Ben Kingsley Gave One of His Best Performances as a Deranged Gangster

The Big Picture

• Don Logan from Sexy Beast is a terrifying gangster despite his unassuming appearance, thanks to Ben Kingsley’s menacing performance.
• Don thrives on controlling everything and everyone around him, using words and psychological tactics to assert dominance.
• Ben Kingsley played Don as an abused child, adding depth to his character and explaining his desperate need for control.

If there were a Hall of Fame of film’s greatest gangsters, then one of its first ballot members would be Don Logan from Sexy Beast. He may not have the iconic pop culture status on the level of Vito Corleone or Tony Soprano, but that’s part of what’s so overwhelming about him. Nothing about him feels like your idea of an enforcer, looking like the long-lost sibling of Mr. Clean, but he makes up for that benign appearance with a ferocity that is hard to fathom. For a guy who spends most of his screen time just threatening other people, with little actual violence, he comes off scarier than some of cinema’s most notorious serial killers. In a stroke of ironic genius, this is all thanks to Ben Kingsley, an actor most known for bringing us one of cinema’s kindest patron saints, now giving us one of its great monsters.

What is Sexy Beast About?

Sexy Beast is the debut film of one of the great practitioners of discomfort, former music video icon Jonathan Glazer. It’s about retired gangster “Gal” Dove (Ray Winstone), happily living out his post-criminal life sunbathing in Spain, with his beautiful wife Deedee (Amanda Redman) and his closest friends, the married couple Aitch (Cavan Kendall) and Jackie (Julianne White). That idyllic retreat is ruined when Don Logan (Kingsley), a legendary enforcer, comes to tell him of a heist job courtesy of his boss, Teddy Bass (Ian McShane). Gal steadfastly refuses, preferring this much more lavish and cozy lifestyle to going back to the grind. This infuriates Don, who won’t take no for an answer, and this leads to a never-ending clown show of blistering arguments and tense stand-offs between everyone at Gal’s home.

Ben Kingsley Turns Don Logan Into Pure Menace

The thing that leaps out about Don when you first see him is how…well, not imposing he is. He’s both the shortest person in the room and relatively thin, especially in comparison to Gal, and doesn’t live up to the image we have of a mafia enforcer. Don himself seems to know this, and so he compensates for that by keeping all of his rage simmering right under his skin at all times. For a guy who rarely commits actual violence to anyone, he uses words in a shocking manner that hasn’t been this vicious since the iconic R. Lee Ermey performance in Full Metal Jacket. From the moment he first appears, he pans and scans the room like he has Terminator vision, but marries that sedentary temperature with a bristling undertone that makes his intentions clear, even at his most casual. Don Logan truly has that dog in him, and he doesn’t need to bark loudly to prove that his bite is brutal.

That’s to say, when he barks at all, since he can be just as threatening by doing nothing. His introduction into Gal’s life involves Don sitting in front of everyone, silently watching everyone and instigating no conversation. No one knows what to say, and no one can even make eye contact with him. These are all people who have experience being around gangsters, and they’re still completely terrified of this man, so much so that they can only think of flustered excuses to leave the room. This doesn’t work, as Don swiftly inserts himself into these made-up plans, insisting on going with them when Aitch suggests leaving to get food. Don pulls Aitch into a vicious rope-a-dope, first wanting to go with him, then forcing him to take money to pay for the food, then telling Aitch to shut up with his rambling. He hasn’t even moved into discussing proper business yet, and he’s already dictating the terms of how everyone around him will operate.

Don Thrives On Controlling Everything Around Him

Don is a creature of control, from his constant upright posture to his efficient word choices, and he exudes the need to bend the environment to his will. If Gal starts swearing in a conversation, Don will swiftly cut him off by going “I’m not swearing” and question why he’s doing it. Don will sit in stone silence with Gal and suddenly mention how he once had a hookup with Jackie, and acknowledge he’s only doing so because he can, keeping Gal on his back foot. He derives a lot of his power from questioning everyone and everything, rapid firing undermining comments at the clipped rate of a machine gun. He puts a particular emphasis on repetition, drilling his mandates into those who cannot abide his orders. This is best exemplified in one of the most famous scenes where Don screams at Gal in his kitchen, insisting he must take on the heist job, while Gal continuously refuses. It’s one of the rare moments where Don truly explodes, yelling “yes!” over and over like a rabid bark, cornering Gal by bobbing his head into his personal space with the ferocity of a juiced woodpecker. Gal looks so drained and defeated at this point, and it sells how much power Kingsley holds that you believe that Gal just doesn’t have the fight in him.

The power in Kingsley’s performance lies not just in him being a masterful psychological terrorist, but in the ways that he can display how Don’s aggression comes not from a place of simplistic rage, but of wounded ego and fear of being found out. We see glimpses of the functioning human being underneath the snarling dog, and Kingsley shows us how a lot of Don’s mannerisms are possibly an act used to cover up insecurity. In a revealing moment of privacy, Don interrogates himself while shaving alone in a bathroom, ping-ponging between sharp criticisms of his prior behavior and reassurances that he can fix it if he just sets things straight. It’s a masterclass in emotional modulation years before Gollum’s dual-personality conversations in The Lord of the Rings, but here Don serves as both his own abusive father figure and his therapist, both sides setting him on the right path. Kingsley tapdances so swiftly between cautious reassurance and indignant self-loathing that it paradoxically becomes more uncomfortable to know this is what’s behind all of those outbursts.

This culminates in the most expansive version yet of the Don Logan experience: the airplane sequence. Leaving Gal’s place to report to Teddy, Don gets kicked off the plane because he refuses to stop smoking, but not before calmly threatening to stub out the complaining passengers’ eyeballs. When he’s questioned by the airport security, in order to avoid legal trouble, he comes up with a fake story about being touched inappropriately by an airport employee, coming off as genuinely empathetic toward the working person’s plight and not wanting to cause any fuss. He speaks in a confiding manner, as one trying to keep a secret under wraps, worlds removed from the Don we’d borne witness to in the previous scenes. Despite us knowing this scenario was made up by Don, his recounting of it feels far more humane and intimately connected than any of his attempts at being chummy had been before. Combine that with how Don comes back to Gal’s place, angrily insisting it was his fault this happened in the first place (implying that Gal was responsible for Don’s bad behavior), and Kingsley paints a picture of a man who’s stuck in a childish worldview, blaming everyone but himself and using petty bully tactics to hide his own faults. Given Kingsley’s rationale behind his approach to the character, this isn’t too surprising.

Ben Kingsley Played Don Logan as an Abused Child

In 2019, GQ interviewed Ben Kingsley to talk about the biggest roles of his career, and he discussed his time on Sexy Beast. When trying to rationalize Don’s actions and mentality, Kingsley made connections to the character of Iago from William Shakespeare‘s Othello, and to the idea that Don was abused as a child, and left unhealed from the trauma. This combination leads to a man who cries out “I don’t want you to be happy, why should I” and who “would go on to scream for the rest of his life.” It provides a clarity to some of the more idiosyncratic aspects of Don’s personality, most notably the way he always keeps his body rigidly upright and uses it as another tool for intimidation, with the attentiveness of a child that’s just been whipped by the teacher and expecting another thrashing. Why wait to be beaten when you can beat someone else first? If that’s how he’s learned the code of survival, particularly in a world built around violence and intimidation, then so be it. Kingsley’s insight led Don to have a touch of desperation and an ever-present expectation of betrayal in even his most arrogant moments, which ensures that even in his most unhinged moments, it’s coming from a place of earnest pain.

This, more than anything, is what sets Don Logan apart from other gangsters in his mold. The archetype of the “mad dog gangster,” the gangster that is a wild card who is defined by his thirst for violence and inability to be trusted, is one that’s been around since the origins of gangster cinema itself, from Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death to Joe Pesci in Casino to James Cagney in White Heat. What binds these characters is an underlying sense that they’re always out of control, that they will lose their sanity and not know what they’re going to do next at the drop of a hat. Don Logan is not out of control; if anything, he is the most terrifying version of this character because he is always tightly in control of the instrument that is his rage. Even when spewing some of the most imaginative profanities you’ll hear in film, there’s a musicality in the rhythm of his words that shows how he’s sharpened his voice over years of practice. Ben Kingsley took a stock side character and turned him into a symphony of chaos.

Sexy Beast can be watched on Paramount+.

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