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

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