Rory Kinnear on Tom Bombadil, losing his father, and challenges of the Bond franchise

“I like to do things I haven’t done before,” he tells me over coffee in a Soho hotel. “From doing big action films to studio sitcoms, to television dramas to Shakespeare. But I’ve never done a fantasy thing before. I’ve never really understood it – it’s never been my bag.”

Kinnear had met the series’ showrunners and they had explained the character to him. “I told my partner [actor Pandora Colin, with whom he has two children] and she said ‘He’s the best character in the whole book’, so I went away and read the chapters he appears in and thought he seemed really interesting. He has a quite jovial positivity, but there is this notion that he has seen all of life and everything that has gone before – and in that way has a sense of everything that will happen in the future as well.”

Apart from the large, bushy beard, there are a few other differences between Bombadil and Kinnear. Bombadil is described by Tolkien as being “older than the old”, while Kinnear is 46; Bombadil lives in Middle-earth while Kinnear lives in London. But what they both do share, according to Kinnear, is that they are both “phlegmatic about the small things in life and not particularly easily stressed or flustered by too much”. This, in Kinnear’s childhood and in more recent years during the Covid pandemic, has clearly proved an invaluable skill.

Born in 1978, Kinnear grew up in Twickenham, south-west London, with two older sisters and parents who were both actors. His mother Carmel Cryan was in EastEnders, while his father was the comic actor Roy Kinnear, famous for his appearances in the satirical '60s sketch show That Was the Week That Was and as Veruca Salt’s dad in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). As a boy, Rory would go to see his dad record shows such as Blankety Blank and be introduced to the likes of Les Dawson (“I was a huge fan”), Sooty and Roland Rat.

It was a fun childhood – Kinnear recalls he “liked books and sport and mucking about”. However, Roy Kinnear’s final shoot changed everything. In the summer of 1988, when Rory was 10 years old, his father died after falling from a horse in Spain while filming a stunt for The Return of the Musketeers. “It forms how you look at life,” he says now of the impact it had on him. “I remember about a year after he died, watching one of his TV shows and getting that pain and ache of missing someone.” I share that I have friends who also lost a parent at a young age, and they were all in some way damaged by the death. This, it seems, was something that worried Kinnear at the time.

“I was desperate for his story to not ruin my life,” he says. “I knew that I had a comfortable enough life. I had so many things in which I had won the lottery. I had all the best groundwork for dealing with it – a loving family, a supportive network of friends and a school that made sure that I was all right.”

And so he kept going. Kinnear attended St Paul’s School in west London and then read English at Balliol College, Oxford, before going on to train at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. “I always really loved acting, because people said I was good at it. I had an instinct for it and I enjoyed the showing-off element of it.”

Viewed from the outside, Kinnear’s career trajectory seems to have been effortless – working with such theatrical luminaries as Trevor Nunn, Nicholas Hytner and Gregory Doran before landing roles in television dramas, such as Russell T Davies’s Years and Years and comedies like Count Arthur Strong. I wonder, did it feel as easy to him at the time?

“It definitely doesn’t feel like I’ve dragged myself up,” he concedes. And in an industry where it can be about who you know – and as the son of two established actors – does he think he has benefited from nepotism? “I was aware that if people wanted to interview me [early in my career] it was because of that,” he says. “But I don’t think it was getting me jobs.”

If there is one role that did bring Kinnear global recognition, it was that of MI6 chief of staff Bill Tanner in the last four Bond films. Being in a franchise so huge and beloved was, he says, something of a learning curve.

“You don’t get a script, so you have no idea what your role is,” he reveals. “I remember the first day that I was filming with Judi Dench and just before going for a take thinking, ‘F**king hell, everyone will watch this…’ and I immediately f**ked up the take. You have to try and park all the outside noise.”

He’s now more confident on big sets – and, following his father’s accident, one subject which Kinnear is always happy to speak about is safety in filming. “On set people can feel squeezed by the pressures of time and money to do things which they’re not fully sure have been thought through,” he says. “So that’s something that I like to speak out on. I will always put my hand up and say I don’t feel happy doing something. It’s so that everyone gets the message that the worst can happen – no shot is worth what happened to me.”

Kinnear has lived through some of the worst things that can happen, losing his father as a young boy and one of his sisters, Karina, during the pandemic (which inspired him to pen blistering critiques of the Conservative government’s handling of the crisis in The Guardian). But, he tells me, he “remains a very optimistic, positive person”, who still sees his late father in dreams 36 years after his death. “I am able to go into that imagined dream landscape and have a hug from him and talk with him,” he says. “It’s a wonderful thing, what we are able as humans to do with our imaginative life.”

It’s a power that Kinnear also credits to the fantasy worlds of writers like JRR Tolkien – even if, as he admits, he’s not a fantasy fan, he now believes he knows why The Lord of the Rings has remained so popular for so long.

“I think it’s because Tolkien’s stories offer worlds that are so different from our own, but familiar enough to give a sense of comfort and continuity,” he suggests. “They provide escape and essentially that is art: it can provide escape, or it can provide reflection. And sometimes it provides both.”

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