Bill Condon's 2004 biographical drama traces the career of a biology professor whose research turned into one of the most debated academic publications of its era, with Liam Neeson in the title role.
What is Kinsey about?
Alfred Kinsey began as an entomologist studying insects before redirecting his scientific curiosity toward a subject almost nobody in his field would touch: how people actually behave sexually, as opposed to how they were assumed to. Gathering interviews at a scale no one had attempted before, he and his research team compiled findings that challenged the era's public assumptions and drew fierce pushback from institutions uneasy about the subject being studied at all. The film follows that research from its academic origins through the publication that made Kinsey's name a household word, while also tracing the personal cost the work placed on his marriage and his closest collaborators.
About the cast
Liam Neeson plays the title role, with Laura Linney, Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard and Timothy Hutton in supporting parts, and John Lithgow, Tim Curry and Oliver Platt rounding out the cast.
Context & significance
Bill Condon wrote and directed the film, framing a scientific biography as something closer to a character study, with the research method itself, structured, exhaustive interviewing, treated as dramatic material in its own right. The story is set in the years surrounding the publication of Kinsey's landmark study on male sexual behavior, a work that arrived into a culture unprepared for it and that still gets cited whenever the history of sex research comes up. Rather than dramatizing the findings directly, the film spends its attention on the people running the study and the resistance they met along the way.
Watching Kinsey on Ktime
Kinsey is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login. The synopsis and cast details on this page are open to read without an account, and the wider catalogue is built with a Farsi-language experience for viewers in the diaspora.