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At one point - between takes of a scene in which Fiennes, as a debonair assemblyman, is hounded by a knot of reporters and paparazzi - the actor steps behind the soundman to greet his girlfriend, the British stage actress Francesca Annis, who is visiting the set for the first time. A real-life paparazzo, who happens to be standing a few feet away, quickly grabs the shot that, within a few days, will appear in Star Magazine bearing the caption, "Ralph Fiennes' gal pal Francesca Annis flew to New York after he was rumored to be romancing Lopez."
Of course, those "rumors" were based on little more than another set of paparazzi shots, published in the New York Post a week before, in which Fiennes and Lopez are seen walking down West Broadway together (in the company of Lopez manager, Benny Medina) after dinner at downtown Cipriani. This rather benign "photo exclusive," as the tabloid dubbed it, ran on page three under the provocative headline WE CATCH SEXPOT WITH RALPH FIENNES.
Fiennes has had his share of press attention in the past, but such breathlessness coincides with a new stage in his career: the actor's recent (and no doubt temporary) shift from high-minded period films to emphatically mainstream studio movies: The Chambermaid and Red Dragon, the forthcoming prequel to The Silence of the Lambs.
"Believe me, photographers weren't clamoring to get onto the Onegin set," Fiennes jokes wryly a few days later in a suite at the Mercer Hotel, referring to his 199 film based on Alexander Pushkin's Romantic poem. "We didn't have hordes of the chasing us around St. Petersburg."
Asked about the Post layout, he hints that the pictures may not have been entirely on the up-and-up. "I couldn't help feeling that the whole thing wasn't quite...organic," he says, leaning forward on his chair. "There was one, single, lone paparazzi waiting politely till we left our table to go to the car - who then, in a very unagressive and gentlemanly way, snapped three or four times and disappeared."
So maybe Lopez tipped off the press, to help publicize the movie or to stick it to soon-to-be-ex-husband Cris Judd?
"I don't know anything," Fiennes says with a slight sigh, settling back into his seat.
The truth is, he probably doesn't. It may come as a bit of a shock to anyone who caught his indelible performance as the murderous Nazi commandant Amon Goeth in Schindler's List - the role that won him his first Oscar nomination and turned him almost overnight from a Shakespearean actor little known outside British stage cirlces and into a major international star - but in person, Fiennes, who's 39, seems more than ingenue than villan, an endearingly gentle naif in the guise of a devastatingly handsome leading man.
"I was suprised how light and funny he can be," says Lopez, who giggles at the suggestion that she might have informed the media of their dinner date, then resolutely denies it. "He's really boyish. When he really lets go and smiles, it's like a little kid. You would think the opposite, because he has a really mature way about him on-screen, but he really has that sweet side in person."
Emily Watson, Fiennes' co-star in Red Dragon, notes, "He's not suave, as you might expect. He gets embarrassed. He's very charming but in a really kind of awkward way. It's quite funny. He seems a little bit like a man who's uncomfortable in his own skin, who really comes alive when he's acting."
"I've heard people refer to him as Bambi," says Davis Cronenberg, who directed Fiennes in Spider, an adaptation of the decidedly un-Bambi-like Patrick McGrath novel about a schizophrenic returning to the scene of a childhood trauma, which screens this month at the Toronto Film Festival and is sure to dispel any suggestions that the actor is going Hollywood. Despite Fiennes' heartthrob status, Cronenberg adds, "He only knows about his power and charisma in a theoretical way. I don't think he really feels it or believes it. There's a childlike innocence about him. He's very honest and straightforward, and somehow he manages not to be cynical about the lack of that in other people. He's just genuinely sweet and gentle and shy - although, of course, he can act all of those other things."
Fiennes, who grew up in England and Ireland, the eldest of seven children, got his first taste of theater as a youngster, when his mother, the novelist Jennifer Lash, took him to see Laurence Olivier in Henry V. But he didn't consider becoming an actor himself until midway through art school (he'd intended to be a painter), after winning the role of Romeo in an amateur production. He later studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company.
After Fiennes appeared on "Prime Suspect" and as Heathcliff in a poorly reeived film version of Wuthering Heights, Steven Spielberg came calling, making the actor's ascent one of the most sudden in memory. Turns in Quiz Show, Strange Days and The English Patient (for which he was again nominated for an Academy Award) followed, along with Oscar and Lucinda, The End of the Affair and Sunshine, a little-seen tour de force in which he played three characters, Hungarian Jews of consecutive generations, confronted with the 20th century's growing anti-semitism. In between he found time to play Hamlet in an acclaimed Broadway run and to star in both Coriolanus and Richard II in twin, simultaneously running productions.
Which amounts to considerably more prepartation than is strictly necessary for his forthcoming portrayal of Red Dragon's tatooed fiend Francis Dolarhyde. Fiennes' familiarity with the Romanticc poetry of Dolarhyde's muse, William Blake - "As I understand him, he celebrates the power of darkness and anarchy, which is truly God, which is is the life force and which can also be terrifying, evil and destructive" - was not what won him the part, says director Brett Ratner, who adds, "I just try to hire someone who I is believe isthe guy. " Something of a young turk, Ratner, who made his name with the Rush Hour franchise, admits he and Fiennes had rather dissimilar approaches to the material. "Ralph is used to a director giving him the feeling behind, the motivation behind the...you know," he says. "And I'm not trained in acting, really. I'm used to saying, 'Stand there, say that, do that, speed it up.'"
"Brett has really great instincts," Fiennes says, clad in a pair of brown pants and an unbuttoned Issey Miyake shirt, his Birkenstocks left neatly beside the bed. "I don't know that sometimes the way the way he chose to express himself was always the most enlightening, but after a few takes we would somehow thrash it out and I would find that what he way saying was very good." The final result, they agree, is dead-on.
And when they wrapped for the day, Fiennes was more than eager to soak up the local culture. "Six in the morning, we'd finish shooting, and he'd say, 'I'm amped up. I just killed seven people. Let's go to the beach!'" Ratner recalls. "One time, I told him I'd take him somewhere really amazing: IHoP. He's like 'What's that?' But he's not a snob. He's up for anything. So I take him to the International House of Pancakes on Santa Monica Boulevard at six in the morning, and he's like, 'Wow...', looking at all the people, totally loving the food."
Cronenberg has noted the same wide-eyed openness, reminiscent of a time traveler newly arrived from a simpler age. "He doesn't condescend," says the director. "He's curious, and determined to be a very proper visitor and obey all the local laws."
If so, Fiennes is venturing even further out of his element with The Chambermaid, his first romantic comedy. The choice to costar with Lopez in a bit of mainstream entertainment (albeit on directed by the indie-minded Wayne Wang) is as risky, in it's way, as the notorious Laurence Olivier - Marilyn Monroe matchup, The Prince and the Showgirl. Predictably, word of the project prompted some ribbing from Fiennes' Red Dragon co-star Edward Norton, who soon had the crew addressing him with the hip-hop moniker "Ra.Fi."
Although Fiennes insists he loves movies of all kinds and makes no particular effort to avoid pop culture, he does admit it's far from being one of his passions. Except for the news, for instance, he can't stand TV. "That's one thing Jennifer was completely surprised about," he says. "I didn't know this program, I didn't know that program..."
As for appearing in a comedy, he acknowledges that earlier runs at the form have been found lacking. For instance, before the disastrous adaptation of The Avengers, opposite Uma Thurman, he played the young journalist in an RSC production of The Man Who Came to Dinner. "I was actually not very good," he says with a wince. "In fact, I was told that I was quite bad. It's always been a slightly sensitive area. I knew I wasn't...I couldn't hit it. It was weird, because I thought, I quite enjoy doing this! - even though I knew it wasn't working."
The Chambermaid seems to be going much better. "I think people will be very surprised," Lopez says of his performance. "You're used to seeing him in such serious stuff, and this is very different territory for him. But he's pulling it off beautifully."
"The whole thing about comedy is being real - Be Real," Fiennes says. "But you have to have a sort of internal thing that keeps it light, so it doesn't plunge into angstville. It's definitely a challenge. I look at the great actors who have perfected that technique, like Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Rex Harrison. That ease and lightness and deftness, still being in the moment and real and emotionally coherent - that's quite hard. It's a real skill."
Nevertheless, he welcomes the challenge. "I've been trying to do something lighter, more contemporary, for so long," he explains. "I get really sick of people assuming I only want to play angst-ridden, screwed-up, f--ed-up, repressed people or whatever. People say" - he adopts a nasal whine - "'What are you doing that for?' And you say, 'Well, why not? I'm an actor!'"
Fiennes is, by all accounts, deeply committed to the craft of acting, and all the attention and acclaim, he says, hasn't altered the experience itself in the slightest. "It's still the same, frightening, weird thing to do," he remarks. "A neurotic choice." Why neurotic? "I love it, but it's always scary. It always only exists when you do it, and you never know where it's going to go. And there's always the same insecurity that you won't be able to do it. That doesn't go away. If anything, it gets more scary because the expectations get quite high."
The attention paid to his personal life is another side effect of fame Fiennes doesn't particularly care for. The British tabloid press took great delight in reporting the breakup of his marriage to actress Alex Kingston, of "ER," and his romance with Annis, with whom he now lives in West London. The fact that Annis is 19 years his senior and played Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, to Fiennes' tormented Dane not long after his own mother died of cancer was cause for much dubious pseudo-Freudian conjecture.
Fiennes' bitter experiences with the press no doubt inform his performances in both The Chambermaid, in which reporters constantly hound his character, the scion of a famous political dynasty, about his breakup with a supermodel fiancee, and Red Dragon, which costars Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a reporter so reprehensible he makes Hannibal Lecter look affable.
As for real tabloid gossips, he says, "They're quite destructive. I think they see actors, entertainment people, celebrities, sports personalities, anyone in the media or politics...they pretty much treat them as fair game to write anything insinuating, embarrasing, lurid.
"I try to be polite, but I can think of several four-letter words to describe these people," he continues, his brow darkening as storm clouds seem to gather above his head. "You find yourself in that tunnel of frustration and just think, Whether it's true or not, they just decided to write this, to invade my life with their assumptions, and I could happily smash their heads across a concrete wall..." Fiennes' eyes flash momentarily with rage. "But you've got to let it go. Just move on, move on, because actually nobody is caring. People are going on with their lives and many things are more important. But for that moment, with your vanity hurt or ego bruised or your pride dented..."
As his voice trails off, one wonders what ever became of that gentle naif.
"You know what my relationship with the press is in Red Dragon, right?" Fiennes suddenly demands, grinning. "I get the chance to bite the face off a tabloid journalist."
Right. It seems like a good time to move on to Shakespeare. With the possible exception of Russian literature (he's currently teaching himself Russian to better appreciate Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the original), probably nothing gives him more pleasure. "That's what excited me as a kid, and it goes on exciting me now," he says, visibly warming to the topic. "I get upset when I meet people who say, 'Surely classical theater is redundant. Do we really need it? What's the point of it?' and I so believe the opposite. It may challenge us linguistically, but emotionally and intellectually and spiritually, iti is completely, absolutely in sync. I never want to lose sight of what an extraordinary thing it is to be able to inhabit those words as an actor, how it feeds you in a way."
And while The Chambermaid and Red Dragon may seem a long way from Stratford-upon-Avon, they're both informed, like the most contemporary comedy and drama, by certain Shakespearean tendencies.
"You could make a very good case for the similarities between Hannibal Lecter and Iago," he says excitedly, "the person who espouses evil, gets up in front of an audience and says, 'This is what I am, this is who I am, now watch me do it.' Absolutely. And The Chambermaid is so rich in diverse characters, all with their little emotional needs, desires, aspirations. You could certainly argue that's Shakespearean."
Fiennes' mind is humming now. He's out of his chair, pacing, energized and totally sincere. And just like that, the storm clouds lift and the callow youth is back.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on September 12, 2002
EL STEPHO