When Joseph Fiennes was six years old he told a bunch of Irish nuns to “f***
off!” He was swinging on a statue of the Virgin Mary at the time, and the
nuns were his teachers, near the Kilkenny home of his soon-to-be-famous
family – including brother Magnus (now a composer), sister Sophie (now a
film-maker) and eldest brother Ralph (an Alister). Fiennes was beaten with a
bamboo stick for his indiscretion. The punishment was savage, he says. The
bamboo broke on his body. Yet he tells it today, in the corner of a busy
West London members’ bar, with a glimmer of pride in his eyes. “It was a
good thrashing,” he says, with a slow blink of his trademark Bambi lashes
and a half-smile of his beautiful bestubbled face. If he didn’t quite like
it, then he certainly appreciated it.
Fiennes, you suspect, is a bit of a fighter. In person, the 38-year-old actor
and former Shakespeare in Love pin-up is smoother than caramel. In
crumpled jeans and crisp denim jacket, he’s good-humoured to a fault and
keen to joke. But scratch the surface, or prod him on a pet hate (everything
from the fame game to human-rights violations), and you get a glimpse of
bubbling recalcitrance, fuelled by fierce intelligence, that seems to hint
at deep simmering rage. “Image-conscious actors should get out of the
business,” he says curtly, at one stage. “There’s a f***ing crisis in Burma,
and China’s inextricably linked!” he roars, at another. Later still, he
rails: “Most journalists are f***ing lazy!”
This antagonistic quality serves Fiennes well in his latest role, as Lenny
Drake, a con with a hair-trigger temper in the outstanding “prison break”
movie The Escapist. Here, in a non-chronological narrative whirl, he
plays one of five oddball cons (including Brian Cox and Liam Cunningham) who
attempt to escape from an unnamed London prison. He spends a lot of time
pumped up, with ripped biceps exposed, punching things and people, knocking
out teeth and banging inanimate objects. “I wanted Lenny to vibrate on a
different level,” he says. “He’s just a very angry man.”
In some ways it’s a perverse antistar performance and so far removed from his
traditional swoonsome image that his face is half-covered by a beige hoody
for a huge chunk of the movie. I wonder was this a ploy? Was this Fiennes
playing a game with his own image and with the audience?
“I don’t know if it’s a game with the audience,” he says sincerely. “I was
just trying to show a guy who was completely immersed in himself.” He stops
and smirks, before adding: “Although I did hear that Harvey Weinstein saw it
and was like: ‘Is that Joe? You get him on the phone right now! I can’t tell
if it’s Joe!’ ”
Similarly, Fiennes toyed with expectations last year in the underrated Running
with Scissors, in which he played – sorry, ladies – a schizophrenic gay
paedophile called Neil Bookman. It was the movie’s standout performance,
with Fiennes strangely sympathetic behind a huge moustache, black leathers
and twitchy eyes. Again, it was a rebarbative role and seemed to exist in
the very act of tearing down preconceived notions of Fiennes on screen. “I
was just serving the narrative and the audience,” Fiennes says, rejecting
any wider implications of his role. “I was just serving the movie, and
enjoying the range of the character.”
Though he won’t admit to consciously defiling his own poster-boy status,
there’s a very real sense that the new Fiennes, madder and badder than ever,
has emerged victorious from a hard-fought battle with the soft-featured
sweetie that the world encountered in 1998 in Shakespeare in Love.
“When you are involved with a film like Shakespeare, something
that pops to that degree, then it can be very hard to escape,” he says. “But
I’m 38 now, I’m not 26 any more. There’s been a decade of changes since Shakespeare,
and they have informed my work. It’s not necessarily about killing my past
but about running with the challenge of change.”
There were some very public postShakespeare flops (including the erotic
thriller Killing Me Softly, the war movie The Great Raid),
after which he seemed to disappear from our screens completely. He hadn’t –
he was just finding it harder to get seen. “Part of being an actor is about
rejection,” he says.
His past, he says, had prepared him for life’s ups and downs. His parents
Mark, a photographer, and Jennifer, a novelist and painter, were
peripatetic, and then some. Initially Wiltshire-based, they moved to the
west of Ireland, where they refurbished houses and moved their brood of six
Fiennes children through 14 different homes. He says that his memories of
Ireland, despite the nuns, are mostly happy. However, when he returned to
England, to South London, and to a starring role in a school play at his new
comprehensive, he knew, he says, “that I’d landed in the right place”. I
wonder then, with the bohemian parents, the creative family environment and
the big brother movie star, if acting was not somewhat inevitable for him?
“I’ve got a twin, Jacob, and he’s a gamekeeper,” he says. “So, no. I don’t
think there was any inevitability to it.”
His ascent to movie stardom was speedy – Shakespeare in Love,after
Elizabeth, was one of his first leading roles – but nonetheless
accompanied by unhelpful comparisons with his older brother Ralph, then
already a Hollywood player. Here Joseph was depicted as light, fluffy and
pretty, while Ralph was dark, serious and handsome. Again, he fought it. He
refused to mention Ralph in interviews, he snapped at journalists who did,
and if there seemed to be an eccentricity in some of his postShakespeare
choices (playing Martin Luther in the German biopic Luther?), it
could only have sprung in part from that desire to be defined against
anything other than his brother.
Today, of course, looking at him staring sternly out from The Escapist
poster, his reinvention is complete, while references to Ralph are almost
redundant. “If people don’t mention it any more,” he explains, “that’s
because it’s not relevant any more.” He will be seen next as a grieving
boyfriend in Against the Current, and, having already directed an
award-winning short film, The Spirit, is working on his debut feature
script with his director sister Martha (Onegin). He says that he’s still
“incredibly close” to his siblings.
He has a girlfriend too, but he’s not mentioning her. Well, not until the
affable film director Oliver Parker wanders over to our table and forces the
truth out. “Where have you been?” he asks. “Er, Switzerland,” Fiennes says,
nervously. “Why Switzerland?” Parker presses. “Love?” Reluctantly, Fiennes
answers: “Yes, love.” He grins and shrugs, “There, you’ve got your scoop!”
The love in question is the Swiss model Maria Dolores Dieguez, who, Fiennes
coyly explains, has moved to London to be with him.
He finishes up in fine form, fulminating loudly against the IMF, governmental
corruption, and the exploitation of natural resources in Third World
countries. “I’m sorry, I’m ranting,” he says. “But it goes back to what
Gandhi said: ‘You must be the change you want to see in the world.’ ” He
says this softly, and with utter conviction. Then he stands up to leave, and
swishes through the bar as he goes, a glorious icon of smooth masculine
beauty, with colourful dashes of mystery and spikiness to seal the allure.
The Escapist is released on June 20 2008
Why do people feel the need to rent their spleen about an actor's personal life when they try to keep it out of the press? Besides which, how does going out with a model affect your ability to save the world? And since when is someone unintelligent just because they're good looking?
Richard, London,
It bespeaks insecurity that he's so snappish and dismissive toward any mention of his older, more successful brother. I'm sure he's still trying to come to terms with the fact that he'll never completely escape the shadow of Ralph, the vastly superior actor of the two, contrary to this article.
Shavs, San Antonio, US
Well he goes out with a model! not image conscious then?Actors always talk about saving the world and then they go off with models or pin up girls, boring!I guess in the parties they go too, not many high intelligent women around saving the world
ric, london,