Every Creator Should Hope Their Stars Love Them Like Ben Kingsley Loves Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest

On June 4, the IndieWire Honors Spring 2026 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best television series. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the creators, artisans, and performers behind shows well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.

Ahead, Ben Kingsley tells IndieWire about the deep joy he experiences working with our Auteur Award winners, “Wonder Man” creators Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest, the kind of guys who allow a “trapeze artist” like Kingsley to take flight.

As told to Kate Erbland. The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Destin and Andrew’s harmony is really remarkable to behold. Of course, by definition, a duet is two voices of a different pitch producing a third effect, which is the tune. And the sum of their parts is really the effect that they have, and is greater even than the two of them individually.

I was told a story by a director with whom I had a working experience — let’s put it that way — but he quoted with relish this European director as saying, “I die a thousand times a day on the film set.” This is completely antithetical to what one experiences with Destin and Andrew. When this gentleman said, “I die a thousand times a day,” you know what he meant? He meant that, when he was on the film set, he witnessed, to his dismay, actors and their characters behaving in a way that he had not anticipated. Inflexible.

I would say that Destin and Andrew, they chuckle a thousand times a day. You can offer them, without ever straying from their beautiful dialogue and without ever straying from the mandate of the scene, your own performance. You can, of course, maneuver within your portrayal and invent as you go along, and you’re actively creating your character in front of the camera.

This is the environment that Destin and Andrew offer to the actor, which is, I’m sorry to say, the opposite of the bloke I just quoted. What Destin and Andrew have is a mandate to deliver to the audience something utterly unique, utterly endearing, quite challenging, and intelligent. It’s a gift to the audience’s intelligence and a gift to their sensibilities and a glimpse into how much the three of us as men love our craft and how much we feel that the audience deserves enlightenment and entertainment, rather than something that a director invented in the bathroom that morning and said, “Yes, that is what they’re going to do.”

They offer you a place to deliver your portrait to the audience. They give you an opportunity. What Andrew and Destin do, it is a gift. It is a gift to actors, to the cameraman, and to the audience. It’s joyful.

I won’t say it’s fun with them. It’s very hard work, because you love to hit precise targets and you love to offer them something new and sparkling. The thousand chuckles a day is what I’m trying to describe. And they are chuckles, they’re not guffaws. They’re not, “Hey, guys, let’s have fun.” That’s death to a film set. “Hey, we’re going to have fun! It’s not going to be fun. It’s going to be hard work, boys and girls, but the end product is going to be joyful.”

Ben Kingsley and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in ‘Wonder Man’Suzanne Tenner

[Returning to this role] was a surprise. I thought that Trevor had finished his journey with “Iron Man 3” and that lovely creation the writer presented to me. The excitement [for the series] was not any kind of preconceived idea of what might happen. I think the excitement was engendered during the work process.

There is an actor I greatly admire who said that all our work is in some sense autobiographical, and on a very, very deep level, I’ll buy that. But the word “autobiographical” often means, hey, they’re just playing themselves. Not interested. I love the leap from me to the portrait I’m creating. That leap for me is everything.

Andrew and Destin really listened carefully and lovingly to my invented, entirely invented Trevor backstory. I invented his mother, Dorothy. I invented all that. That’s all me. But they gracefully incorporated it into their show, and still kept that leap from me to my character. They never blurred it. And personally, I find that if it gets blurred, the audience has nothing to watch.

I mean, when you watch a trapeze artist, what do you watch? They let go of one trapeze. They spin in the air, and they catch the other. I let go of myself. I spin through the air, and I catch my character. It’s that spin through the air that the audience pays to see.

[The series] is a very accurate and very affectionate look at a job that’s extremely hard to define and describe. I think they’ve got very close to it, and they share that with an audience. It’s very generous. There are moments of tremendous vulnerability, and there are moments of triumph as well, and the isolation, the camaraderie, they’re balanced, the gains and the losses, the individual journey, the imagination.

I very much look forward to the opportunity to be in their company again, because being in their company accelerates and uplifts things rather than diminishes or tarnishes them.

“Wonder Man” is now streaming on Disney+.