How do you describe the career of a guy who started as the host of Talk Soup on E! and within five years was Oscar nominated for a role opposite Jack Nicholson? Greg Kinnear certainly hasn't taken the usual career path. He may have starred opposite Tom Hanks in You've Got Mail, but he was also conjoined with Matt Damon, played a sex addict and a meat inspector, guest starred on Friends and voiced a character in the Beavis and Butthead movie. Not to mention leading the SAG-winning ensemble in one of the best indie comedies of recent years in Little Miss Sunshine.

Now he's on screen as the inventor Bob Kearns in Flash of Genius, and he was happy to be playing a real-life character no one's ever heard of. "Well, it's not like everybody comes in with a preconceived idea of who Bob Kearns is," he says. "So it was kind of loose as to how I could portray him. You know, nobody's ever going to stand up in the theatre and say, 'Hey, that's not what I remember the intermittent windshield wiper guy to be like!' It's not like with Clinton or Nixon or some sort of galvanising figure that everyone's familiar with. At the same time, as an actor I felt absolutely obligated to try to, as best I could, make him real."

Later this year he'll be sees in Paul Greengrass' new film Green Zone, about the hunt for WMDs in Baghdad after the American invasion. "Paul is a remarkable director," he says. "He just has an immediacy on the set. He doesn't come in with a prearranged agenda of how things are going to go, and he's always chasing something that's not easily found. It's his own journey as a filmmaker, but I think everybody feels like you want to give him everything you've got, because the thing that he's searching for always translates to the screen, always creates these pictures that feel very vibrant. He has a way of making even smallest moments really big and lifelike on screen. It was wonderful."

When asked about his five favourite films, he looks to the ceiling and comments that he's going through his mental Rolodex...

Click on a thumbnail below.

Something Wild
The Godfather
Chinatown
North by Northwest
Willy Wonka