Time Out New York Article

October 4-11, 1995

By Holly Millea

Ralph Fiennes specializes in characters who could use a good therapist: lovesick Heathcliff, Hitler groupie Amon Goeth, quiz show cheater Charles Van Doren, the skull-smooching Hamlet, and now Lenny Nero - the Strange Days anit-hero who spends his days reviving a dysfunctional relationship and his nights navigating L.A.'s digital underground and peddling outlawed virtual reality clips. Like that other famous Nero, this character fiddles around while the city burns. "Lenny's kind of a screwed-up asshole," says Fiennes, smiling. "He's not really dark; he's actually anice guy. He's just wrapped up on the wrong side of the fence at the moment."

"Ralph's doing the chameleon act," says Strange Days producer Steven Charles Jaffe. "He's playing another character you wouldn't imagine him playing." True, a graduate of England's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts might not seem an obvious choice to portray a Valley boy, but Jaffe sensed the necessary dynamic. "You can be a sexy actor," he explains, "but without intelligence behind the eyes and without an emotional vulnerability, it's all one-dimensional." Besides, adds Jaffe, "I've been doing this for 24 years and it's really hard to find a gem in this polluted ocean."

Night was the natural setting for director Kathryn Bigelow's bleak vision. "Her films do have a dark side," Fiennes concedes. "But she doesn't. She's got a great sense of humor." And yet, he adds, "I think Kathryn would admit that she's fascinated by the darker things in humanity and that they've brought out by her work. And so am I."

Fiennes joined co-stars Angela Basset and Juliette Lewis in a vampiric existence while filming, rising to work after sunset and crawling back under the covers near sunrise. "I liked the perverseness of it." he says.

That's not to say that Fiennes himself needs to spend time with a shrink. "Ralph is a great pretender," says Steven Spielberg, who directed him to an Oscar nomination in Schindler's List. "He can convince us that he is the darkness when the role calls for that."

It is a powerful gift to be able to make even the most disturbed character strangely, uncomfortably appealing. After Shindler's List, long before Quiz Show opened, Fiennes found himself embraced by the critics and in vogue with the filmmaking elite. But at what price? What does Hollywood expect from him? "Does Hollywood know what it expects?" counters Fiennes uneasily. "Doesn't it just look to see what someone does, and then there will be a sort of movement, a rippling effect, and then they'll decide how they should react? I'm guessing."

Jaffe likens Fiennes' capabilities to those of Daniel Day-Lewis - "who, on the one hand, does My Left Foot, and then turns around and does Last of the Mohicans." Offers the producer, "I don't think Ralph has any need to take roles for the sake of keeping working. He's very shrewd and very cautious about what he wants to do."

Asked how he chooses his characters, the actor replies, "They seems to have always sought me out." Maybe that explains why, when most in his position would be calculating a blatant play for box office success, Fiennes chose as his next project the titular role in The English Patient, opposite his Wuthering Heights costar Juliette Binoche. The film is based on Michael Ondaatje's Booker-prize winning novel about a burn victim shot down during World War II.

The appeal of the role is probably traceable to Fiennes' early years. His younger sister Martha, a film director, recalls that when Ralph was growing up, "he had a great passion for military history - he was mad about model soldiers. He used to love painting their uniforms on. And he knew all about fighter planes."

Ondaatje's early works top his reading list, in addition to anything written by Cormac McCarthy. "No one told me to read them," he notes. "All of the things I most treasure, in terms of experiencing art, are things that I've discovered myself. That's true of other actors as well. I love to go see a film and discover an actor I've not read anything about."

Which was precisely the world's reaction to him. Soon Strange Days will open and cause a whole new ripple affecting how he is perceived. But while Hollywood is busy resetting its expectations, Fiennes will have long since escaped into yet another troubled, troubling persona. "You've got to go on and do your work," he says, taking a breath. "You can't make decisions about your life and your work based on what other people might think - it's crazy."