Ben Kingsley wigs out with Mike Davies about his new role as pot-smoking pscyhiatrist.

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It’s not just the wig. Ben Kingsley’s performance in The Wackness as a drug-addled, disillusioned but ultimately sympathetic New York shrink is every bit as transformative as his turn in Sexy Beast, and no less deserving of award nominations.

Even so, it’s hard not to be drawn to the aforementioned rug which renders the more familiarly shaved headed actor almost unrecognisable. However, having hair turns out to have been very much an integral part of the Dr Squires character.

“I needed it,” states Kingsley. “There is a lot of nonsense spoken about acting but I think I’m becoming something of a portrait artist as an actor. I sort of saw Squires with wires coming out of his head as if the madness couldn’t be contained in his skull, he had to have almost a halo of unruly hair around his head.”

Along with his recent turn in Elegy and, in a perverse way, The Love Guru (a role he admits he took for the pay cheque), Kingsley seems to have lightened up of late, shedding the intensity for more self-liberating performances that play with his perceived image.

“I’m certainly enjoying not having the whole moral dilemma of the film resting on my shoulders as I did in The House of Sand And Fog, Schindler’s List and Gandhi,” he confesses. “As you get older and more popular or successful, then I hope that, like painters, you just allow yourself to be a little more carefree.

“While Luke (his depressed teen drug dealer patient and supplier) is striving to find the adult inside him, Squires can’t get rid of his inner child. He drops balloons full of water on people. The film really tells the story of our identity, of how we perceive ourselves.”

For Kingsley, it’s the drugs – both the dope and the medication – to which he’s addicted that are a large part of the problem in Squires being unable to kick his comfort blanket of childish behaviour.

“There’s a point when Squires flushes them down the loo, but then he’s back on them again and it’s clear that drugs are blocking his mental process. It’s an artificial way of keeping him completely childlike and irresponsible. There’s something tragic and comic about that dependence on drugs and it’s also directly linked to the lack of intimacy in his relationship with his wife.

Drugs in this story are as important as all the alcohol that was consumed in the tavern with Falstaff and the prince. It’s all about that kind of excessive indulgence. It’s just a way of Squires not allowing himself to meet the real world as a sober adult.”

Interestingly, both The Wackness, which is released this week, and Elegy, in which Kingsley plays a commitment-phobic professor infatuated with a younger woman, look at troubled relationships and the issues that arise as you get older and become less idealistic about love. It’s worth remembering that the 64-year-old Kingsley recently married Daniela Barbosa, a Brazilian actress half his age.

“That’s very interesting,” he says after a long pause. “I think the human struggle is very beautiful, I don’t see it as an ugly thing. I see the journey as almost mythological. It’s a struggle to find our equals and I hope that there are many surprises in that search. Finding that equal partner might take a lot longer than certain magazines we flick through suggest.”

Whether it’s finding that equal partner in his fourth wife or not, but these days, although a certain arrogance remains, Kingsley seems a far more serene figure, more comfortable with himself, somehow spiritual.

“I hope we’re all spiritual, “ he says softly. “The human creature is a spiritual teacher but there is no focus of worship or particular group of people who interpret that power to me. I’m not connected to any particular faith but I think I’m religious; however you define that.

“I’m fascinated by the human dance, patterns of human behaviour, evolution, our relationship with the universe.

“The universe created human beings so that it can look at itself, and I want to look out into that universe.”