Though he may have emerged as one of Hollywood’s top leading men with searing performances in Schindler’s List and The English Patient, both of which earned him Oscar nominations, Ralph Fiennes greeted movie stardom with a sort of dignified skepticism. Highly intelligent, well-educated, and articulate, he was immune to celebrity trappings and fled fame rather than allowing himself to become turned into a mainstream matinee idol.
Nonetheless, he has hardly been hiding in the shadows, having embraced roles ranging from Prince Hamlet to Lord Voldemort. He’s soared as John Le Carre’s ultimate lost man in The Constant Gardener and earned critical acclaim as a director with his post-modernist take on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as well as his haunting portrait of Charles Dickens in The Invisible Woman.
His most recent films starting with The King’s Man, a spin-off prequel of sorts from Colin Firth’s Kingsmen, he plays the Duke of Oxford, the central character in an early-1900s plot in which rivaling factions, some of history’s worst tyrants, attempt to plot together to wipe out millions.
As a beacon of justice and fairness in the middle of it, Fiennes has his work cut out, both personally and cinematically.
Next up is the long-awaited Bond slate, No Time to Die. With more delays than many of the flights out of our airports this summer, the Covid pandemic has finally eased to the point where the film was granted a November 25th release; and whether a year late or not, the power of the 007 franchise promises that this will be a hit whatever.
Fiennes again adopts the moody magnificence of someone totally at home with drama on any level. His third incarnation of M, he is both subtle and pivotal to the plot.
In both movies, the 57-year-old is undoubtedly up to the task, and there’s indeed a sense of relief for the British actor, whose enforced break this year represents his first in over four decades on screen. The diversion has at least enabled him to focus on home life, famously popular with the opposite sex, he’s been involved with actresses Alex Kingston, with whom he was married from 1993 to 1997, and had a relationship with Francesca Amis, from 1995 to 2006. He was also linked to Irish yoga artist/teacher Sirin Lewendon in 2005; his love life seems to continually overlap and includes a fling with a Romanian singer, Cornelia Crisan, during his relationship with Amis. His life has certainly not been remiss of scandal; his most notable tabloid event occurred when he met a Qantas flight attendant in 2007 and allegedly had sex in flight. He has also dated aristocrat Lady Amanda Harlech.
Born in Ipswich, in the wild and rugged eastern part of England, often forgotten about not just in entertainment circles but pretty much everyone else too, he is the eldest child of Mark Fiennes (1933-2004), a farmer and photographer whose father was industrialist Sir Maurice Fiennes. He is an eighth cousin of the Prince of Wales and has five siblings, including actor Joseph Fiennes, director Martha Fiennes.
STRIPLV: You’ve played a wide variety of roles in the course of your career. Is it essential for you to keep mixing things up in terms of your choices? FIENNES: As an actor, I’m constantly trying to discover what’s lurking underneath in a character. What are those hidden elements inside a person and what people try to project to the outside world.
STRIPLV: What is your perspective as an actor? FIENNES: I like it when I can feel as an actor that I can say anything and be free to offer up stuff and I can be heard. As an actor, I’m a child; I come with a child’s enthusiasm. STRIPLV: Do you often reveal a great deal of yourself in your roles?
FIENNES: It all depends on how good an observer you are and how you look at a given performance. There will always be something unknowable when it comes to separating the actor from the performance. There are many layers to each role that mask an actor’s real nature, but at the same time, your essence and soul are informing the work and informing the choices. Ideally, you want to be able to dissolve into your character and create something unique and different from yourself because you’re not playing yourself! You might recognize certain mannerisms or gestures, but the context is different. There’s often very little in common between your own personality and your character’s even though, of course, you’re giving something of yourself to your character. Some roles will feel closer to who you really are, and others will have very little resemblance to you. Even when you are playing a character for which you feel some affinity, it may not really be like you at all, even though you feel drawn to that character’s nature or way of behaving. STRIPLV: How did you enjoy working with the cast and crew on The King’s Man? FIENNES: Well, it’s always great when a director like Matthew Vaughn asks you to become a new part of a successful franchise; you think to yourself that you must be doing something good in the world of cinema to be asked in the first place. He created a great band of merry men and women for The King’s Man, and the undertone amongst everyone working on the film was always great. When you have a great cast and one with such a hunger and feeling to make the project another success for the franchise, how can you fail? You’ve got the young and brilliant Harrison Dickinson, the classy and wondrous Gemma Arterton, the always fantastic and superb character-actor Rhys Ifans, who displays a tremendous portrayal of Rasputin, which I believe has never been seen before. Then, you’ve got Tom Hollander, who transforms himself for three different parts where he plays the ruler of Russia, England and Germany. Working alongside him during the filming, I was overwhelmed by his brilliance, and I’m confident those who get to see him when the movie is released will see just why. STRIPLV: As you said, you have a lot of respect for Matthew Vaughn. Were you a fan of the previous films in this series? FIENNES: Absolutely. I was very much attracted to the role and the script, even though this particular movie was a bit different from the two previous chapters, so to speak. With the context of historical characters and settings in this film, it gave a totally new level to the franchise and there are so many different layers to this one. I think that’s what attracted just myself to this role, but also the fellow cast members. I think we were all probably feeling that gravitational pull for the range of genres within the piece. There’s great action with comedy, pathos and as I say, the historical references make it such an interesting, funny, fun and entertaining movie. It was very much brilliant to be involved in. STRIPLV: Djimon Hounson was very kind in his praise and admiration for your work and said that it was such a privilege to be working alongside you in a movie and your work was something of a “masterclass.” Matthew Vaughn also commented that you’re a master of the theater, compared to him being a novice in such areas. How nice is it when fellow actors eulogize about you in such ways? FIENNES: Is that really what he said? Well, it’s all a little embarrassing, and Djimon is a great actor in his own right. He put his body through a lot for the action scenes in that film, and he said to me after one or two of them that they were pretty tough compared to what he has done so far in his career. Action isn’t something I can put my own frame through at this stage in my life (Laughs), so I leave that the younger, fitter and more durable actors out there now. Djimon was very much the man for the job in hand for this, more than capable. With regards to Matthew, his experience in terms of cinema, putting a film together, the great crew that works with him, casting, etc. It makes it all a lot easier to concentrate on the job at hand. Not just for me, but for everyone, and that’s a huge step in the right direction with regards to how filming can go so well, and the end product is as close to how you want it, as is possible. Again, for him to say such great things about my work and myself is flattering, and again, you choose to work with these people not only because they are good at what they do, but also that they are great to work with, as well. Being a nice person goes a long way in this industry because as recent reports and events have come out, not everyone in the film world is as great as they seem. STRIPLV: The costume and design in this movie and, of course, Bond, are just tremendous. Certain actors like yourself will say that they find that props help the character if they take it outside themselves to dress or style a certain way. FIENNES: That’s true; that’s true. There are some actors who are just as themselves, but others who truly take on a new form when dressed. It is a mental transformation, not a physical one. STRIPLV: And confidence is everything if you are an actor, right? FIENNES: Confidence on the outside is certainly everything, yes, but I know a number of actors, of both sexes, who are quivering wrecks. To meet them in public, they would be the very last people you would expect to see getting up in front of an audience. And yet acting often gives shy people an outlet to be the brave, bolshie, bombastic person they crave, albeit through the action of pretending. I have seen the most remarkable transformations, where confidence and courage booms out of every pore. So yes, to answer the question, confidence is everything, but you don’t need it all of the time. STRIPLV: Familiarity must help too—something I guess has gathered with your work as M. FIENNES: There’s definitely a feeling of having your feet a bit further under the table with something like Bond when you are coming back for a third-bash at it. Of course, things around you change, not least the director this time, but many of the people and the processes stay the same. It is a nice club to be in, and I don’t mean that in the sense of the pomp and the adulation, more than, as an actor, it is nice to experience a sense of belonging to something. Remember, we are very nomadic creatures – we travel around the world starting something, finishing it, moving on somewhere else, working with completely different people and restarting the whole process. That’s why the appeal of sequels is so great for an actor. It’s security in terms of money, yes, but it’s also a sense of certainly just in the sense of having a rare injection of familiarity and homeliness in a profession that usually offers very little. STRIPLV: How good is Daniel Craig’s final Bond then? FIENNES: Well, obviously, I can’t say much, but I will tell you it is good! It feels appropriate to go out on this sort of high, and it is certainly worth the wait, although many other studios will say the same about their own releases as we have quite a backlog of cinema to get through. STRIPLV: Like what?
FIENNES: He’d say, ‘I don’t want to put you up for television. I want you to go and learn your craft in theater outside London in regional theatres.’ And that really impressed me. I think for a lot of agents they look for the handsome pretty faces, and they want to make their commission by getting a young, pretty face into a TV series, and this was an agent taking on a client with a long-term view, and that he wanted to have clients who developed over time. So he would be one of them. My mother was an incredibly insightful woman and wise, and she would definitely be there. And there was a lovely actor in my first job, who was a friend of my agent and he just carefully looked after me in my first job and made sure I was alright and would nod in approval in rehearsal if I did something that he thought was good and just had a lovely and gentle presence. And sometimes at Christmas, he used to send me recordings of older actors that he had found, of Michael Redgrave, or Charles Laughton, and he would send them on cassette, which was sweet. STRIPLV: So, will we be seeing your lovely face on television anytime soon in a series or coming up? Do you have any plans, would you do it? FIENNES: I haven’t got any plans. Open horizon.
RALPH FIENNES: LOVES & HATES LOVES • HIS MOTHER [Jennifer Lash, a painter and novelist) who died of breast cancer at age 55 when Fiennes was 31. “I was very close to my mother. She was an enthusiast,” he says. “She encouraged us all to engage. To really go into whatever we were doing, not to skate on the surface. To become impassioned. (She had) an emotional fragility, often present that we all felt strongly.”
• COMEDIES “Once in a while, I like to watch some silly comedy, usually on airplanes. That movie with Mark Wahlberg and the bear (Ted) was just excellent. Ted! I’d love to do something like that.
• YOGA “I enjoy yoga. I showed (good friend and fellow New Yorker Liam Neeson) some basic yoga positions years ago. And then he threw out the story that we do yoga together. What I actually love to do with Liam is go walking in the country, where he has a place in upstate New York. We’ve had some great walks.”
• JAMES BOND “As a teenager, I was obsessed with him. When I was younger, I might have fancied my chances, and actually, there was a moment 15 years ago when a few phone calls were made, but nothing came of it. What Daniel Craig does so brilliantly is the toughness, that killer streak. Funnily enough, when I was growing up, Roger Moore had taken over. There was the sense that Connery had established this lean, catlike, cruel thing that nobody else could match. Now I take a nostalgic delight in Roger’s tongue-in-cheek Bond. I think it has a priceless quality to it.”
• SOLITUDE “I don’t like being isolated, but I like the freedom to be alone. Sometimes solitude or feeling lonely confronts you with yourself. It can be a form of meditation. Active reflection is really important.”
HATES
• MAKEUP “Oh God, I hate being in the makeup chair. I don’t know why I’ve developed a pathology about the makeup chair. It’s the time, and the people so close to your face with a brush or a sponge or a pair of scissors or something, it’s a nightmare. I can’t bear it. The only nice bit is being stroked and cossetted by a lovely makeup person. It’s nice getting a hot towel at the end of the day.”
• ANXIETY ATTACKS “I have huge anxiety attacks. I’ll wake up early in the morning with my brain anxious about something, and I don’t even know what it is, just a general sense of profound uncertainty. It’s from the unconscious, I suppose, fears about existence—a weird twilight panic. We feel we can organize our lives and have an order that we can control, but really, we can’t; it’s always paper-thin, and underneath there’s this lurking chaos. You think, “Fuck! This could come at me at any moment.”
• ENGLAND’S OBSESSION WITH CLASS “It’s a media construct to run stupid articles about class this, posh actors that. It’s so not right to me, the discussion. It’s not true. There are parts for everyone. It happens to be a couple of actors who are hitting the limelight at the moment who happen to have public school educations. It’s depressing. It’s this country’s fucking ghastly Achilles’ heel, its obsession with class. Good actors get work. It doesn’t matter what their background. It’s even a question I’m reluctant to go there on.”
• BEING IN THE LIMELIGHT “I’ve had my bruises in that regard, and it can be very upsetting and disturbing. But I guess you get burned. You try and be smart about it. But yeah, it seems to be something now that if you’re in a job, and an actor’s job is about their relationship with the public. The audience goes to see him or her, and I think you would be kind of dumb if you didn’t acknowledge that you take on a profession where you yourself are being watched in public. Of course, there’s a curiosity, and I think you can sometimes forget the intensity of that curiosity, and it’s kind of good to be aware of it.”