The actor is America’s Mr Nice Guy. So what drew him to play an out-of-touch Bob Hope in the Miss World protest movie?
Can I ask you something?” says Greg Kinnear, slightly nervously, toward the end of our conversation. “Did you notice that I’m wearing a prosthetic nose?”
He is not talking about right now – he is on the other end of the line in a hotel room in
British Columbia, so he could be sporting nothing but clogs for all I know – but rather how he appears in the new film Misbehaviour. In this British comedy-drama about the Women’s Liberation Movement
protests that disrupted the 1970 Miss World event, he plays the US entertainer Bob Hope, who hosted the pageant that year and made no secret of his disdain for the idea of gender equality. A month earlier, the comic had appeared in a TV special, Bob Hope Looks at Women’s Lib, in which he imagined how different the TV networks would be if they were run by women: no televised sport but the offices would be spotless.