The Guardian, July 24, 1996

Is Joseph Fiennes the Next Big Thing or just the Next Best Thing to his famous brother? Lyn Gardner meets him as he prepares to play Troilus at the RSC.

At the time appointed for our meeting, Joseph Fiennes can be observed from the window of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre walking hurriedly in the opposite direction. This is not entirely a surprise. Getting Fiennes's agreement to be interviewed would have taxed the negotiation skill of Henry Kissinger. The interview has been on and off more times than the Burton-Taylor romance. Perhaps he'll do it if you agree not to ask about his brother, suggests one RSC press officer helpfully. Perhaps he'll do it if you agree not to ask any questions at all. But then again, perhaps he won't.

It's hard not to sympathise with Fiennes's wariness. The average drama student, still working his way through Stanislavsky For beginners at college, is not deluged with film scripts from Hollywood moguls. The average 25-year-old with a mere handful of credits and a blossoming classical career with the RSC is not besieged by requests for interviews.

Fiennes, however, is not remotely average. Far from it. For a start there is no getting away from the fact that he is the kid brother of the as yet more famous Ralph, currently one of Tinseltown's most favoured sons. Secondly he is good. Seriously good. Even better than Ralph - his senior by seven years - say many in the know. Ian Judge, who is directing Fiennes in Troilus And Cressida, which opens tonight in Stratford has pronounced Fiennes junior as the real star of the family. On stage, Ralph is all cool cerebral charisma, Joseph is all hesitant emotional warmth. Or put it this way: Ralph is a natural Angelo; forty years on, Joe will be a Lear.

There is nothing the British media like more than the prospect of some serious sibling rivalry. How much less interesting the Redgraves would be without those spats between Vanessa and Lynne that erupt every time they spend more than a week on the same continent together. Fiennes isn't sorry to disappoint. He and Ralph are the best of friends. His chief concern when he decided to become an actor was that he would embarrass his already successful older brother. He has also had the benefit of the brother's experience.

"I've learned very quickly that hype and work don't go together," he explains when we eventually meet - it turns out that the white rabbit act was nothing more than a desire to pick up a book from the cottage he is renting during his Stratford season. "The more you give, the more you have to withdraw. Acting is a very revealing art. It makes you vulnerable. I've become more and more reclusive. A lot of the time I feel that I just want to hide away in a shell," he says, apologising for his initial reluctance to be interviewed with a disarming gap-toothed grin. He looks in need of at least a month's worth of hot roast dinners.

It's this streak of vulnerability that has made Fiennes so devastatingly effective in his brief stint with the RSC. There's an element of danger in his performances. You know it's art, but it seems real. You'd swear that there was no safety net. He does torment exquisitely, as if he were really on the rack. His performance as the hippyish self-doubting Jesus Christ - the most galvanising RSC debut in years - in Dennis Potter's Son Of Man at the Pit last autumn, had grown men weeping and grown agnostics contemplating a swift conversion to revolutionary Christianity. When he crawled out of the desert after 40 days and nights of temptation, you thought he might actually have flipped and would have to be carried away in a straitjacket.

Cast this season as a manic, besotted Silvius in As You Like It, the tortured Rafe in Peter Whelan's brilliant The Herbal Bed and now Troilus, Fiennes has cornered the market in agonised lovers. At a matinee of The Herbal Bed he quivered with such affecting, catch-in-the throat intensity that I and a coachload of little old ladies were reduced to jelly. You fear that if he isn't cast as the juvenile lead in a light comedy soon, Fiennes, who talks of the roles he plays as being a haunting - "The characters are with you constantly, like a marriage between yourself and their persona" - could end up either deranged or a hermit. Or maybe just the definitive Hamlet of the nineties.

That, of course, may seem too much like following in his elder brother's footsteps. A psychiatrist could probably make something of the parallels between the brothers' careers: both initially did a foundation year at art college before swopping to acting, and both fetched up at the RSC soon after leaving drama school. Ralph's Troilus in 1991, which his brother saw and was overwhelmed by ("I saw the matinee and went back in the evening") was no less eagerly awaited than Joe's. But Fiennes seems genuinely puzzled by suggestion that he could be either consciously or unconsciously following Ralph's lead.

He counters that the route from art to acting is well-trodden. "Art and acting hold hands together. They are both about looking and learning. I never made the change. I just grew and moved on." He also argues that if you are set on a classical career, the RSC is the only place to go. His mother Jini, a writer and artist, told him "Words are your only friend as an actor." Fiennes cannot imagine why anyone would want to be on Eastenders if they could be in Troilus and Cressida.

What he does acknowledge is that the Fiennes family upbringing - Joe is the joint youngest of six siblings with his twin Jake - has shaped the brothers. "By most people's standards our upbringing was strange and wild and unconventional. But it was constantly stimulating too: full of literature, art; long walks and dogs. I wouldn't say it was idyllic though. We moved 14 times. They say moving house once is traumatic so you can imagine what it was like for us. Going to a new school every year isn't idyllic at all, it's very difficult. Necessity turns you into a good communicator."

Mother Jini - who died in 1993 during Joseph's last year at the Guildhall drama school - was also enor-mously influential. "She gave you courage," recalls Fiennes. "I remember a conversation we had one afternoon when I was about 14 or 15. We were talking about what I might want to do, and she said that most people are either producers or receivers. She said, 'It's right for you to act because you are a giver.'"

It took Fiennes seven years to get there. That foundation year at art school was followed by a hated stint in a graphic design studio by day ("I still loathe 2B pencils and rulers") and an evening job, which he got through Ralph, as a dresser at the National Theatre. "Everybody who wants to be an actor should do a menial job backstage, it makes you understand the reality of what's entailed in acting."

But still he agonised. "I knew that it was right and I knew that it was what I wanted, but it was hard to make the commitment. I didn't want to move in on Ralph. The worst thing that I can imagine was that I'd be a terrible actor and that I would end up embarrassing him all the time." Fiennes shudders.

Unlikely. Fiennes's performances, as the girlish, manipulative Rodolpho in A View From The Bridge and as the camp, sexy assassin in Les Enfants du Paradis, quite the best thing in two lacklustre productions, suggest that the RSC hasn't even begun to tap his range yet.

The RSC, presumably keen to replace one Fiennes thing with another, made an offer to Joseph straight after drama school. But the parts were tiny and he said thank you but no thank you because, "I know I need to focus, and I didn't want to spend two years carrying a spear and drinking every night at The Duck."

The gamble paid off. After a six-month stint in the Victorian thriller The Woman In Black - "Which was gruelling, but taught me everything I know about economy and the relationship with an audience and how it can change from performance to performance" - he was cast as Belyaev in Bill Bryden's production of A Month In The Country opposite John Hurt and Helen Mirren. When Bryden was asked to direct Son Of Man, he immediately thought that Fiennes would be perfectly divine.

Troilus will be an even greater test, the decider as to whether Fiennes is the Next Best Thing or just the next best thing to Ralph.

He hates the comparisons but is smart enough to know that they are inevitable. After all, nobody thinks any the less of Sophie Thompson's talents just because she isn't Emma. Fiennes's way of coping is to avoid reading any reference to himself, to laugh at the hype and to bury himself in his work, in this instance the "strange, wonderful, bleak world" of Troilus and Cressida.

"Troilus is a wonderful young man with marvellous dreams who's just overwhelmed that Cressida seems as honest and truthful as he is. He has a very naive view of the world. He projects the persona of a goddess on to Cressida, and it undoes them both... I fell that he is really to blame for what happens." Ah, Fiennes is piling on the agony again.

He smiles his hesitant, diffident, melting smile. "He is a dangerous boy." He is. He really is.