The Express on Sunday
16 June, 2002
By Garth Pearce

(Note: it's our experience that Garth Pearce recycles old material along with the "new" when he writes articles like this so you may have already read this...)

JOSEPH FIENNES spent seven days in bed with Heather Graham on the set of his new film, Killing Me Softly. The sexual chemistry had to be powerful, passionate and no-holds barred.

And, insists Fiennes, it was some of the toughest acting of his life.

"We were making an erotic thriller, which has been done before and not always that well," he says. "We couldn't be too explicit, because the scenes would have had to be cut. But it had to tackle sex in such a way to make the audience feel it had not been cheated."

Fiennes, 32, has had his moments before. In Elizabeth, he played the lusty Earl of Dudley who courted Queen Elizabeth, played by Cate Blanchett, and took her virginity. Then, with Gwyneth Paltrow, he proved that William Shakespeare had more to him than just quill and ink in the Oscarwinning Shakespeare In Love. But nothing was quite like this. It is lust at first sight when Fiennes, as climber Adam Tallis, meets Graham's American career woman, Alice Loudon. She abandons her boyfriend and all common sense to engage willingly in sadomasochistic sex with her new lover.

The scenes had to match Alice's description in the Nicci French novel: "Sex had never been like this. There had been indifferent sex, embarrassing sex, nasty sex, good sex, great sex. This was more like obliterating sex."

Fiennes explains: "My character has a cursed past with women. He falls in love with Heather's character and their relationship is instantly excessive, to the point of becoming dangerous.

"She leaves her boyfriend, they marry quickly and the sex becomes darker and very adventurous. She then starts receiving obscure information, saying that he has killed previous girlfriends and also raped someone.

So is this complicated man hiding a terrible past?

"We had to deal with sexuality in a very full-on way. As Heather was hired before me, I knew what I was getting involved in, from an acting point of view. Does it affect your own private life? You can't let it."

Fiennes will talk sex, love and lust until the crew's gone home - so long as it is about the script and the movie. In his private life? Forget it.

THIS is Joe Cool of the sex symbols. Kiss and tell? He would sooner walk naked around London's Regent's Park, where we met in an immaculate trailer. But there have been plenty of beautiful women in his life over the years.

He had a six-year relationship with actress Sara Griffiths, who he met at an audition during his three years at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Then there was Catherine McCormack, whose career has not paused for breath since playing Mel Gibson's tragic bride in Braveheart. Naomi Campbell was a girlfriend; her personal assistant sold the story about their secret relationship.

Such an act of betrayal is not his style. "I can't go into that territory - sorry," he says. "Some actors talk about their private life brilliantly, particularly in America. Maybe I want to talk, but others involved may not want themselves exposed.

It doesn't feel right."

Fiennes has such a clear-eyed decency about him that to go further seems intrusion to the point of rudeness. Don't get me wrong; he's not prissy. We have met several times before and get on well. But to imagine him standing next to the bar, with a pint in his hand, talking about who he's been with is as unthinkable as, well, Mick Jagger as a virgin.

He is also extremely polite and considerate. When we first met, during a break in shooting on Elizabeth, there was much oldfashioned courtesy on display. He opens doors for women, stands up when they join us at table, holds eye contact in conversation. He also seems to have a lack of awareness of how attractive he is to virtually every girl he meets. He's a trim six-footer who listens. The fact that he manages to put across that on screen is probably down to good acting, but it's natural, too.

So to press him hard on his private life would be almost treacherous. "I feel blessed that I am in a world in which I can put my passions and beliefs into my work and I don't feel a great urgency to have my love life on view," he says.

There will be no pictures, then, of any future marriage in gossip magazines? "I would not even think about it," he replies crisply. He voices much admiration for Kate Winslet's public rejection of £500,000 to have pictures of herself emblazoned across such pages with daughter Mia. "They're buying you at a personal price," he observes.

"If you refuse to be bought and sold, that can only empower you."

If all this gives an impression that honest Joe might also be a boring one too, it's wrong. He has a sense of humour, lists Fawlty Towers and Only Fools And Horses as two of his favourite television programmes and freely admits that he doesn't read much apart from scripts and books for role research.

He does not suffer the same sensitivity as his more famous 38-year-old brother, actor Ralph, with no long, awkward silences as he searches for the right phrase, as if fearing to see it in print.

They are part of the Fabulous Fiennes family. Father Mark, in his 60s, is a photographer specialising in landscaping and interiors;

Martha, 36, is a film director;

Magnus, 33, a musician and Sophie, 32, a freelance film, stage and theatre producer. There is also Mick, an archaeologist in his 40s, whom Mark and his late wife, Jini, adopted when he was 11. Joseph's twin brother, Jacob, sounds the odd one out, preferring to be a gamekeeper in Suffolk.

"We had a crazy upbringing," reflects Fiennes. "My parents' income came from selling houses, so they could clothe and feed all these kids. So we moved regularly around the country and I fell down badly with all the changes of school and different styles of lesson."

He attended art school, briefly, before working backstage at the National Theatre and then on a Tuscany building site. "I slept in a hammock in a barn," he recalls.

"It was tough work but a wonderful life, with cheap wine and good friends. The builder, Gino, died of alcohol consumption. Walls we built were full of beer and wine bottles."

Since leaving drama school nine years ago, life has been far from smooth. There were a couple of appearances in West End plays, plus two ill-paid seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. He has been regularly out of work. "This business has no compassion," he says. "If you didn't keep a cool attitude to all the rejections, it would drive you mad."

BUT, from what was virtually a walk-on part in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1996 film Stealing Beauty, Fiennes has established himself as hot property.

A small British film, Martha - Meet Frank, Daniel And Laurence, proved that he was the sort of guy to get the girl. Then came his Elizabethan experiences, last year's big-budget success on the siege of Stalingrad, Enemy At The Gates, and American stardom.

But even now it seems he hasn't quite got used to the luxury of non-stop work and our conversation is peppered with self-deprecating remarks. He recalls feeling a "right *****" when, dressed as Dudley, he tried to get a pint among the electricians and carpenters at the Shepperton Studios pub.

Fiennes was terrified at the prospect of playing Shakespeare, both in and out of bed, with Gwyneth Paltrow, fearing he might not be up to the complexities of the clever script by Tom Stoppard. He also thought that leaving school at 16 would leave him "a bit thick and illeducated".

He even admits getting nervous at his 30th birthday party in May 2000, when he co-celebrated with a close friend and 200 people at a pub in the East End of London. "I didn't drink at all because I was too nervous," he says. "I wanted to make sure everyone knew each other, so I ran around playing host and actually found the whole evening a bit frightening."

Jacob was supposed to join him, but his wife had just given birth to a daughter. "If I envy anyone's family life, it is his," says Joseph.

"His daughter is absolutely beautiful. I can't wait to have a kid myself. Families are great, the best way to be brought up."

That's where brotherly envy stops. "Jacob loves nature and the environment, but being a gamekeeper is a hard grind," he says. "He is up at 5.30am, laying traps, keeping vermin down, channelling the animal population, keeping wildlife together.

"You could be foxing at midnight or keeping poachers off the land.

It's exhausting and tough for little financial reward. That's real work, compared with what I do. I don't think many men would complain about going to bed with Heather Graham."

Killing Me Softly goes on nationwide release on Friday
SMOULDERING: The eyes have it. Fiennes's modesty, courtesy and sex appeal make him irresistible to women
LUSTY: With Heather Graham in his new film, Killing Me Softly.