Actor out of the fire and into the forest

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This article was published 19/01/2016 (3521 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEW YORK — If you watch the Golden Globes, but you don’t watch the TV series Chicago Fire, you may have noticed a really good-looking guy on the red carpet escorting Lady Gaga, who would go on to win an acting award for American Horror Story.

His name is Taylor Kinney. Lest you think of him as just another bit of studly Hollywood arm candy, the strapping actor (Gaga’s fiancé, in fact) is in his fourth season playing Kelly Severide, the super-confident lieutenant who runs the Rescue Squad on Chicago Fire, and occasionally on the show’s spinoff Chicago P.D. His acting credits also include Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and the short film Prodigal, in which he shared the screen with no less a prestigious thespian than Kenneth Branagh.

On the big screen, Kinney, 34, is currently starring in an American horror story he can call his own, playing a freelance travel journalist who joins Natalie Dormer in her search for her missing twin sister in the notorious “Suicide Forest’ at the base of Mount Fuji in the thriller The Forest.

The character, named Aiden, was an interesting change for Kinney, he says, especially after playing a straight heroic character on network television.

“I’ve been on Chicago Fire for four years with that character, and Aiden was a departure from that,’ he says.

Indeed the character, unlike many TV heroes, proves to be maddeningly ambiguous. He seems to be very much in the hero mould when he offers to help Dormer’s distressed heroine find her sister, making the bargain that he’ll help her if he can write about their shared experiences in the creepy environs of Aokigahara Forest (a real place with a reputation for making people go a little crazy).

But as the two venture further into the forest, Aiden proves to be more suspicious. Is he manipulating Dormer’s character to get a good story? Does he have still more dire designs on her? Are his character’s sinister overtones a product of Dormer’s increasingly unhinged psyche?

“You have this ambiguous character and you’re not really sure if he’s a good guy or a bad guy, or what his motives are,’ Kinney says. “That was fun to play. You can’t put your finger on it. There’s a lot of possibilities going on with this character.’

Kinney would debate the point of whether The Forest qualifies as a horror movie, preferring the term “psychological thriller.’

“Certainly for my character, there wasn’t a lot of guts, gore and slashing, screaming and all the horror essentials,’ he says.

Regardless of genre, Kinney asserts that an actor shouldn’t alter his approach to any given film.

“When you’re in the midst of it and you’re shooting, it’s work,’ he says. “In comedy, you’re not trying to be funny and in a drama you’re not trying to be dramatic. You focus on a character

“You can be loose and fun, but you have to take the take.’

The Forest is currently playing at McGillivray, Polo Park, St. Vital and Towne cinemas.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca