THE GREEN KNIGHT

HIGH TIMES talks to Ben Kingsley on the set of The Wackness.

There are few things more intimidating than arriving on-set to interview the great Ben Kingsley, the Academy Award–winning actor who was even knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on his birthday in 2001—particularly when you know you’re going to ask him if he smokes pot. You have a pretty good idea that he, in fact, does not. But you have to ask anyway. After all, you work for HIGH TIMES magazine. It’s your job.

What is lost, as you clutch your recorder and prepare to interview the star of Gandhi, Schindler’s List, Sexy Beast, House of Sand and Fog, etc., is the surreal set of circumstances that have brought you to the set of his latest film, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on a drizzly fall afternoon. It just so happens that Sir Ben is filming The Wackness, a movie in which the classically trained star of stage and screen—and former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company—plays a psychiatrist named Dr. Squires, who gives therapy sessions to a troubled teenage drug dealer in exchange for high-grade marijuana. (The sessions go for a quarter-ounce each.)

With a therapist accepting cannabis co-pay and a cast consuming clouds of pot smoke in scene after scene on celluloid, the film seemed perfect for HIGH TIMES coverage. So, after Kingsley graciously agreed to grant us an interview, there we were, face to face—him donning a stringy brown wig and Hawaiian shirt that rendered him nearly unrecognizable, and me hoping my awkward weed-related questions didn’t cause him to channel his Brit gangster character, Don Logan, and fly into a homicidal rage.

In the end, the interview went very much as expected: Kingsley was engaging and insightful when asked about the film and his character, and flatly denied any personal experience with cannabis. “I’ve never, ever touched anything,” he said. “It’s frightening, you know? Actors need to be totally in control, so I’ve never strayed off.”

During that same visit, we were also afforded the opportunity to speak with his Wackness co-star Josh Peck, who plays Luke, the aforementioned troubled teenage drug dealer. Unlike Sir Ben, Josh enthusiastically declared his love for pot as he derided the ideology behind marijuana prohibition, spoke about his favorite bong, complimented the HT centerfolds, and even posed for pictures with a bag of Strawberry Cough.

Also on hand was the film’s writer/director, Jonathan Levine, who was eager to tell us of his first experience buying weed from a delivery service in New York City in the mid-’90s. Unfortunately, he was soon called away on more pressing business, leaving us with a marijuanalogue cliffhanger that abruptly stopped just as he’d stepped into his dealer’s car for the first time and the two sped off down a crowded Manhattan street ….

Despite Mary-Kate Olsen declining to speak with us (we saw her peeking out of her trailer as we exited the set and proceeded cautiously, knowing that sudden movements and loud noises frighten her), we left The Wackness fairly well satisfied. After all, we didn’t piss Sir Ben Kingsley off too much, and we met a couple of pro-marijuana movie-industry mainstreamers on the rise.

Still, it was difficult to ascertain exactly what sort of movie The Wackness would be based on our two-hour observation of muted dialogue as we sat perfectly still in the back of a dingy Brooklyn bar. However, the tone on-set led us to believe that the film wasn’t going to fill out the ranks of mindless stoner comedies, and the basic premise—of a therapist teaching his patients, as Josh put it, that “it’s okay to have fun, it’s okay to be yourself, it’s okay to smoke a lot of weed”—left us feeling encouraged.

Months later, when the final product was made available for review, what appeared before a smattering of critics in a midtown Manhattan press screening room was an engaging film that not only managed to avoid using copious pot consumption for cheap laughs, but also abstained from handing down a generalized verdict on marijuana use. Instead, it examined the travails of two well-written and well-acted characters whose lives, for better or worse, are tied to drugs.

The Wackness’s first two minutes contain a sight worth the price of admission alone: Sir Ben Kingsley hitting a bong after a therapy session (and blowing the payload out through a cardboard tube no doubt filled with drier sheets). Kingsley acknowledged that “this weird apparatus that’s used in smoking pot” perplexed him. And co-star Olivia Thirlby confided to HT: “If you look closely, he’s actually using it incorrectly. He never uses the slide on the bong, which is something that we noticed and decided not to correct, because it made sense for the character.” A character, Olivia added, played with a depth and humor that amazed her.

Sir Ben also told us of his character’s relationship with Luke: “He actually is guiding me, because my life’s a total wreck, and it’s only by meeting this wonderful young man that I decide to get my own house in order.” And boy, is his house a mess: Drifting through life and trapped in an unhappy marriage, Dr. Squires self-medicates, bombarding his system with prescription pills as a means of mitigating the throes of a ravaging midlife crisis. Then the doctor befriends his teenage patient and oscillates between reverting to adolescence in his presence (he helps Luke sell pot and even makes out with a young, dreadlocked hippy chick—Mary-Kate—in a telephone booth), and providing the stern and judicious mentoring expected from an accomplished psychiatrist.

Josh Peck’s Luke is no better off. The film begins on the eve of his high-school graduation with his family falling apart. His parents fight constantly as the prospect of losing their New York apartment becomes an inevitability. The only person aside from Dr. Squires who could possibly be considered a friend is Luke’s supplier Percy (Method Man), who spends his days holed up in an abandoned warehouse listening to Biggie Smalls and surrounded by burly machine-gun-toting guards. Luke sells pounds of pot to his classmates, thereby gaining access to a crowd he’d like to be part of, yet he remains aloof, always standing on the outside looking in.

When he befriends Stephanie—a promiscuous beauty played to perfection by Olivia Thirlby—he quickly falls in love, elevating a summer fling to the lofty designation of savior of his own disconsolate existence. The two seem happiest together passing the sweltering summer months by sharing joints and 40s in Central Park. (As Thirlby told us, “The relationship that they form is very genuine,” adding: “You do form a special bond with somebody when you get stoned with them a lot.”) However, their connection often appears untenable, and the affair is complicated further by the fact that Stephanie is Dr. Squires’s stepdaughter, connecting the three in a taut coming-of-age story.

The Wackness hits theaters July 3 with a well-calibrated script, bundles of weed, strong performances, and a soundtrack that plays like a who’s who of early-’90s hip-hop.