The Green Knight largely focuses on Gawain (Dev Patel), who finds himself on a quest to confront both his morality and mortality. His journey is centered around meeting the Green Knight -- played by screen and stage veteran Ralph Ineson. The Green Knight's appearance and Ineson's performance are deliberately haunting, giving the film much of the energy and drive that defines the narrative and A24 productions as a whole. During an exclusive interview with CBR, Ineson spoke about the challenges -- and privileges -- of performing in such a massive and distinct prosthetic suit and what attracted him to the Arthurian-based project.
In A24's The Green Knight, the titular Green Knight is a mysterious and powerful force. He's a strange and almost ethereal being who challenges the knights of Camelot to a challenge. In meeting him, Gawain finds himself bound to the undying figure, committed to facing him once again in the coming year. To achieve the distinct and imposing look of the Green Knight, Ineson went through a radical transformation via practical special effects and make-up.
Reflecting on the experience of taking on the character as a performer, Ineson admitted, "There's good and bad about it, actually. There is no way to make playing a character that looks like that a particularly comfortable experience for an actor. There just isn't. I was very well looked after, and everybody helped me make it as easy as possible, but yeah, three-and-a-half hours every morning in makeup, to get the prosthetic on, and an hour to get it off at the end of the day as well. It makes your day very long. The costume is very heavy, with the armor. Also, it puts you in this strange world, where it's like being underwater, because the prosthetic is over your ears, so you can't really hear. And you can't really see particularly well, because of the lenses. So all your senses are focused on... Everything's about the smell."
Revealing his first day on set was the Green Knight's first appearance in Camelot, Ineson explained, "I'd spent all the time in makeup, the rest of the crew had started work... When I arrived on set, the first time anybody had seen me really was when I rode in on horseback into the court of Camelot. So the look on the faces of the support artists and the cast and everybody the first time they saw me was all the inspiration as an actor that you need for that character. You're walking in, and you go, 'I don't really need to do a lot here, do I? I've just got to find the fun in this character.' Because the really intimidating and scary bit is so taken care of by the enormous horse and the fantastic prosthetic that was designed by Barrie Gower."
"The beauty of the design of the prosthetic was that it was so thin and fine around my eyes and my cheeks and the edges of my mouth, the bits of your face you use an actor," he added. "So the prosthetic was very cleverly designed to have lots of wooden bits all over my face, but he left lots of pieces for me to work with. That's where I could actually express and didn't have to do pantomime, cartoony faces to express emotion. It was very easy to work within a sense. It was the first thing that [the film's director] David Lowery was keen to reassure me on. I mean, I didn't really need much reassuring. They could have put me in a mask, and I would have quite happily played the character, in a film like this, with a filmmaker like David."
Ineson revealed that his focus on smell, due in part to the costume, actually benefited the character overall. Describing a later scene in the film, Ineson said, "[In rural Ireland], it had a forest full of wild garlic, which had just come to flower. So walking from the base into this location, into the Green Chapel, with this wild garlic flooding my senses, was like proper overload. And yet in a way, that got me so much into the character, in a completely unexpected way. So sometimes the things that are hardest actually bring something interesting."
Reflecting on the film's final product, Ineson had nothing but glowing compliments for David Lowery. "I think what David Lowery does is he doesn't hold your hand," he said. "I think there are so many ways you can go. I'd love to be a fly on the wall, to listen to the discussions as people come out of the theater on this one, because I think there are so many things that you can take from it. He's quite an uncompromising filmmaker, in that he doesn't make it easy for you in a sense. You've got to work it out yourself. That's one of the strengths in the movie."
Previously, Ineson didn't have an academic history with the Green Knight. He explained it was David Lowery's script that really drew him to the film. "I think it's just such a wonderful world," he said. "I think the cinematography, the score, it just brings you in. It's a place that I just want to go back and spend another two hours in, rather than sit and try and work out the theories. It's something that I just want to experience again and just let it wash over me."
To meet the man behind the legend, see The Green Knight now in theaters.