By: debbie lynn elias
New to the world of Marvel and Tony Stark are Sir Ben Kingsley, Guy Pearce and Rebecca Hall, all of whom join the cast of IRON MAN 3 as our hero’s adversaries. Each inexplicably intertwined, it is perhaps Kingsley’s character, The Mandarin, and his riveting performance, that makes this not only the most remarkable, but one of the greatest villains in movie history. With strong visual resemblance to Osama bin Laden but ever cloaked in hooded darkness a la The Emperor in Star Wars, Kingsley’s vocal intonations and demeanor feel like a compilation of the ever present “dark lords” in the world today and an ideal nemesis for IRON MAN.
According to Kingsley, The Mandarin is “[A]ll in the script. Drew Pearce and Shane Black presented us with a wonderful document, and there’s very little straying off the written word. Whenever we do improvise it’s minimal, and just to maybe sharpen one or two ideas that we were playing with on the set, but it’s all there. I do respond to the written word. I love to see it down there on the page, and it was all there. I tried to give The Mandarin, in his political broadcasts, a rather unnerving sense of righteousness and make him almost paternalistic, patriarchal. That’s where the timbre of his delivery comes from, and the weird iconography was there to disconcert and completely scatter any expectations of where he might be coming from. I think the line, ‘You will never see me coming’, sort of voices that unpredictability that he has. It’s a great script. It was a wonderful read, and we stuck very closely to it.
Echoing Kingsley’s sentiment on the script is Iron Man himself, Robert Downey, Jr. whose praise for writer/director Shane Black and co-writer Pearce is endless. “Drew and Shane had a good document. The story is really good. The twists are really good.” However, unlike the ever humble Kingsley, Downey is quick to extol Kingsley’s abilities and contribution to The Mandarin. “Once we let him off the chain, we found that he was a glorious improviser, and a lot of ideas, without giving away his character arc, were just flowing out from what was written.”
Ever important to the IRON MAN franchise is the thoughtfulness with which the story is crafted, the language used, the visuals created and the mindfulness of the impressionable young people that will be watching the films. According to Downey, one of the key elements (and particularly important with the antagonists like The Mandarin) to crafting an IRON MAN script is that ” Even in your character’s transition, there’s something about it that allows the air to be taken out of the darkness that would otherwise be there, maybe.” Kingsley expounds, noting, ” Whatever the context, whatever the scene, there’s always a quest for sincerity, a quest for the genuine, a quest for putting the human dance on the screen. All generations will respond to that. Children do respond to sincerity, and Robert, as a guiding actor through our experience, will always debate, ‘Where is the sincerity in the scene? Where is its heart?’”
Lauding Black on his leadership and creativity, Kingsley is quick to point out, “He has a great attribute as a director; one of many great attributes is that the director will give you the role and then he will let go. This is a wonderful quality that he has. There are some directors lesser in confidence or skill who make the actor feel very uncomfortable because you feel you’re auditioning for them every day, and that’s a terrible feeling on the set. But Shane has this wonderful ability in his own confidence, and his ability to cast a movie to say, ‘There’s your role. I’m just going to film it.’ It’s really good energy to have on the set.”
