Parenting & Family Quote by Ben Kingsley

Actors are “a very strange lot” in Kingsley’s mouth isn’t a cheap insult; it’s a confession with a grin. The strangeness he’s pointing to is occupational. Acting requires a person to treat identity as something you can try on, discard, rebuild, and still make it feel true. That’s not how most adult life works, where consistency is rewarded and improvisation is penalized. So Kingsley reframes the actor’s supposed eccentricity as a survival strategy: you stay porous.

The second move is the telling one: “keep in touch with the child.” Not “be childish,” not nostalgia, but access. Childlike attention is unfiltered; it’s the ability to be impressed, to be wounded quickly, to believe a game is real while it’s being played. That’s exactly the emotional mechanism acting runs on. Technique matters, but technique without that inner permission slip reads as calculation. Kingsley’s subtext is that the best performers don’t just simulate feeling; they maintain a pipeline to the part of themselves that feels first and explains later.

There’s also a quiet defense embedded here. Actors get stereotyped as vain, unstable, melodramatic. Kingsley concedes the oddness, then upgrades it into something almost ethical: staying in contact with the child is staying in contact with sincerity. Coming from a performer known for controlled intensity, the remark lands as a reminder that discipline isn’t the opposite of innocence; it’s what protects it long enough to be useful onstage.