‘Conclave’, ’28 Years Later’ & More

Ralph Fiennes arrives for an interview with Deadline in the cramped manager’s office at the Prince Charles Cinema just off London’s Leicester Square and it is too small to swing a cat. “Mind your head,” he calls to a visitor about to be knocked out by a low beam.

“Is this divine intervention?” I joke. It’s a pertinent point, considering Fiennes plays Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the Dean of Cardinals, the Vatican’s most powerful figure after the pope, in Edward Berger’s Conclave.

The role was gifted to Fiennes by producer Tessa Ross and has garnered the actor his third Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actor. His first Hollywood movie saw him get a Best Supporting nod for his role as the cruel Amon Göth in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. And Fiennes’ first Best Actor nomination was for Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient. 

As Cardinal Lawrence it’s as if he’s born to the order. He has a handsome, patrician, almost regal bearing— really, it’s no surprise to learn he’s distantly related to King Charles, since both are direct descendants of James II of Scotland.

On this winter’s night, although far from his character’s Vatican setting, Fiennes still cuts a dash in denim and a woolly sweater. He’s just wrapped up a Q&A event at the Prince Charles, before meeting me in this tiny office.

In Conclave, Fiennes herds the cardinals toward the election of a new pope after the existing Supreme Pontiff has been discovered dead in bed. And Fiennes wears the garb effortlessly. Oftentimes, some actors look ill-suited to wear ancient attire. But after four decades playing practically every major role in Shakespeare’s canon, and other classical roles to boot, he wears the costume well, it must be said.

Fiennes tells me he used to believe that make-up and wigs are applied so that the actor can become the character and completely disappear themselves. He says, “I used to think, ‘Oh, how much can you change and be utterly completely different and no one recognizes you?’”

That was way back. Now, he brings up the actor Charles Laughton — who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Henry VIII in The Private Life of Henry VIII and was celebrated for playing Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame — as proof that the essence of an actor actually comes through the layers of disguise. “I think we read the soul of the actor there,” Fiennes says.

On the topic of how the actor must deeply connect to their audience, Fiennes had, earlier in the evening, quoted to the Q&A audience something the late critic Roger Ebert had said: “The closeup is the eyes to the window to the soul.” He added, “I think it’s true, I think if that inner spirit of the actor’s soul is alive and not hidden, or sat on, I think then that often we connect.”

He recalls the beautifully delivered speech his Cardinal Lawrence character gives in Conclave where he expresses doubt, saying, “Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.” And for Fiennes, “That speech was a gift,” he says. “It was in the book and it’s in the script. I think everyone felt it was a wonderful intelligent provocation about the nature of belief and faith. And even if you’re not religious, I think the principle of asking questions is a good one to hold onto. I think all the importance of tolerance, is never more important in the world than right now. And so I think sometimes you get to say things as an actor, which speak to you a little more profoundly than perhaps other speeches do. So I think I felt a deeper connection to the essential argument or sentiment of that speech,” he explains.

“I was brought up a Catholic, I rejected the doctrines and dogmas and the sort of sense of certainty in the church. I was about 13, but I’ve never lost curiosity about faith, about any spiritual path. There’s the mystery Lawrence talks about, so I connected with some of the themes in the speech,” he continues.

Is that an illustration of the essence of Ralph Fiennes combining with the essence of Cardinal Lawrence?

“It is hard to describe one’s own essence,” Fiennes says. “I think as I go off to work more and more that I come less with preconceived ideas, to be open to the part. Because I think there’s so many infinite ways that any part can be played. There’s a healthy creative tension between, ‘I come with an idea, but can I be open to what else is happening?’ And then what the director brings, the other actors bring. When I was younger, it was, ‘There must be the answer to this part.’ How do I suppose, for want of a better word, nail it? But you realize you can’t ever nail anything. You just have to be open.”

He continues: “I think being on stage in front of an audience, is really the real test of an actor. I do feel that, because you can’t escape or you can’t say ‘Cut’ or you can’t say, ‘Can I have another take?’ And so you have to be present. And I think experience teaches you that if you try to repeat it every night, it gets brittle and it loses life. There’s a baseline of stuff that you repeat, sure, but within that, how do you keep flexible? How do you keep open in life? If I’m playing Macbeth every night, [as he was on a recent stage tour] I want to be open in the moment. Hopefully, with my screen partner recently, the wonderful Indira [Varma], there’s a dance. If you dance with someone, you have to feel their energy, their pulse.”

Fiennes has been a creature of the stage since his days studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where his contemporaries included Iain Glen, Jane Horrocks, David Morrissey, Paul Rhys, Joely Richardson and Jason Watkins.

He went straight from RADA into a repertory season at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, his first professional role being Curio in a 1985 production there of Twelfth Night, later he made his first leap to a title part, playing one of the star-crossed lovers in Romeo & Juliet. 

After that, the Royal Shakespeare Company came banging on his door, and it was there that he cemented his reputation, because he was both gifted and suave. He appeared in a dozen RSC productions. Sam Mendes directed him in Troilus and Cressida, opposite Amanda Root and Simon Russell Beale. He also played a striking Edmund in Nicholas Hytner’s production of King Lear.

Those were important connections — Mendes later cast Fiennes in Skyfall as Gareth Mallory, who becomes M at the end of the movie.

He has acted with his old friend Russell-Beale several times over the years, indeed he recently completed work on Hytner’s new film The Choral, written by Alan Bennett. Set in a fictional Yorkshire town during World War II, it also stars Russell Beale.

The Choral is in post, as is Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, filmed in North Yorkshire. Of the latter, Fiennes says, It’s about an England “full of infected people. I’m not one of them,” he says laughing. There’s little more he’s willing to say for fear of the producers knee-capping him. “I can tell you there’s a fantastic set built out of bones,” he teases.

Later this year, as first reported in Deadline, Fiennes is guest artistic director of the Theatre Royal Bath for a season beginning in June, where he will play opposite Miranda Raison in the world premiere of David Hare’s new play Grace Pervades, directed by Jeremy Herrin, where the pair portray Victorian era theatre greats, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry.

Later, in August, he’ll direct Harriet Walter and Gloria Obisanya in As You Like It. Come October, Fiennes will star in Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s play Small Hotel, staged by Holly Race-Roughan.

During the audience Q&A, he was asked, if the theatre acting is the real test of an actor because you’re in front of a live audience and you can’t hide, then does he feel that acting on screen is, well, cheating? “No, I don’t think that. Never is it cheating,” he says. Afterwards, in the manager’s office during our one-to-one chat, he expounds on this, saying, “Sometimes you’re called on to be very naked emotionally in front of the camera. So it’s not cheating. Weirdly, if you have a difficult emotional scene to play, for instance, you’ve only got so much juice to do it maybe once or twice, maybe a third [time]. After that, you can’t do it. I mean you can indicate or you can do a goodish job.”

He mentions the  Hungarian director István Szabó, who won a Best International Film Oscar for Mephisto. Fiennes starred in his epic 1999 movie, Sunshine.

“When I first met [Szabó], he said, ‘For me cinema is about the closeup, when thoughts and emotions are born on the face for the first time.’ He wanted to capture the virgin take where he would say, ‘Please, please rehearse. but only technically.’ The ideal was that the first time you go is the time it’s purest, which relates to that night on stage. You’ve just gotten that one chance.”

When we first see him as Cardinal Lawrence in Conclave, Fiennes is walking with such an energy and purpose. And it feels a though only an actor who has mastered both stage and screen arts can pull such a propulsion off.

Was a sense of purpose for Lawrence discussed with Berger, whom Fiennes calls “a dream director”?

“I remember Edward saying, ‘You’ve got the call, you’ve got to get there.’ Actually scenes were cut out where Lawrence wakes up and he’s aware something’s happened. And so it was that momentum that was important, and I think that was something Edward encouraged.”

“Lawrence is highly alert to everything that’s going on. He’s not sitting in a dreamy miasma, he’s the Dean of the Vatican, he’s got really executive muscle. If I think back to the part, he’s someone who listens and he’s  really alert  to every moment of what’s  happening and has to think fast.”

Fiennes is getting ready to leave now. There’s an air of momentum about him for sure, as he has another appointment to get to tonight. But before he goes, is there any other character that he equates to Cardinal Lawrence? He puts down his backpack again, considering and mentions Vincentio, the Duke in Measure for Measure, who departs Vienna only to return disguised as a friar to observe whether certain laws of morality are being observed. “I’ve never played him, but he watches and he listens while incognito,” he says. Then he adds, “Henry VI has a great spiritual integrity, even though he’s a terrible king, and I think Lawrence has something of that as well.”