Ralph Fiennes seems both parodically English and consummately European, the way classical music isn't bound by borders, either. In addition to all measure of British, he has played, to my count: Austrian, Irish, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, and unspecified Balkan—as well as American (both WASP and serial-killer varieties), and Snake. He appears to carry with him, among many other charms, a cache of words, phrases, and proper pronunciations of non-English languages, like a deep pocketful of pre-Eurozone coins. It is very fun to listen to him talk in movies—and in person in London, as I did, for a few hours in late January.
I say all this to help explain why Fiennes registers to many interested in his life and career as one of our ultimate cosmopolitans. He is, just to list some of his culture bona fides, one of the living actors most associated with Shakespeare. He has said that he and his six siblings grew up listening to vinyl recordings of poetry recitations. He has often acted in films based on the acclaimed novels of major-prize-winning authors. He has said the talent he would most like to have is playing the violin. He has said that when he travels for a film, he always does so with the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, a “talisman” and “safety net for when one is feeling a bit bruised or battered.” He has described the greatest love of his life as “having a transforming encounter with a Work of Art, either as a listener, viewer, reader, spectator, or participant.” He is fluent in painting styles and the names of museum directors and the great theaters of both the East and the West. He is fluent in ballet now, too, since he's just directed a movie about the Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. He enjoys hopping on the Eurostar to Paris from his home in London. He enjoys short flights to European capitals. He enjoys picking up his rental car in Umbria so that he may drive—the only time he drives—to his “tiny farmhouse” in the Italian countryside, where he goes “to read.” He has said his idea of perfect happiness is “swimming naked in the sea.” He has said that when and where he was happiest in his life was “swimming in Voidokilia Bay in the southern Peloponnese.” While we were together, he sounded most like Ralph Fiennes when he said European-sounding nouns, like “Peugeot” and “Tchaikovsky” and “salade niçoise.” He pronounced the little tail thing on the c, and, as a Fiennes character might direct him to, he pronounced it trippingly.
This cosmopolitanism seems to have sort of become the point about Ralph Fiennes in recent years. Wes Anderson may have been the first to recognize a new use for this caricature: that in the post-heartthrob Fiennes, a filmmaker could mine middle-life pathos, as well as levity and humor; that if a character were to possess an arch knowingness about the fact that he was being played by Ralph Fiennes, it might be really, really fun to watch.
Actually, maybe credit belongs to Martin McDonagh and In Bruges. The joke there was that Fiennes—the very high culture of his cells—could play the antithesis of so many counts and kings: an irritable East End gangster with a Shakespearean facility with fucking fuck fucks. Maybe that was the pivot?
Or, scratch that, too—perhaps it started earlier, with his first nose-less “Avada Kedavra!” in a Harry Potter movie. Maybe that was when we felt the options expand.
Regardless, there's been a slow shift, iterative at first, and then all at once wholly present, in a new series of roles for Fiennes over the past decade or so. There would always be the bedrock of English/European-set drama (Schindler's List, The English Patient, The Constant Gardener, The End of the Affair, Sunshine, just to name some acclaimed heavies), but there was space now for a fresh kind of on-screen presence. You get the Oscar-nominated talent and the self-awareness, too.
Take Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash, for example, where Fiennes plays a motor-mouthing cocktail of taste and devil-may-care that could be reduced to something like: Ralph Fiennes type—but with all of the shirt buttons unbuttoned. Ralph Fiennes type—but with a Jagger falsetto and breezy linen. There's a scene in which Fiennes's Harry Hawkes leads his compatriots to a no-tourists dinner spot on a secluded hillside on an Italian island, doling out per favores and grazies as he gracefully inserts himself into the hospitable hands of the locals. I remember thinking in the theater, or on the plane, or wherever: This. This is what you get when you strip off the uniform of haughty propriety, but still have all the knowingness—all the language and command and wisdom amassed from a lifetime of moving fluidly across European borders. The result is very funny and very cool.
When we met in January, Fiennes had just finished a 76-show run of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre in London. He'd spent the previous day—his one and only day off between the play and a new film shoot—reading books and responding to e-mails. (He'd been journaling when I first approached our table.) Fiennes still had his beard from the play, but it would be gone by that evening. He made reference to “what little hair I have left” on top, a style that changes often. The fixtures of his face were plenty there, though. The prominent nose and brow. The sticky-outy canines. The sensitive pale eyes, ticklish to the light—ever-present in the heroes and the villains alike, the same pair on Count Almásy as on Voldemort. The eyes were so familiar. As was the voice. His voice sounded exactly like Ralph Fiennes.
Sometimes actors make choices to pivot their careers. Other times those choices—those theories about their work, the sort of I've just laid out above—are more arbitrary, connecting unrelated opportunities in an effort to make sense of them, the way we trace weird animals out of the stars. Fiennes has said that, at times in his career, he felt people presuming that he only did a certain kind of dramatic role. I asked him if the run of films including In Bruges and The Grand Budapest Hotel and A Bigger Splash felt like a pivot.
“It did feel like that,” he said. “I cannot tell you how thrilled I was when Wes asked me to be in the film. And when Martin McDonagh approached me to be a kind of London gang boss. Which is not my obvious casting bracket.… And then Luca came to me with that great part, and it felt exciting to me, that ‘Oh, great, I'm not being seen as, I don't know, English intellectual or sort of cool, crisp bad guy.…’ The thing that people were responding to was the comedic, or the humorous, that was clearly in Wes's script, and Martin's, and in A Bigger Splash, and also the wonderful scene I was asked to do in the Coen brothers' film [Hail, Caesar!].” (Would that i' t'were so simple...)
I told him I'd been wondering how active he was in the pursuit of that pivot, since it's difficult to know how much an actor's hands are on the wheel.
“I think it's a very valid question. And I think sometimes actors are absolutely going: I want to do this and this. And other times it comes to you. All the stuff I've loved doing most has come to me. Sent to me.”
In the case of A Bigger Splash, Luca Guadagnino, who'd made it “an aim” of his to work with Fiennes ever since seeing Schindler's List and Quiz Show, told me he knew the actor for Harry “had to be somebody who could carry a complete buffoonish, clownish character combined with melancholy—and there was no doubt Ralph was the right person for that.” At the time, Fiennes had done The Grand Budapest Hotel, Guadagnino continued, and a trailer had just come out: “And I saw him briefly in a pink tie, being suave and swarthy in that little clip, and it was, ‘See, he's perfect.’ He's not only a master of shades of brooding-ness and melancholy, but he can also bring a levity and a capacity of likability that is really unique.” That well-worn heavy, and the new light. Perfect.
Fiennes is a voracious reader, and many of the films he's best known for have been adapted from the works of renowned authors. Michael Ondaatje. Graham Greene. Peter Carey. Shakespeare and Dickens. Even with the more genre-y, it's the best of the genre: Ian Fleming, John le Carré. I asked him if there was any intentionality to those clusters, to working with material from notable novelists.
“I know, I've been asked that before,” he said, seeming to consider it fresh. “But I think I'm responding to the film. And I've been happy to do things that are not based on a book, like In Bruges or The Grand Budapest Hotel.”
I asked if “his people” know what he's going to go for at this stage.
“I believe they know what I respond to,” he said. “But I'm actually not a good reader of film scripts. I'd rather read… I mean, I think I try the patience of the people who represent me.” He laughed knowingly. “If there's a book to read, and they're both sitting there…I'll go to the book, I'll read the script later.… If a certain amount of pressure is put on me, I'll go, Sorry, sorry, I'm doing it.”
I asked Tony Revolori, who played Fiennes's teenage co-lead in The Grand Budapest Hotel, if he remembered what Fiennes was reading on set. “A book of Shakespeare's sonnets,” naturally. Revolori said that Fiennes taught him “the proper way” to read those sonnets and then presented him with a “beautifully designed book” of those poems at the end of the shoot. On set, there were discussions of diction with director Wes Anderson. Tongue twisters were introduced. She stood upon the balustraded balcony inimicably mimicking him hiccuping while amicably welcoming him in. “Tongue-twister battles” ensued. (I would be disingenuous if I described any of this as being shocking.)
From a distance, it is hard to see Fiennes's life as anything but full and packed wall-to-wall with high culture. I asked if he, as a Known Culture Person with a love of things like theater and opera and classical music and art, worried there was something “slipping” in culture?
“I think, 'cause the National is fresh, I can talk about that with a bit more—I can know my thoughts more about the National more than…”
“Than all of culture, like I'm asking you?” I said.
He laughed. “It may be nostalgia, it may be how I'm choosing to remember, but you felt that within the National Theatre—and certainly at Stratford it is the case—they have to function as the company. I think it's probably impossible to do that now because of the way the entertainment business works, and the way actors need to be a part of—the pay is not high—so you have to make money on television or doing voice-overs. But maybe I have a romantic sense of the company.”
Fiennes's first big break came in 1988, in Stratford, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the company of companies. “I wanted to be an actor because I was excited by Shakespeare. It was thrilling and moving. I don't know, I had a quite naive infatuation with Shakespeare. I thought, What a wonderful thing to be in the Royal Shakespeare Company, or the National—and I didn't really think about films, because that seemed like another world.”
Shakespeare led to his first films, which led to a meeting with Spielberg and a role as an Austrian Nazi. In 1993, he was nominated for his first Oscar and embarked on the 25-year movie career that's followed. “If he picks the right roles and doesn't forget the theater,” Spielberg said of Fiennes at the time, unwittingly providing a useful blueprint, “I think he can eventually be Alec Guinness or Laurence Olivier.”
Fiennes didn't forget the theater, and he returns to Shakespeare frequently. The plays were his first love. And despite all forces pushing younger actors toward other kinds of work, he finds that that same infatuation endures with a new generation. “Even just walking back from our last-night Saturday, across the bridge to a party we were having [to celebrate the end of the production], one of the younger female members of the cast, a tiny part, but a lovely presence…she was saying, ‘I just wanted to do Shakespeare. I just love it. I just…’ And she expressed what I had felt. I was so touched, actually, because she said it with such ‘I just love Shakespeare.’ ”
Walking back across the bridge. I love that. Every actor, unknown and galactically famous, leveled out, in it together, the intimacy with one another, and with the city where they performed each night. It was fun to get a glimpse of Fiennes in London. It'd almost be a shame to encounter him anywhere else. We walked around Covent Garden for a bit, and he pointed out the grand theaters of the West End. That's where Eliza Doolittle sells flowers in the beginning of Pygmalion. That was Dickens's office. Fantastic. He delineated the precise border of the City of London, pointing at “that church-y thing over there,” a critical marker. We ended up facing the National Theatre—across the very bridge he'd mentioned—and it was sort of like being Ouija-ed by a drunk back to his favorite bar. The theater felt like home position, like all wanderings might wind up back there. Fiennes has lived and worked mostly in London all his career. I asked him if he ever thinks about elsewhere.
“I love London. I think London is a great city. I think it's got fantastic things. I don't know, I guess I've thought about elsewhere but haven't done it, because if it's working, why fix it?” he said. “I'm at a funny time, and I keep wanting to make a shift in the way I, where I live or how I live. I live in London, I've lived in London all my adult life, I live in the East End Shoreditch area, before it became über-hip, I bought a place in 2000. I've got a very lovely place in New York, which I love going to. But most of the work I get tends to be based out of here. And the theater work… I keep going back, because I miss it, I miss that thing.”
Fiennes has the rest of the year “chalked up” already. Five new films: a Kingsman prequel, a new Bond (“I'm waiting to get a Bond script; I'm hoping for a sexy location”), and three-ish other interesting-sounding dramas. Plus the release of The White Crow—Fiennes's third film as director—about a young Rudolf Nureyev, the famed Soviet dancer, and his defection from the USSR to France in 1961.
The White Crow features several scenes that capture those “transforming encounters with a Work of Art” Fiennes has described as the loves of his life. In one flashback, a young Nureyev—born on a trans-Siberian train to poor parents—is taken by his mother to the theater. We don't see what's transpiring onstage, only what's transpiring across his face. We see it happen again when Nureyev, older now and in training in Leningrad, stands before the Rembrandts at the Hermitage Museum. And then, once again, when he wakes up early one morning, to make sure he's the first person at the Louvre, so he can have Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa all to himself.
Again and again and again—“transforming encounters with a Work of Art.”
I read Fiennes's words back to him.
He laughed in recognition. “Yeah, okay. I'd forgotten that.”
I asked him about those scenes in the film.
“Those scenes,” he said, “the one in the Louvre and the one in the Hermitage, with the Rembrandt, those were the scenes that really moved me. Because the engagement with the Rembrandt… I thought The Prodigal Son, looking at it, when we shot that, I was so emotional, I wasn't crying, but on the inside… Those were holy days for me.”
I told Fiennes I knew he'd answered this question after directing his first two films, but I wondered if the answer had evolved during his third: Among the directors he'd worked with, had he cobbled together bits from one or another to help inform him, or was he standing on his own now?
“I don't know that I'm consciously taking from the films I've been in, in terms of visuals, in terms of cinematography,” he said. “But I certainly, in terms of ways of working…I'm often interested in Spielberg, whose energy, vocal… He's not a quiet sort of monosyllabic, quiet-voiced director. He's just direct. ‘Just go here.’ ‘Just put this lens on.’ ‘Come sit down.’ ‘Do it quickly.’ Very clever. Totally positive. And you can feel it. I remember the set, people loved it, because there was a sense of momentum. I think generally actors and crew love it when they feel this forward momentum and, along with it, good work.”
“Deliberate intention,” I said.
“Deliberate intention,” he said. “Wavering, wavering on the set is…” He chuckled darkly. “Too much wavering is worrying. And, like, Anthony Minghella [during The English Patient] was brilliant with actors. A gentle provocation towards looking for something other… It was in my lack of experience that I thought he was wanting me to ‘hit it,’ to ‘nail it.’ But I think actually, quite rightly, he's looking for ‘What else is there that I can get that this actor can own so that they're not contriving something to satisfy me?’ ”
“The pleasure is that I see a French film and meditate on what it, being an Englishman, what it says to me...it offers up new provocations, and also confirms common identity of being a human being.”
After lunch, we walked a short distance to the Royal Opera House, where Nureyev had danced and where a large black-and-white portrait of him hangs in the wings, hovering above the dancers as they step onto the stage. The Royal Opera House is also where Fiennes took ballet lessons of his own—eight or nine, he says—with a dancer in the Royal Ballet named Bennet Gartside, in preparation to play the legendary Soviet ballet teacher Alexander Pushkin. Once, and only once, in my presence, Fiennes did that incredibly weird thing where an actor transforms his head and face and body into another human being in a flash, a total magic trick, while showing me the way Pushkin did something or other.
The White Crow centers on the 1961 trip to Paris by the Kirov—the famed Leningrad ballet company. Nureyev is played by the Russian dancer Oleg Ivenko, who leaps and spins throughout as tightly as the threads of a screw. The film builds to a masterfully suspenseful climax at Le Bourget Airport in Paris, where Nureyev has to choose between defecting to the West or being sent back to the Soviet Union to face some unknown—but likely terrible—fate.
“It's not an easy decision as he sits there in the room. We've seen the love of the mother, we've seen the support of Pushkin, and we've seen those friends—it's not just the oppressive evil empire, it wasn't stifling,” Fiennes said. “When we shot Leningrad, the Soviet scenes, I wanted it quite classically framed, and ever so slightly, we bring the color up. We don't want to confirm the cliché of the gray Soviet world. And when I tried to look at color stills of the Soviet era, they're quite hard to find, but when you find them—bang!—I mean everyone, the women, the red, red being the political color, but red is everywhere. But it pops! And we see so many black-and-whites, it's so weird what this very basic visual thing does. Yeah, I just…it's complicated.… I know the film asks questions; I don't know that it answers them. I don't know that a film should answer. I like films that provoke me to think.”
When I met Fiennes in London in late January, politics was on the surface. Theresa May's Brexit plan had just been rejected by Parliament. And Fiennes had recently given a little-seen speech at the European Film Awards, in which he had spoken about film's role in Europe, and Europe's present relationship to Britain. The speech was economically rendered, but urgent and unequivocal in its diagnosis of political crisis in Europe and the U.K., and of film's role as a remedy:
We discussed the speech, and his intentions with it. I asked him how much some of the ideas in The White Crow—the way ballet could move across borders, like the films he describes—were on his mind when he delivered the speech.
“I just had an instinct, that I wanted to say how much, how important I felt the community of filmmakers are, and given what this was, I would really be meaning European filmmakers, at the time when my own country is divided about what it means to be linked to Europe,” he said. “Not that countries have to make films that express [exclusively] their culture.… The pleasure is that I see a French film and meditate on what it, being an Englishman, what it says to me…it offers up new provocations, and also confirms common identity of being a human being. And I do feel, I suppose it links what I hope is identifiable in the film: [that he is] being moved and therefore changed by exposure to a work of art. It's a dialogue.”
There are the works of art in The White Crow, I said, and also the cities themselves. Before Nureyev sees the performances or the paintings, he's walking about first Leningrad and then Paris, experiencing that new feeling of somewhere else, letting it in. Fiennes doesn't shy away from his comparable feelings for Russia. The feelings you discover when a place becomes for you the people who live there and not just the political systems that dominate headlines.
“I've formed over the years a handful of friendships in Russia, a handful who are very important to me, and I love going there. And I'm aware of the… I mean the authoritarian nature of their regime that's in control of mostly all the press, and the creep of censorship and control, is very disturbing. But when I'm there, I sort of: There's life going on. I see amazing theater plays, and I have friendships with people.… What interested me was the common humanity underneath the ideological, political fisticuffs.”
I said that hearing about his friends in Russia reminded me of the same dynamic in the United States, the dissonance between the noise of American politics and the lives of most Americans, how most people have nothing to do with the political headlines, how most people are trying to do their best, to generally be kind to their neighbors.
“That's it. Exactly. Exactly. I'm sure that, you know… I mean, nothing that I read about Republican politics makes me think I would ever be sympathetic…but I'm sure that I could go to a Republican community in America and be welcomed, and looked after, and treated with extraordinary generosity and decency and kindness, and those people might go support a Republican candidate the next day.”
That continued exchange between human beings, whether ultimately fruitless or not, seems critical to Fiennes. And art continues to be one of the pre-eminent currencies of at least the exchange of culture.
“Ballet, not being connected to any spoken language, is an extraordinary communicator.… And as an audience member, whether it's a film, or a ballet, or a play, it feels so important to me that we have the privilege of being exposed to these things.... This is the one area, cultural interaction…where we can talk to each other. So when that's impacted, it seems serious.”
We discussed performers and companies struggling to get visas.
“I'm not saying that they're not coming anymore, but it is a challenge that you have to get a visa to go to Russia. And it's funny, isn't it, that I think the cultural interchange, interaction, exhibitions, theater, ballet, coming, that is where we can be like—”
Fiennes threaded his fingers together, hopefully, like hands in prayer.
Daniel Riley is GQ's features editor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2019 issue.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Scandebergs
Styled by Jon Tietz
Grooming by Ciona Johnson-King
Set design by Zach Apo-Tsang at Magnet Agency
Produced by Samira Anderson/Mai Productions