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``Nothing is too much for John Steed. The only time he is deeply angry is when someone punctures his bowler hat with a dart; that makes him very cross.''
Based on the popular British television series of the '60s, ``The Avengers'' stars Fiennes opposite Uma Thurman's Mrs. Peel. They play a pair of ultra-hip crime fighters who prefer to dispatch the villains of the world with a minimum of weaponry. But while Fiennes retains Steed's strict, very '60s dress code of suit, bowler and umbrella, and Thurman sports Mrs. Peel's sexy leather catsuit, the movie version has been updated to the '90s. And this time our heroes have to do battle with a larger-than-life evil mastermind, Sir August De Wynter (played by Sean Connery), who is determined to dominate the planet by controlling its weather.
Fiennes, who says he was a ``big fan'' of the TV series, reports that the movie version is ``very much tongue-in-cheek'' and will feature a surprise appearance by Patrick Macnee, the British actor who played the original Steed. ``Actually, I felt slight trepidation doing it, because Patrick created Steed,'' Fiennes admits.
So how does he play the famous role? ``I just thought Steed was that perennial English gentleman, from any time in this century,'' the actor explains. ``He sort of has no age, whereas Emma Peel is the real modern. Everything in her flat is ultra-modern, and she is sort of the new modern woman and in charge of herself.
``(Steed) is a traditionalist, and the film, as in the old TV series, focuses on the play between her independence and femininity and sexuality and his somehow very dressed-up containedness and precision. It's in that sort of sexual tension that their partnership works.''
Mrs. Peel may be the ``really cool and sexy'' one of the pair, as Fiennes puts it, but in real life the quicksilver actor who appears to be equally at home playing a murderous Nazi in ``Schindler's List'' as a hideously disfigured spy in ``The English Patient,'' has become quite the sex symbol himself. Fiennes squirms uncomfortably at mention of this. ``I'm always bemused by that because I don't quite know what it means really,'' he says. ``I sort of feel that's a media term, sex symbol.''
So how does the reluctant sex symbol feel about fame? ``I feel it's sort of the double-edged sword,'' he says. ``The feeling of being successful is a great feeling, and a hit like `The English Patient' helps you get movies like `The Avengers,' and people come up to you and say that they like your work and that's wonderful. But I think it can distort your approach to living everyday life, (then) I think it's very dangerous.''
However, he does not allow fame to limit his freedom, at least not severely. ``No, I don't really feel that,'' he states. ``But increasingly I feel I do get recognized going out, and it's all very complimentary and flattering, but it's not the same as it was. I'm not anonymous now if I walk around London, which is where I live. So the downside is that people want you to become public property. They want you pretending to be someone as on film. So I don't really enjoy it, although I think I'm beginning to accept that it's part of the job.''
Advice from a veteran, his ``Avengers'' co-star Sean Connery, helped Fiennes out in that department. ``Meeting Sean Connery, who for a whole lifetime has had this sort of intrusion and just shrugs it off -- that taught me a lot about how it doesn't matter,'' he notes. ``It's like water off a duck's back to him. I saw from that that it's not going to kill me.''
Fiennes also has come to terms with the pervasive feeling that he was ``just the latest flavor of the year. It's past now,'' he says, ``and there are other flavors and other films, and you recognize that that's the pattern that goes on. The focus is on the hot films, the hot actors, and (the media) will talk about them and write about them, and six months later it's something else. So I think you have to just be consistent in the private areas of your life, and just let each moment unfold for itself.
``I think the dangerous thing is to
feel that if you are not in the papers,
there is a problem. If your film is not a
success, there's a problem. There isn't a
problem really.''
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on September 7, 1998
EL STEPHO