group of youthful pickpockets in 19th-century London.
“I walked in wearing full costume and makeup, greeting all the crew as Fagin,” he says. “Every morning I’d ask the same question of Roman Polanski: ‘Good morning, who are you?’ And he’d say, ‘I’m the director, I’m the director!’ He used to laugh so much at how far I was going.
“I did it for the child actors,” Kingsley says. “I wanted them to feel that I was always there as this man who manipulated their lives. To those children on the set, I was one person and one person only – Fagin – and that’s all they called me. They’d say to me, ‘Hey, Fagin,’ and I’d say, ‘Yes, my dears?’ And they’d grin and go, ‘I quite like you, Fagin. You are all right.’ “That’s what I wanted – I didn’t want them to think of me as an actor.”
Physically, though, it was an ordeal.
“I had to stay bent over for hours,” Kingsley says, “which gave me a backache. I also bent my legs to shuffle around, which hurt my knees, and I kept my prosthetic teeth in, which used to hurt my mouth. Then I had all this glue and stuff on my face to hold my beard, which was very uncomfortable and got terribly itchy.
Ultimately, it was worth it.
“But, when I walked off the set at night, I left Fagin behind,” the actor adds. “You can’t take a character home with you or you’d go mad, at least I would. What I find is that, if I leave the character until the next day’s filming, then I go back and get to jump from me to the character. I love taking that running leap from me to him.”
Kingsley drew on a childhood memory to guide his metamorphosis into the hunchbacked, grimy apparition with matted hair and a cackling voice.
“Fagin reminded me very much of a man that my brother and I used to go to see in Manchester,” he says. “He had a very untidy junk shop in the Shambles on Withy Grove, which sounds very Dickensian. He was a dirty old fellow, with teeth like a horse that were very crooked, and he was wearing three overcoats at the same time, all tied together with rope. I remember my brother asking for a rare Victorian stamp called a ‘Penny Black.’ He looked down and said, in this squeaky voice, ‘You’re asking for the moon.’
“There was my Fagin, this man I saw as a child.”
Kingsley brings a new approach to a character who has often been portrayed as a stereotypically evil Jew who cares little for the homeless boys he lures into a life of crime. He and Polanski worked to strengthen Fagin’s relationship with his gang of young thieves.
“I always thought of him as a very isolated child, perhaps an orphan himself who, in his adult life, surrounds himself with children, which for me has a symmetry,” Kingsley says. “I wanted to give him something audiences could connect with. What Fagin did not have in his childhood leads him, as an adult, to a very odd life with a gang of children, none of whom leave him, however cruel, however mesmerizingly manipulative he is.
“Oliver does tries to run away,” Kingsley concedes, “but even he goes back and says to Fagin at the end, ‘Actually, you were kind to me.’ I hope people might think, ‘Without Fagin in their lives, these children would starve to death, they’d be dead.”‘
Kingsley insists he gave no thought to the controversy created by some previous productions of “Oliver Twist,” especially Alec Guinness’ portrayal of Fagin in David Lean’s 1948 film, condemned by some critics as an anti-Semitic caricature.
Having played several real-life Jewish heroes on the big or small screen – including Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in HBO’s “Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story” and Itzhak Stern in Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” – – Kingsley doubts such allegations will come his way.
“Roman and I never discussed anti-Semitism,” he says, “but perhaps part of why he wanted me in the role was because he is aware that, as an actor, I have dealt with the tribal grief of the Jews. I had a yellow star on three different overcoats in three different films with three different numbers on them.
“It’s a very strange journey I’ve had as an actor, to have those three experiences, not to mention playing Moses,” says Kingsley, a Hindu whose mother was part Jewish. “But, I promise you, any potential controversy surrounding how to play Fagin never entered my head. And Roman left me a very uncluttered avenue to travel in creating the character.”
“Oliver Twist” is set in the 19th century, but Kingsley hopes audiences will see a contemporary parallel in its tale of institutionalized abuse of children.
“Tragically, it hasn’t got any better for a lot of kids across the world,” he says. “The horrors that Dickens wrote about have just migrated from one century to another.”
The Oscar buzz already beginning to surround his performance as Fagin is nothing new for the 61-year-old actor, who earned an Academy Award as best actor for “Gandhi” (1982). He says, however, that his drive to succeed has nothing to do with awards.
“When I started as a young actor at the Royal Shakespeare Company,” he says, “a director told me that I would never play kings or great men, but that I would be very good at playing servants. I thought to myself, ‘How dare you judge me?’ I knew in my heart that one day he’d prove himself utterly wrong.”