Ferdinand Kingsley interview: ‘Yeah, but mum’s dad was totally bald too!’

The day before I’m due to meet Ferdinand Kingsley, actor son of Sir Ben, he sends me a message to introduce himself via Twitter. ‘I’ll try not to be a complete a***hole!’ he quips merrily, for absolutely no reason at all since I hadn’t actually imagined that he would be. Does he normally behave badly during interviews, I query, suddenly hoping rather mean-spiritedly that he does. I can see the ‘thespian heir acts up’ headline already. ‘Oh, yeah, I’m a total moron.’

Sadly, Ferdy Kingsley, 26, is, in this regard, a disappointment. Firstly, though he does have some bad boy traits — beard and occasional musician among them — he is far too polite to warrant a real bad boy label, messaging me again ahead of our meeting to advise me to wrap up warm (‘the rehearsal space is freezing kiss kiss’). And moronic he most definitely is not. This is a man who turned down a place at Cambridge (to read English at Clare) and his CV is flagrantly highbrow. He and his older brother Edmund, also an actor, have been performing Shakespeare since they were little (‘my first role was “boy at party” in Romeo and Juliet, I think’), completing a Royal Shakespeare Company run of Troilus and Cressida the day he joined the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (‘God, they must have thought I was an a***, waltzing up on day one with my Real Job — how annoying’), followed more recently by a turn as Rosencrantz in Hamlet at the National Theatre, for which he was nominated for the prestigious Ian Charleson awards.

He gushes breathlessly about his new project, an immersive production of Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (more on that later). That rather effusive thoughtfulness that Sir Ben Kingsley is known for? Yep, his son has it too.