Taking lead in bloody tragedy
SITTING on a sofa in a West End hotel in London, Ralph Fiennes’ intense eyes are focused intently on a prize.
A waiter is removing a plate of cakes and buns from the table, prompting Fiennes to politely reach out to keep the confectionery in place, and then order a fresh cup of tea.
Fiennes needs the sugar rush. He has a mild dose of flu, and sounds disconcertingly like his raspy uber-villain Voldemort from the Harry Potter series.
The 49-year-old is meeting the Irish Examiner to discuss Coriolanus, his directorial debut, in which he also stars. It’s a modern-day adaptation of one of Shakepeare’s lesser-known plays. Set in a contemporary cityscape, the film retains the Bard’s language.
Fiennes lived in Ireland as a child in the mid-1970s. The eldest of six children — his siblings include film-maker Martha and fellow actor Joseph — he spent four years in Kilkenny, and later west Cork, after his parents, Mark, a photographer, and Jennifer, a writer, moved the family from Ipswich.
Fiennes says it was a happy time, even if the sojourn was unsuccessful. “It seemed to us as children to be a formative experience,” he says. “My father bought a handful of sites and land in west Cork on which he planned to build a house for us. It didn’t work because my father didn’t have a clear way of making a living there. He was brilliant with his hands but he wasn’t a property developer.
“It was like this extraordinary adventure. It was fraught with my parents’ anxiety about how they were going to make it work, but it started off with my mother, particularly, saying that this is the place we should live. Something about Ireland spoke to her soul. Maybe it was a combination of being a writer and loving Irish literature, and being Catholic and having a lot of children. I think she felt a sense of recognition there.”
In Coriolanus, Fiennes plays Caius Martius Coriolanus, a feared Roman general at odds with the city of Rome and his fellow citizens. Pushed by his controlling and ambitious mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) to seek the powerful position of Consul, Coriolanus proves a poor politician and alienates the masses.
His anger prompts a riot that culminates in Coriolanus’s expulsion from Rome and the forging of an alliance with his sworn enemy, Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), to take his revenge on the city.
Fiennes played the title role on stage in London and New York in 2000, and was intrigued by the possibilities cinema would give him to explore the performance further.
“I thought the play offered a really strong filmic dimension,” Fiennes says. “For instance, you have these high-definition protagonists with all these shifts in dramatic emphasis, plus there’s a war and a battle. I felt that if you could realise that in a properly filmic scale, that is, not shoot in a warehouse but take it out into the real world, then you’d have a very strong political thriller with a lot of resonances about things going on today.”
The relevance to our troubled age is in its themes of social inequality, civilian unrest, riots, protests, and political bickering. Some scenes in the movie recall recent protests in Greece or across the Arab world.
“We had our first outing in Berlin in February of last year, when all the protests were happening in Cairo, so it was really pertinent,” Fiennes says. “But I think the things in Coriolanus are always happening. It’s just that now they’ve reached a point of critical mass and the world is in a state of uncertainty.”
He says: “What I love about it is that Shakespeare has a bigger perspective than the endless shifts of power. What is right? What is wrong? What do people really want in a strong leader? This is a pattern and it’s particular to nowhere. It’s a global, ongoing dysfunction.”
Fiennes says he wasn’t put off by Coriolanus being one of Shakespeare’s more obscure plays. “I think the whole point is to do one that people don’t know,” he says. “Shakespeare has many plays that aren’t as well known, and they’re all amazing because they’re much more ambivalent and weird and quirky.
“I like this jagged, hard, austere piece and that it confronts an audience. The audience is challenged as to where to put its allegiance.
“In a perverse way, I like Coriolanus because he’s so hard to like. I don’t always want protagonists to be likeable. Likeable is kind of deadly.”
When pitching the idea to producers, Fiennes says a common response was, ‘Wow. But will you be keeping Shakepeare’s dialogue?’ Again, the star stuck to his guns.
“I think that was the big worry factor: that the dialogue is the turn-off for people,” he says. “But [screenwriter] John Logan shares my passion for language and what the language can do, and we quickly decided not to rewrite it.
“I think Shakespeare is experimenting with the English language. He’s inventing phrases and sentence structures. In fact, Shakespeare’s earliest writing is more accessible than his later style, where he’s really experimenting. That can be thrilling to the ear, but you are challenged. It’s like looking at a complex painting or listening to a difficult piece of music.”
Fiennes says that double-jobbing on the film was “very, very hard, and it was a bit mad. The days I wasn’t acting, I was relieved. But underneath it all there was a thrill about it. It was a huge adrenaline rush. I’d been thinking about it for a long time and I had an amazing crew around me. I suppose I feel now, in hindsight, that I’d like to do it again but I don’t know if I’d act and direct again.”
The actor’s CV continues to be as varied as ever. Right now, he’s shooting an as-yet unspecified role in the next Bond movie, Skyfall (“Oh, all this speculation is classified information,” he says, smiling), while audiences will next see him reprise the role of Hades in the CGI-fest sequel, Wrath of the Titans. After that comes Magwitch in Mike Newell’s new adaptation of Great Expectations (penned by One Day writer David Nicholls).
“I don’t buy into the idea that you have to be one thing or the other,” he says of mixing art-house and blockbuster projects.
“It’s absolutely the case that the high profile and the incredible opportunity I got on Harry Potter to reach such a wide audience makes something like this a lot more viable. I’m an actor for hire.”
* Coriolanus goes on general release on January 20.
