Keeping one's head

Rory Kinnear looks like he's been decapitated. His jacket is pulled over his head and his arms are flailing. This is his impression of what a pigeon looks like when it flies into a window - in this instance, the window behind which the cast is rehearsing the new Donmar Warehouse production of Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart.

This sort of thing is typical of Rory Kinnear: he tells a good story. Most recently seen in the Almeida's hugely successful production of Festen, the 27-year-old is also charming, self-deprecating and winningly English. In short, he's not unlike his father, the late Roy Kinnear.

'He died when I was ten, so in terms of how it's affected my career you can't tell. Both my parents were actors,' he says, 'so I was aware it was possible to have a career in acting, whereas that leap of faith is quite difficult if you come from a family of doctors. But when I was growing up, I never wanted to be an actor.' Which begs the question...'I wanted to be a butcher.'

But when he wasn't dreaming of chops and cutlets, the young Rory spent enough time backstage with his father to get a taste for theatre.

'I remember The Duchess Of Malfi at the National. I wasn't allowed to see it because my dad had his head chopped off and they thought that would disturb me. So they left me in the dressing room with the speaker on to hear my dad's garbled screams. The power of the imagination is much more vivid in a child.' But it wasn't all bad. 'Aged seven, Belinda Lang kissed me on the cheek. Woo-hoo.'

Although he dabbled in productions at school and university, where he studied English ('basically reading books - and you don't need to go to university to do that), it wasn't until the end of his second year at Lamda that Kinnear began to consider the stage. But then the screen came calling.

'I got a ludicrous part in one of these Biblical epics made for American TV. I played the disciple Andrew, who, owing to a lack of Biblical evidence, was the comedy disciple. Oh my God, it was good.'

His student debt cleared, he joined the RSC, before going on to appear in some of the classic plays (including Trevor Nunn's recent Hamlet) he'd loved as a child. 'As a ten-year-old, what was I thinking? I should have been on my bike.'

And then came Festen. But playing Michael, the angry young man of an ultra-dysfunctional family in the adaptation of the Dogme film, wore him down. 'Four months of that and I was knackered. Which is quite embarrassing to admit.'

So he opted to work in TV for a time, until he won the role in Mary Stuart. It's the second Schiller adaptation this year, following Michael Grandage's