Ben Turner on Not Being Pigeon-Holed, Playing an Eight-Year-Old Boy & Flying High in London's The Kite Runner

Ben Turner's theater credits include the Eddie Redmayne Richard II at the Donmar and the Almeida's revival of Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing but the classically trained performer is now taking the West End lead in The Kite Runner, adapted from the Khaled Hosseini bestselling 2003 novel of the same name that was itself filmed in 2007. Playing the Afghani emigre to America, Amir, who is haunted by an event from his past, Turner scarcely leaves the Wyndham's Theatre stage and spoke to Broadway.com late one recent evening about taking on the stage role of his life to date. 

What has it been like sticking with this project since its debut at Nottingham Playhouse in May 2013? 
It's such a rare opportunity to be able to revisit material. A lot of the time in the theater, you have this epiphany moment a month or two after you finish the job where you think, "I should have done it like this or like that," so it's nice to be able to revisit something in the hope that it goes deeper and deeper. I might get it right this time!

What has the journey been like along the way?
Every time we've done [the play], we've had a fantastic response, and it always seemed as if there was the potential to take it on somewhere. The first time we did it was at Nottingham Playhouse, and the second time was on a big UK tour with the hope of bringing it into town, which of course means the West End and is all about finding the right theater at the right time. We nearly went into the Trafalgar Studios, where it would totally have worked, but we're pleased to be at Wyndham's for a three-month run. 

Does this feel like a eureka moment for you and for the production? 
What I love about this show—and this is just my humble opinion—is that the West End model at the moment is "let's get a big star in to sell tickets," but I absolutely 100% think that the star of this show is the story. Sure, a few Casualty fans [the TV series in which Turner was a regular] might come along but it certainly doesn't have the kind of draw that it would have if James McAvoy were in it! I love James, don't get me wrong, but there are no tricks here, no gimmicks—just old-school honest storytelling at its best with a real kind of company spirit. The story is the star.

Why do you think Amir's journey from Afghanistan halfway across the world to San Francisco has proven so enduring across so many art forms?
I think some stories are just universal in their origins. Yes, this is a play set in a war-ridden Afghanistan where there are hints of the Russians invading in the late 1970s, but actually what the piece is about is family, and that's a theme that everyone can relate to. My character goes from fear, guilt, and betrayal through to redemption and then ultimately forgiveness, and I think that's something no matter where you're from or the color of your skin that is universal. Not to make light of the backdrop and Afghanistan and all of that, but we don't smack anyone over the head with the politics of the piece: it's about a father, a son and a brother and ultimately what happens between them. 

What's it like spending so much time onstage talking to the audience?
Because I never leave the stage, there's a bond with this play between me as an actor and the audience in many ways: it's almost like they go through it all and I go through it all, and a kinship happens between us. I've never felt anything like it onstage.

Did you actively chase this part?
If I'm deadly honest, at the time The Kite Runner reared its head, I had decided that I wanted to stay in London to do theater. Cut then to my agent calling me and saying that this amazing part had come through, but it was in Nottingham, not London. I was sent the script to read and basically, I couldn't put it down. Parts like this don't come along very often—it's an amazing piece. 

With regard to the title, what happens if your onstage kites don't take wing?
Actually, we've got two versions of the kite flying. One is these incredible indoor kites which don't require any wind to fly: they require force and propulsion, so you pull on the string and it goes. But for the tournament itself, that is much more an act of the imagination. Unfortunately, our budget didn't quite stretch to 1000 kites which would have been amazing, but, again, it's a character taking you through what has happened in his mind so the important thing is that you're watching us see the kites fly—that's what counts. 

Wasn't there a separate version of this play in the U.S.?
I believe so, but the difference here is that Amir is played by one actor as opposed to a narrator and then a young Amir running around doing all the first-act stuff. Sure, you might think it's a bit of a stretch for a 36-year-old man to be playing an eight-year-old boy, but I hope the audience will use their imagination a bit on that one. What happens is that my character steps forward and says that he has a story to tell and then he conjures up these characters from his past who enter the stage, almost like he gets sucked back into the memory. I do run around playing a kid for a lot of the scenes, and then I will step out to give a bit of narration and move the time and place along before I get sucked into another memory. 

Has your relation to the material changed in the years since you first started playing Amir?
What's interesting to me is that we all read about these places in the paper every day and see words like Afghanistan and Taliban and refugees and immigration, but we don't really know what they mean. The fantastic thing is that our play humanizes all these issues: it's about a family so that people can relate to these topics in a way that they haven't been able to before. I thought the piece was current three or four years ago, but it's even more current now. 

Don't you have your own personal connection to the Middle East?
Very much so in that my mum is from Iran and I used to go every year up until the age of 10 or 12 to Tehran. My memory of Iran is as a child, where in my mind's eye everything was huge, but I've only ever been there as a boy. I haven't been to Afghanistan, but as far as the climate goes, it is very similar. It's very beautiful actually: people think of this arid, blasted landscape and that couldn't be further from the truth.

Do you get cast as a result in a diverse array of parts?
Yes, totally, which is kind of weird because I'm a Londoner, born in Hackney and I now live in north London.My father was and is an English actor [Graham Turner]. But I guess people see on my resume that I speak Farsi, and so I get put in that Iranian camp. I've played a few terrorists, I'm not going to lie—I just played one with Mark Strong, in a film about the hostage situation in London in the early 1980s when the Iranian embassy was under siege. That said if Steven Spielberg wants to cast me in a trilogy called The Terrorist, bring it on! 

Wasn't your father in A Chorus Line some 40 years ago in London?
He was but that was before my time. In fact, that's where my mum and dad met: my mum came to see the show and that's essentially where they fell in love. My mum was completely bowled over by this incredible production, and I remember as a kid finding my dad's sequined jacket in the cupboard. I still have an amazing poster of him showing the final number "One," where you can see him in the line: he remembers that time incredibly fondly. 

So, where do you see yourself within the profession at the moment?
What I'm trying to do is climb the ladder and resist being pigeonholed by people asking whether I'm Mediterranean or English or Middle-Eastern—or whatever. The fact is, I could be all of these things. Ambiguity is the way forward.