National Post Article

A psychopathic killer and a gentleman: Ralph Fiennes has taken a dark turn in his recent film roles
By Barrett Hooper

In fact, there's little about Fiennes' appearance or manner to suggest he's anything but a British gentleman. The romantic lead in The English Patient and The End of the Affair, he is handsome in a Michaelangelo's David sort of way, and charming in a Cary Grant sort of way. Not a dandy -- in fact, he comes across as quite masculine -- just very, very proper. But as an actor, Fiennes is going through a bit of a dark period. He plays Francis Dolarhyde, the titular serial killer in the Silence of the Lambs prequel Red Dragon, which opens today, and a man struggling with schizophrenia in David Cronenberg's Spider. "Now people are going to be wondering, 'What's wrong with Ralph Fiennes?' " he says with a flash of near-perfect smile. Based on the Thomas Harris novel that marked the first appearance of Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon begins with Lecter's capture at the hands of FBI agent Will Graham (Edward Norton), and follows Graham as he uses Lecter to help track down Dolarhyde. Dolarhyde's worship of Lecter is matched only by the brutality of the murders he commits, which always end with shards of glass jammed into his victims' eyes.

"Why he does these things, it's about feeling omnipotent," says Fiennes, choosing his words carefully and obviously still struggling himself to fully understand his character's motivations. "It's a very ancient, primitive, ritualistic thing. The blood of others empowers him."

Unlike The Silence of the Lambs, where Buffalo Bill was merely a flesh dress-wearing sideshow freak in Lecter's three-ring circus of liver-loving carnage, Red Dragon truly is a tale of two psychos.

Lecter's thrust-and-parry with Graham is paralleled by a much gentler give-and-take between Dolarhyde and his girlfriend, Reba, a naive blind woman played by Emily Watson. "The heart of the film is the relationship between Ralph and Emily and that gives it an emotional centre," says director Brett Ratner (Rush Hour).

While on the surface Dolarhyde seems like just another "cardboard cutout psychopath," Fiennes says seeing him through this relationship and through the eyes, so to speak, of a blind woman, is what sets the character apart. "We get to see a man struggling with how to deal with emotions, how to relate intimately with someone," says Fiennes, who found the biographical detail in the source novel the most interesting part of the story. He prepared for the role by studying the writings of serial killers.

"They are quite articulate and highly intelligent, some of them, and very narcissistic," he says. "They write at length about their pain, they have massive egos, but they're full of it really."

When it comes right down to it, Red Dragon, like the other films in the series, is all about the cannibal. But after Ridley Scott's Hannibal seemed to take the character about as far as he could go -- "almost to the point of becoming his own parody," says Hopkins, "when he says things like 'Okey-dokey' " -- and the lukewarm critical reception the film received, Hopkins was initially quite reticent to revisit cinema's most popular villain. That Red Dragon had already made it to the big screen once before when Michael Mann turned it into the 1986 neon-and-pastel cult favourite Manhunter starring Brian Cox as Lecter was further reason not to go back for thirds.

But he was soon swayed by the script by Ted Tally, who won an Oscar for adapting The Silence of the Lambs (Tally refused to write Hannibal), and the cast, including Fiennes, Norton, Watson, Harvey Keitel as Graham's FBI boss (a role played by Scott Glenn in The Silence of the Lambs) and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a nosy journalist.

That Ratner intended to shift the tone away from Hannibal's goriness and toward Silence's white-knuckling tension only made the project that much more appealing. "I'm not making a horror film, I'm leaving it up to audience's imagination," says Ratner. "It's more psychological even than Silence."

Surprisingly for an actor whose best-known character views the human anatomy as a five-course meal, Hopkins "wanted some of the gory bits [in the script] toned down, not that I'm squeamish," he says. "And I wanted to keep away from the campy stuff and play it with more menace, drop the mask once in a while and show Will Graham what a monster Lecter really is."

But that doesn't mean audiences won't be rooting for Lecter in Red Dragon. "He isn't a hero although I know there are people who like him," Hopkins says. "It's strange, because he is after all nuts." And while Lecter is often compared to other classic screen villains, from Darth Vader to Dracula, Hopkins actually finds stronger comparisons among the classics of literature.

"He has the Grand Guignol way of Iago in Othello, or Richard III, or Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, who is so diabolical and so charming and so daring and sexy, like Lecter. They're fascinating characters. And they walk the razor's edge between life and death and they tempt fate and they are great showy villains because they're smart, and audiences root for them although they're terrified by them."

In the end, though, it comes back to Fiennes' performance as Dolarhyde to centre the movie. "We really needed a strong, accomplished actor who could not only portray this character, but who would be just as interesting to watch as Lecter," says Ratner.

The first person to win a Tony award for portraying Hamlet on Broadway, Fiennes knows a thing or two about portraying complex and tormented individuals. But unlike in Shakespeare, it wasn't the dialogue but rather the lack of dialogue that he connected to.

"There's a minimalist nature [to Dolarhyde] that I like very much," says Fiennes, a quality he also found in the title role in Spider, with Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne. That character speaks almost entirely in mumbles and gibberish. "They are both almost monosyllabic, not knowing what to say socially, not at ease with intimacy of any kind."

While Fiennes admits he hasn't made it easy for casting directors to see him in anything other than "Brit roles, which often are more interesting to play and have more meat on the bone," he would love to get "a f--- off leading role" in a big American film and get away from "Englishy roles." To that end, he co-stars opposite Jennifer Lopez in the romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan, due out in December.

"For so long I've waited for something light and charming and not high on angst. And it was quite challenging to me," he says. "I walk into the room, smile, shake Jennifer's hand and look like I like her. And I'm like, 'Is that it? Isn't there a terrible tragedy I have to play underneath?' "

And how did working opposite Lopez compare with working with Watson? "I didn't get to eat Jennifer," he says, with a thin-lipped smile only a cannibal could love.

El Stepho Zone