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"It is a great part," smiles Ralph Fiennes, who has to spend six hours in make-up to have a huge tatoo of the Dragon etched onto his back. "It has some wonderful high-octane scenes that are quite, well, scary. He is a psychopathic paranoid-schizophrenic. It all rings true, his condition." Fiennes spent time at a state high security psychiatric hostpital meeting the real deal, people who had done terrible things. What he couldn't escape was the simple fact that they remained human beings. He found it profoundly sad.
"I took that away with me. One must remember when doing parts like these, that these people came into the world innocent."
He discovered a degree of empathy to make Dolarhyde real.
According to Ratner, Fiennes beat Sean Penn and Nicholas Cage to the role, but was de rigueur for Red Dragon, it still took the miraculous script to tempt him.
"When I picked up the script, I though, 'Whoa, not another Hannibal movie,' " he recalls, " but it was the script - I couldn't stop turning the page."
All the same, it must be quite weird when someone phones up to say you'd make the perfect serial killer?
Fiennes pauses to look at Empire judging the tone of the question: "I suppose I've done parts of people that are divided or kind of torn in some way, os psychologically unhappy. I guess the character I played in Schindler's List is kind of psychopathic."
Just for added effect, he complestes his answer with an exaggerated leer in Empire's direction.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on September 12, 2002
EL STEPHO