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He has mastered Hamlet, brought the coldest of Nazis to life and made Americans take a hard look at their morally bereft television generation through an erudite whiz kid gone astray.
Ask actor Ralph Fiennes, veteran of London's Royal Shakespeare Company, what movie captures his imagination, though, and two unexpected words emerge from his mouth in a buttery British cadence: "Terminator II."
"I found that an amazing movie," says Fiennes. "It was reworking the themes of hell and heaven--this evil monster that's set to destroy and the force of good that resists it. It was classic."
On a recent gloomy afternoon, the heartbreakingly handsome and brooding Brit sips English breakfast tea, stares out a skyscraper window and discusses the finer points of Schwarzenegger films.
The occasion is his own foray into science fiction, Kathryn Bigelow's "Strange Days." In it, he plays Lenny Nero, an ex-L.A. cop with greasy hair, two-day stubble and polyblend outfits, who traffics sporadically in a new technology dubbed "Squid tapes" -- people's actual experiences, sexual and otherwise, recorded digitally on diskette and bought and sold illegally for vicarious thrills.
As with many of his roles, Fiennes incarnates Lenny as an ethereal figure who wanders through the film, unsure whether to choose good or evil.
Fiennes likes it that way -- the moral ambiguity of "sort-of" and "kind-of" characters with inherent goodness that is corrupted by the world.
"I love flawed heroes," Fiennes says. "I'm a great fan of them. They're just the kind of people that interest me." His other two well-known movie roles, if not heroes, certainly had their flaws.
His first big-time American movie role was Amon Goeth, the pot-bellied, nasty-to-the-soul Nazi commandant in the Academy Award-winning "Schindler's List". It earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor and the repugnance -- and subsequent admiration -- of audiences.
Last year, he portrayed another real-life anti-hero -- Charles Van Doren -- in Robert Redford's "Quiz Show". Van Doren, the son of one of America's most famous literary and intellectual families, earned fame and misfortune as a network pawn during the TV game-show scandals of the 1950's. Redford has said he chose Fiennes after seeing in his eyes "pain, vulnerability and intelligence."
Even when Fiennes is not acting, those traits come through. He is kind of ethereal himself; just to be in the man's presence is a strange experience. He has the odd effect of slowing down time -- an hourlong interview feels like three -- and his words often trail off into reveries of self-contemplation.
He lights up -- if one can call it that -- only when asked about the intricacies of his craft and the characters he portrays.
"I'm interested in the way that fundamental goodness in people can win or lose against human fallibility and weakness -- about the people who make mistakes, the weaker people, those who can somehow survive their faults," Fiennes says.
"Hamlet is the quintessential version of that. It's seemingly clear what his course of action is, yet he's constantly examining his inability to take action."
Fiennes, who finished Hamlet in July, is shooting a new film "The English Patient," in Italy and North Africa. It is, he says, a film about "four people with a past who come together in a World War II setting."
He plays a desert explorer, a distant man -- surprise --
nursing an obsession about what the desert does to people,
how it reduces and denudes them.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on August 27, 1997
EL STEPHO