Ben Kingsley Sneakers (1992)

Sir Ben Kingsley (born Krishna Pandit Bhanji, December 31, 1943, Snainton, Yorkshire) played Cosmo in Sneakers (1992) — Bishop's college roommate, presumed dead, alive and prosperous as the film's antagonist.

Cosmo is one of the great quiet villains of the 1990s

Kingsley's choice for Cosmo is to play him as the calmest person in any room he is in. The performance is built almost entirely on stillness — folded hands, soft voice, the capacity to deliver a thesis statement about world domination as if proposing dinner.

"Kingsley is one of those actors who can suggest, simply by the way he sits in a chair, that he is the smartest person in the room." — Vincent Canby, The New York Times (1992)

Phil Alden Robinson cast Kingsley specifically because Cosmo could not be played as a conventional megalomaniac.

"Cosmo had to be persuasive. The whole movie hinges on the audience half-agreeing with him. Ben understood that the moment he read the scene." — Phil Alden Robinson, The A.V. Club (2012)

Gandhi was the passport; Bugsy was the pivot

Kingsley won the Best Actor Oscar for Gandhi (1982) and spent the next decade in serious drama (Betrayal (1983), Pascali's Island (1988), Bugsy (1991, Best Supporting Actor nomination)). Sneakers in 1992 and Schindler's List in 1993 marked the start of his decade as a working character actor on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Kingsley took Sneakers because he wanted to play someone unambiguously bad. After Gandhi he had been waiting years for the chance." — Andrew O'Hehir, Salon (2008)

Selected filmography

Year	Film	Notes
1982	Gandhi	Best Actor Oscar
1983	Betrayal	Pinter adaptation
1991	Bugsy	Supporting Actor nomination
1992	Sneakers	Cosmo
1993	Schindler's List	Itzhak Stern
1993	Dave
1994	Death and the Maiden	Polanski
2000	Sexy Beast	Supporting Actor nomination
2001	Iron Monkey	Narrator
2003	House of Sand and Fog	Best Actor nomination
2008	Elegy
2010	Shutter Island	Scorsese
2013	Iron Man 3	The Mandarin