‘Billions’ Star Stephen Kunken Talks New Climate Change Play ‘Kyoto’ as Royal Shakespeare Company Unveils Trailer: ‘The Existential Crisis of Our Time’ (EXCLUSIVE)
The Royal Shakespeare Company and Good Chance’s climate change play “Kyoto” represents “the existential crisis of our time,” according to its lead actor, “Billions” star Stephen Kunken.
Written by Good Chance co-founders Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson (“The Jungle”) and directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, who previously teamed on “Stranger Things The First Shadow,” the play recounts the hours of tense negotiation which led up to the signing of the UN’s landmark climate change treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol in December 1997. The historic agreement was signed unanimously by 176 nations and paved the way for much of today’s environmental legislation. A trailer for the play has also been revealed (watch below).
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“Kyoto” follows oil lobbyist Don Pearlman, who makes it his mission to delay and defer consensus at all costs, raising doubt and casting questions over the scientific legitimacy of evidence in favor of climate change at every turn.
Pearlman is played by Tony-nominated U.S. actor Kunken, most recently seen as James Jesus Angelton in the BAFTA-nominated series “A Spy Among Friends,” chief compliance officer Ari Spyros over the seven seasons of the Showtime series “Billions” and as Commander Warren Putnam over the five seasons of Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
“There’s something about the moment that we live in, and it’s fascinating now that there’s a snap election that was just called [in the U.K.] — we’re approaching that in the States, which is where we’re gearing up for what will be one of the most partisan, just completely divided periods in American history, and it feels like there’s no commonality,” Kunken tells Variety. “Even on something as fundamental and as close to this play as climate change, I can’t quite figure out how we aren’t able to move forward, how we can’t find agreement, it is the existential crisis of our time.”
He adds that “one of the incredible things about this play and about being an actor is your responsibility to be an empath and to try to figure out the musculature and the connections between yourself and the character.”
“No matter how horrible that person may or may not be — Ari Spyros or Commander Putnam are not the most delightful human beings necessarily on the planet — but you have to find your path to them, and to understand them to make them real people,” Kunken says. “And when the idea of playing Don Pearlman, a guy who sits completely on the opposite side of where I sit in my understanding of climate policy and climate change, I thought that was an incredible opportunity to try to figure out and understand the other side of this argument.”
Kunken says that not unlike his “A Spy Among Friends” character, Pearlman is somebody who operated in the shadows with not much public footage of him to look at. The actor benefited from speaking at length with Pearlman’s son, Brad, to flesh out the character. Kunken also says that nobody on the creative team wanted to do a “hit job” on Pearlman.
“We were all eager to find out what the truth was for this guy and lend it as much credibility as possible,” Kunken says. “You can’t move forward by making him a paper tiger, he has to have an entire raison d’etre that is deeply felt and deeply steeped in a truth for him.”
Kunken says that the play weaves together satire, drama and kitchen-sink realism, and that the Pearlman character is playing three dimensional chess all the time to keep America at the top of the heap.
“But America at the top of the heap means nothing if the planet is going down the toilet,” Kunken says. “And that’s true across the board, for every country — for China, for the U.K., for Russia, wherever it is — it’s going to the bathroom in your own bedroom. We have to work together. And hopefully, theater is a great place to explore how we do that.”
The actor says that while there is no silver bullet solution to climate change, the biggest takeaway he’d like audiences to walk away with is that it is possible. “This is the interesting thing about where this play goes — it doesn’t require intellect to move us forward, it requires just a soulful commitment to stepping into the unknown,” Kunken says.
“Kyoto” plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from June 18 to July 13.
Watch the trailer below.
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