Rory Kinnear: 'I was given the big picture early' — on grief, acting and set safety

Rory Kinnear's father, the comic actor Roy Kinnear, died at 54 in 1988 after being thrown from a horse while filming The Return of the Musketeers — and the family's negligence suit against producer Pierre Spengler, director Richard Lester and Falcon Films ended in an award of £650,000 in damages plus costs. The actor, now 48, has laid out the circumstances in a new interview that ranges from set safety to James Graham's play The Standard of Living, in which he plays John Maynard Keynes at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London.

The circumstances of Roy's death, Rory says, were avoidable. "He shouldn't have been on the horse. The stuntmen refused to do it," he said. "It was a cobbled bridge in Spain. Someone said 'You can't put horses on cobbled bridges, what are you doing?'" The production, at risk of losing a day's shooting, put sand down and used the actors instead. Roy's unsent letter, found by Rory's mother, the actor Carmel Cryan, read: "Just off to do a scene that the stuntmen said was too dangerous to do, so wish me good luck." Kinnear adds that the death was also a hospital failure: Roy broke his pelvis and "just needed a blood transfusion."

What does the death change for the industry?

Not enough, according to Kinnear. He assumed film-set safety would have been revolutionised since 1988; he discovered it has not. He is a patron of the Mark Milsome Foundation, named after the award-winning cameraman killed in 2017 when a car stunt went wrong on the Netflix and BBC drama Black Earth Rising. "The industry's predicated on the hope of the worst not happening rather than ensuring that the worst is eliminated," he said. Cast and crew still face pressure to cut corners — he estimates it has happened to him "four or five times", including on a biblical epic shot in the desert, where his request for riding lessons was met with "Mate, it's your first job, fucking wind your neck in." Producers relented only when he told them how his father died. "No shot is worth anything as important as human life. None of it is worth what happened to me."

A career built on range

Kinnear is currently playing posh on three fronts: press attaché Graham Anderson in the BBC's cold-war comedy thriller Honey (an unofficial Killing Eve prequel), a neurologist in the Parkinson's film Onwards and Sideways, and Keynes in James Graham's The Standard of Living — a performance as the Eton-educated, ethically driven economist who married a prima ballerina and helped facilitate the NHS that the interviewer calls "fabulously nuanced". "I really like acting," Kinnear says. His screen roster spans Bill Tanner, chief of staff in four Bond films — three opposite Judi Dench's M — Lord Lucan for ITV, Tory prime minister Nicol Trowbridge in Netflix's The Diplomat, Dave Fishwick in Bank of Dave, and the bicycle courier in Russell T Davies's Years and Years. He played Hamlet at the National Theatre by his early 30s, wrote the play The Herd, and directed the world premiere of Ryan Wigglesworth's opera A Winter's Tale in 2017. He had not watched Bond films before joining the franchise: "It wasn't something I watched. But I've enjoyed being in them, and it's a nice night out to see the premiere!"

Dench's husband, Michael Williams, was his godfather and a close friend of Roy's from their RSC days. Dench's recent announcement that her sight is too poor for her to work drew praise for her recall: Kinnear and she played a game in which he gave her a Shakespeare line and she supplied the next — even from roles she had not played.

Grief as inheritance

Kinnear was 10 when Roy died. His grief arrived late — "By the time I was 16, I was beginning to be sad" — and with anger at the death's stupidity. His paternal grandfather, the Scottish rugby international Roy Kinnear Sr, died at 38 in 1942 during an RAF match; Roy, then eight, and his sister were ordered not to mention their father. Kinnear weeps recounting how the children sat on a train with their mother, forbidden to speak of the death until she finally said: "Since your father died." "I went hand in hand into my grief with his grief," Kinnear says of his father. "What I was going through he had done, and he'd become a lovely man." Both men, he believes, were changed the same way: "He was unmoved by the little stuff because he had been given the big picture early. And I was given the big picture early, too. And that is in some ways a great gift."

Mozart's Dies Irae taught him how to mourn; he learned piano to release emotion because, as he jokes, "It's difficult to blub when you're on the trumpet." After St Paul's, where he won a scholarship, Oxford left him cold — "I felt everyone had inherited the plan" — but Lamda delighted him: "Acting feels like a communal pursuit."

His profoundly disabled sister Karina, who communicated through laughter and loved drums, tambourines, Abba and fast wheelchair rides, died of Covid in 2020, aged 48. He wrote two Guardian pieces about her — one a tribute calling her kindness his anchor, one seared with rage after learning Boris Johnson attended a lockdown party on the day of her socially distanced funeral. Karina politicised him, he says: his mother's life as a caregiver was "at the mercy of the decisions being made elsewhere." He backs Andy Burnham's proposed social care service, cautiously: "At least it's being talked about."

Kinnear lives with actor Pandora Colin — his Diplomat co-star as his on-screen wife — with whom he has shared 20 years, a recent civil partnership and two children, aged 15 and 12. The question Graham's play poses stays with him: "What is a good life?"