W Magazine
March 2001

Joseph Fiennes seems custom-made for Hollywood stardom: He's dashing, handsome with a trim athletic build, softly curling hair and dark eyes that penetrate like lasers. He possesses both highbrow credentials (two seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company) and mainstream appeal (an MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss – shared with Gwyneth Paltrow). Fiennes hit the big time seemingly overnight with breakthrough roles in two of the most acclaimed productions of 1998, Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth, and has been linked to everyone from Paltrow to Naomi Campbell. Plus, he's British, a quality that earns him further bonus points among Hollywood executives, who seem to suffer from an incurable cultural inferiority complex.

But the actor has several additional characteristics that complicate picture: Foremost among them is a deep seriousness of purpose, which explains why he recently turned down a starring role in Roman Polanski’s upcoming film, The Pianist, along with a $1.5 million paycheck to star in a rarely performed 16th-century play. Fiennes also suffers from a pronounced aversion to the trappings of celebrity and a nettlesome reluctance to lay bare his personal life to public scrutiny.

"I just don't feel I'm in that bracket, that people are desperate to know everything about me," he says, shrugging. "All the excitement after Shakespeare in Love opened my eyes to the power of the media and how many people it can reach. But then after a couple of days you just ingest it and move on."

Of course, reticence seems to run in the family. Big brother Ralph is notoriously tight-lipped. But while Ralph is tautly intense, even nervous, Joseph comes off as low-key and at ease. So much so, in fact, that one actually believes him when he claims to be interested not in the money or fame that go along with his job but merely in the work itself, having dreamed of an actor's life ever since age nine, when he appeared in a school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. (His only regret, he says, was that he didn't get to actually sing; he had to mouth the words.)

Occasionally, however, Fiennes offers glimpses of a need to control his public image. He says he hates interviews, and impishly admits to having rewound journalist's tape recorders when they left the room to erase something he didn't want included in a story.

But he establishes his boundaries with the same polite, laid-back manner he seems to adopt in everything. He's clearly driven, but he seems to view his acclaim as a matter of mere happenstance. Asked about his career plans, Fiennes almost drops his water glass. "One can't be caught up in the energy of trying to plan a career," he says, waving his hands dismissively. "I don't think that enters into the minds of most actors. I just make decisions when I need to, based on what excites and challenges me. That's all you can do."

And that’s why he's heading to Sheffield. Fiennes has wanted to act in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II for years. He heard the award-winning director, Michael Grandage, was planning to do the play so he called him and begged for the part.

"It's a clever move," says Grandage. "Obviously Joe is aware of his brother's stage profile recently with Shakespeare. Everyone would have expected Joe to return to the stage with Shakespeare. Instead he dives into a classical play but goes for Marlowe. It shows a degree of chutzpah."

"I'm an actor who trained in the classical at drama school and later on, and Edward II is a play I've loved for a long time," says Fiennes, dressed casually in denim cargo pants, a navy blue sweater and work boots. "It's performed only every 15 years or so, because Marlowe's writing is tough music. There's nothing flowery or guilded about it, although it's a beautiful love story, and the poetry within it is masterful."

Besides, theatre allows Fiennes to stretch in ways movies never will, he says, adding that he's constantly afraid of being pigeon-holed. To avoid that trap, he turned his back on playing more men in tights after Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love. Instead he accepted the part of a dodgy Irish lawyer in the small film Rancid Aluminium opposite Ray Liotta and Gretchen Mol, and another as a horribly scarred drug dealer in Paul Schrader's Forever Mine. Unfortunately neither was a hit - Rancid Aluminium was dubbed by one British critic as the "turkey of 2000," and Forever Mine, while praised by critics, went straight to American television after its production company went bankrupt and sold off its assets.

But next up is Fiennes first likely blockbuster – Jean-Jacques Annaud’s $80-million Enemy at the Gates, a love story set during the Nazi siege of Stalingrad, which also stars Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Ed Harris. Law plays the Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev, while Fiennes is Danilov, a Communist Party apparatchik whose propagandist writings turn the peasant Zaitsev into a national hero.

Fiennes says Danilov's less-than-heroic qualities are what attracted him to the role. "He's so flawed but seemingly so in touch and on top of his beliefs," he says, twisting his hands over and over as he thinks. "What I loved during the filming was how Danilov comes to realize that Stalin is as abhorrent as the Nazis. He at first lives in this Utopian idea of communism but in the end realizes that it's bound to fail. He realizes that human DNA is such that ultimately we are all full of jealousy and flaws, which is why communism would never work. We're individuals and each of us has his own desires and hopes."

Filmmaker Annaud describes Fiennes' attitude on the set as "very, very intense," adding that one of his challenges as a director was "to make sure he found a way to relax during the filming. He has this immense desire to do well and is very, very serious about being an actor." Annaud also praises the depth of Fiennes' performance, particularly compared to his American peers. "It's because he's read important, well-written texts," Annaud insists. "American actors have just read television dramas. They’re all about surface, and there's nothing inside."

While it seems farfetched to attribute Fiennes' talent to his nationality, his upbringing clearly influenced his choice of a career in drama. Four of his six siblings are involved in movies or the arts – Ralph, the director Martha, the composer Magnus and the producer Sophie. The other two are Fiennes' foster brother Michael Emery, an archaeologist, and his fraternal twin, Jacob, a gamekeeper on a private estate. According to Fiennes, Jacob works the hardest of them all. "It's not an easy life," he says. "Out in all weather looking after the estate. It's not something I would want to do."

His father, Mark, is a photographer and his mother, Jini, who died in 1993, was an artist and author, and by all accounts, was the driving force behind the clan. The family led a peripatetic existence, moving more than a dozen times when Fiennes was a boy, and he described his childhood as "kind of rough…messy, smelly, noisy." Fiennes claims he was a horrible student at school, a tough kid who terrorized his peers. He dropped out at 16 to join a youth theatre company, then took apprentiship as a dresser at the National Theatre. The job involved running errands, getting actors into their costumes and doing their laundry. "I did that and went to youth theatre because I had a drive," he says. "It certainly wasn't because I wanted to pick up sweaty underwear. But I think every young actor should do that, because it shows the reality. I had no illusions about what being an actor was about."

That explains why Fiennes seems so intent on dismissing the notion that he's an overnight success. "Hey, let's rewind – it's more than 10 years, folks," he says. "It certainly didn't seem fast when I was acting at the National doing eight shows a week for two years."

Not that he's complaining, of course. He loved every minute. From the beginning he says, "It gave me such a feeling of well-being and of being home. It was like: Am I really allowed to do this one pure thing?"

Indeed, these days, he's doing it more than ever. Immediately after Enemy at the Gates wrapped, he completed the film Dust, directed by Milcho Manchevski; it's a tale of two Macedonian outlaw cowboys intertwined with a story of a 90-year-old woman and a thief in contemporary New York. He is currently making the thriller Killing Me Softly in London with Heather Graham, the first Western movie by Chinese director Chen Kaige. In March he'll do the Marlowe play. After that, he doesn't know.

"I don't really like to do things back-to-back," he says, somehow ignoring the fact that he's been working almost constantly for the last 18 months. "Hey, I need a life! I like to do a lot of other things to stimulate myself. If acting is about portraying a life, you need to go out and get a life after each job."

While that life includes copious reading, as Annaud attests, Fiennes does more with his spare time than pore over dusty volumes of Elizabethan poetry. He's busy redecorating his apartment, for instance, and his instructions on how to sand and varnish a wooden floor or staircase are so precise they could earn him a job at Home Depot.

Another recent obsession is rock climbing; in fact, he just completed a climb in Glen Coe in the Highlands of western Scotland. "I started training at 75 feet and then went up to 2.500 feet," the actor recalls proudly.

"Hanging upside down at 2,000 feet works wonders for one's perspective," he adds with a lift of the eyebrows. "The last thing on your mind at that point is your career."