Rory Kinnear is a 44-year-old actor who has covered a lot of ground in the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game. While many actors would be chuffed to take these roles, they are only the tip of Kinnear's acting iceberg.
Only a few actors can claim to be accountable for a scene that has been burned onto our retinas and never to be forgotten, no matter how hard we try. For Rory Kinnear, that scene is in the very first installment of this disturbing dystopian anthology series, where he plays a Prime Minister forced into doing the dirty with a pig on live television to save a royal hostage victim. It's an exhausting, cannot-look-away performance.
In the gothic horror drama Penny Dreadful, Kinnear received the best supporting actor award at the Satellite Awards. He was menacing but sympathetic, understated but devastation. In the show's spinoff series, City of Angels, he played Nazi Dr Peter Craft, who begins as a character but grows into a villain.
For his role as tortured, violent father Bob Oswald in Broken, another Best Supporting Actor Award (this time at the British Independent Film Awards) was presented. The role demonstrates his ability to be frightening in the most ordinary situations.
Kinnear's back catalogue isn't all doom and gloom: he's done a surprising amount of comedy. As sitcoms go, Kinnear is a welcome surprise as Michael, the pleasingly funny butt of the jokes.
In HBO's pirate sitcom Our Flag Means Death, Sean, a charming but-blackmailing bowling alley employee, is well-known among his peers. In the 2015 film Man Up: The Unknown,
Over the years, he has brought a wide range of public figures to life, including Lord Lucan in the ITV drama Lucan, music businessman Brian Epstein in the John Lennon biopic Lennon Naked, controversial Downing Street figure Craig Oliver in Brexit: The Uncivil War, and Denis Thatcher in Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley
In Netflix's Bank of Dave, a true story about a minibus salesman who decides to start a community bank, he depicted an entirely different type of real-life character — Burnley businessman Dave Fishwick.
Kinnear was able to take on numerous roles in the British horror film Men, in which he played a remote widowed lady Harper (Jessie Buckley) on a remote village retreat last year:
It's quite astonishing that his roles in Men, Bank of Dave, and Our Flag Means Death all came within a year of each other. Who knows what's next for Rory Kinnear? Your guess is equally as good as ours.