Ben Kingsley brings precision to men who expect to be taken seriously. We admire the control, but his scenes with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Wonder Man make us value his warmth just as much.
Fi1m perspective
In The Thursday Murder Club (2025), Ben Kingsley's Ibrahim keeps the files and corrects other people's grammar. He is a psychiatrist, and Kingsley makes that attention to detail feel like an old professional habit. Alongside Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Celia Imrie, he seems comfortable enough to let a small contribution count. We enjoy their company, though Chris Columbus gives them a murder mystery that does too little to earn our interest. Kingsley is worth watching here; the film is harder to recommend.
His breakthrough as the title character in Gandhi (1982) depended on restraint. As Itzhak Stern in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), he brought quiet intelligence to a supporting part. Don Logan, the volatile gangster of Sexy Beast (2000), gives his intensity a much less reassuring purpose. There is a risk in such deliberate acting: the precision can become mannered, and we can start noticing the technique before the person. That is the reservation worth keeping, rather than assuming every change of character is an achievement in itself.
Trevor Slattery, introduced in Iron Man 3 (2013), offers a comic use for those actorly habits. In Wonder Man (2026), the pleasure is his friendship with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's Simon Williams. The series takes wanting work and wanting company seriously, and both actors give those ordinary needs enough attention to sustain its modest scale. We were more touched than we expected by Simon and Trevor's friendship, because the affection between two men in a competitive profession is allowed to stand without becoming a joke. Their rapport justifies the time the series spends simply letting them be together.
The limitation is that Wonder Man is too friendly to make its showbusiness satire particularly sharp. That is a caveat we can accept when the performances make the friendship matter this much. The Thursday Murder Club asks its cast to compensate for a less engaging story, and their ease together cannot supply the missing interest in the murder. For Kingsley in generous company, start with Wonder Man; expect Hollywood to emerge largely unharmed.
Biography
Sir Ben Kingsley is an English actor. Born Krishna Pandit Bhanji on 31 December 1943 in Snainton, North Riding of Yorkshire, he trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1967 and appeared mainly on stage for the next 15 years.
He is known for his title role in Gandhi (1982), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor and a BAFTA, and for his performance as Itzhak Stern in Schindler's List (1993). He has also appeared in films including Sexy Beast (2000), Hugo (2011) and Iron Man 3 (2013), and reprised the role of Trevor Slattery in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) and the series Wonder Man (2026). In 2025 he played Ibrahim Arif in The Thursday Murder Club.
Kingsley was appointed Knight Bachelor in 2002 for services to the British film industry.
