Wherefore Art Thou Joe?
Interview Magazine
We've had smolder. We've had sizzle. And we've had it up to here with
electrifying. Finally - a leading man whose intensity cuts through
cliches like a laser...
Riveting Joseph Fiennes - the youngest member of Britain's acting
dynasty - opens up to his two-time costar, Geoffrey Rush
Geoffrey Rush: Can you give me a description of where you're sitting as we
talk?
Joseph Fiennes: (laughs) Oh, my God, Geoffrey. Is this what you want to ask
me? I hope you're not going tabloid on me.
GR: Don' t worry, I'll get hard-hitting toward the end of this interview.
JF:OK, then. I'm on my roof terrace. I'm in a tiny little conservatory on top
of my flat in Notting Hill. Which now is probably a very expensive property
because of the film. I can't thank Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts enough.
GR: It certainly boomed real estate.
JF: Yeah.
GR: So let's talk about me.
JF: Can I do the interview then?
GR: Yeah, So, if I were a fruit...
JF: You've already thought about this!
GR: I'd like to be a kumquat because it sounds tight and sexy.
JF: But you are tight and sexy, Geoffrey.
GR: (laughs) What fruit would you like to be?
JF: I'd like to be a passion fruit. Not because it's passionate, but because
someone I know is mad about them and has got me onto them.
GR: Yes, they're very nice. So you see, this is my way of easing us into
conversation, warming up the night.
JF: Oh, God, you are one of these gutter press people.
GR: (laughs) Listen, before we get into the really serious stuff, like
whether Cate (Blanchett )or Gwyneth (Paltrow ) was the better kisser, I'd
like to ask you about your childhood. I know you're from a large family.
Are there any elements from your childhood that have a direct bearing on
your career?
JF: We were a pretty nomadic family. I'm not dressing it up into a wonderful,
bohemian gypsy life; it was kind of rough - I went to something like fourteen
schools. So I guess I've had a gread grounding in terms of living out of a
suitcase.
GR: You're family with unpredictable rules. How did all that travel affect
your adolescence?
JF: It's weird. I never hid adolescence. I kind of bypassed it, and I'm a
bit angry that I didn't go through all the angst. I had the acne but no
angst. From the age of about five to twelve I was very bad, a hideous little
terror who beat people up. I was a member of a Rough Gang - we went around
and terrorised all the pupils in school. I was this really nasty kid, and
then overnight I turned into the man I am now, Geoffrey.
GR: Did you do theatrical stuff at school?
JF: Not really. At the age of nine I was cast to play Joseph in Joseph and
the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, but I wasn't allowed to sing the songs.
I had to mime everything. That was my first time onstage.
GR: And then you did nothing particularly theatrical?
JF: No. My academic years were appalling.
GR: What prompted you to go to Guildhall (school of Music and Drama, in London)?
JF: Well, I'd spent about two years with the Young Vic Youth Theatre before
Guildhall. We did an adaption of Jude the Obscure which I found wonderful
but really difficult over the run of three weeks. I remember thinking I
needed some kind of technical backup because I was giving everything and
finding myself completely wiped out. I also had a fierce passion for the
classics, so the solution seemed to be drama school.
GR: So you made your stage debut at nine -
JF: God, you make it sound so glamorous.
GR: - and fourteen years later you made your professional debut in A Month
in the Country. Then you did The Woman in Black, but it wasn't exactly the
kind of classic you're talking about.
JF: No. The Woman in Black was a camp Gothic thriller - a bit Edgar Allan
Poe, a bit Dickens. It was great fun but it was a twohander, with a wonderful
actor called Edward Petherbridge. He taught me a lot about lightness and pace
and energy.
GR: Is it like a mind game between two characters?
JF: Yeah. We did a six-month run, which is like baptism by fire when you
come out of drama school. There's no preparation for the merger of school
and the real world. The shock of doing a six-month run, eight shows a week,
is quite tough, really.
GR: A two-hander's pretty demanding, isn't it? Cate (Blanchett) and I did
Oleanna together, and the two of us had to hold the stage. I found that
really sharpened my theatrical instincts in an extraordinary way.
JF: Right, there's no one else to fall back on. So I learned that you just
have to really listen. That's the greatest thing I learned - to listen,
because if your mind wanders...
GR: I made my debut as a raven in a sort of thinking child's version of
Rapunzel, and it was in the height of summer. My character was a bookworm
and I decided he would have really heavy dandruff, so I put all these soap
suds in my hair, which looked fantastic but on stage I sweated up a storm.
I spent the first twenty minutes with froth pouring intomy eyes. That's my
one and only great theatrical anecdote.
JF: Oh my God. I hopy you let the other actors throw their dirty linen on you
at the end of the night, to get it washed. Actually, I think my real debut was
dressing at the National Theatre. I had to pick up all the filthy skid-marked
pants from the actors' egos and their dirty linen. That I think, more than
being onstage, was my real debut.
GR: I often find that drama students are the most well-oiled actors around
because they've been playing with their imaginations on a daily basis and
in very intense ways in school. And the harsh reality is that they get
thrown into the profession and find out it's all about soiled shorts, really.
JF: Yeah, it is. It's sad that you can't continue with that kind of
thoroughbred preparation.
GR: What inspires you most about the actors you admire?
JF: I think it's when someone infects you with their 100-percent commitment
to what they're doing. When you can see from the twinkle in their eye that
if you throw them the ball, they'll catch it. It is a kind of trust. So I
guess I look for passion and trust and spontaneity.
GR: I know what you mean by the twinkle in the eye. Do you think you're more
likely to find it in the theater than in film?
JF: Yeah, I do, because in film there's this lens zooming in and out of your
face, and so much of that twinkle in the eye is given to the lens and not to
the other actors. The camera deadens interaction to a degree, whereas onstage
it's all about chucking the ball and catching it.
GR: When I was a student I realized that you can get something very special
just from being close to the actors. I used to love going to plays and sitting
right up front and just being able to see the moisture in the actor's eyes.
It's like watching a fire or something. You just sit there, mesmerized.
JF: It's literaly seeing their breath, feeling their heat. It's like this
incredible experience I had over the weekend. I went to the Hermitage in St.
Petersburg; there was an extraordinary collection of Van Goghs and Gauguins,
and you can go right up to them. I was literally centimeters away from this
Van Gogh, and there were about a thousand different colors on the canvas.
When you stand that close, you see why he went mad - the madness is just
screaming out. So I came away really invigorated just from having been so
close to this oil painting. It's like the same visceral, emotional feeling
you have when you see the actor's breath.
GR: Now, as someone who's worked with you and who's also taught and directed
a bit - so I'm speaking with a great deal of authority here -
JF: (laughs)
GR: I would say for an actor who's only twentynine, you have facility, skill,
a strong imaginative approach, and good focus; you handle verse, you're
whimsical, you've got that trademark dreamy bovine-eyed sex appeal...
JF: More, Geoffrey, more.
GR: (laughs) Do you believe that you have ever personally failed, even in an
acclaimed work, or not reached a level of satisfaction?
JF: I've never reached a level of satisfaction, ever.
GR: Are you good at assessing yourself?
JF: I think I'm a good judge of what's working, but I've been probably been a
bit tough on myself. When I walk away from a job, I always suddenly realize,
Damn, that's how it should have been done. I guess I'm never happy, but I
never want to give up.
Gr: You've had a pretty good bash at playing epic figures - for example,
you've done Christ onstage (in Son of Man, for the Royal Shakespeare Company)
and Shakespeare in a film (Shakespeare in Love, 1998). Both of these men, as
they've been written and portrayed, are very shrewed and streetwise, and both
works are by very skillful writers.
JF: Yes, these characters represent sacred ground to so many people that to
even begin to step into their shoes is just not to be done, it's impossible.
GR: There's a lot of baggage playing someone like Christ or Shakespeare that
comes with the audience's expectation. But Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman
created Shakespeare as a visionary hack. And Dennis Potter created Christ as
a fisherman, basically a pre-radical.
JF: Both were very human.
GR: Are there any other mythical characters you'd like to tackle?
JF: I could go the other way - Mephistopheles or, um, maybe not. Actually,
I'd love 'not' to do the kind of classical play where you've got some bastard
in the front row muttering all the soliloquies under his breath. I would love
'not' to do a character that everyone has such a strong opinion about. I love
new writing, new blood, modern works by unknown writers. One of the best times
I had recently was at the Royal Court Theatre. We did a new play called Real
Classy Affair that we were all discovering for the first time, and we sort of
put our stamps on the characters. So rather than hunger to do another mythical
icon, I'd love to play somebody off the street, a character from the
supermarket or something.
GR: It's interesting how all those Amercian playwrights - the Arthur Millers
and Eugene O'Neills - wrote about the little guy, the average person, but in
a classical context.
JF: Exactly. When the man on the street is suddenly put into a tragic Greek
scenario, it can work fantastically. I like to think that one of m strengths
is finding the man on the street within the great mythological characters.
And finding the mythological side to the man on the street. Maybe it's finding
the opposites within each.
GR: And what do ou see as your limitations?
JF: I don't know what my limitations are until I reach them. I look for the
challenge. Like in this new Paul Schrader film I'm doing (Forever Mine),
which is a wonderful love story, I do this character who's an all-American
kid from Miami, and I had to age to fifteen years later when he assumes a
Cuban identity. Now, I didn't think twice about it, I just put myself aside
and reached into the adventure. Only in the middle of it did I suddenly
realize the tough undertaking I had got myself into.
GR: You're also about to be seen in another film - The Very Thought of You,
which I think was originally called Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence.
Did your success in 'Shakespeare' prompt the U.S. release?
JF: Absolutely. I'm very cynical because The Very Thought of You could have
been released two years ago. So the fact that it's being brought out straight
after 'Shakespeare' - well, one has to smile.
GR: You just laugh it off and say, "That's my early work."
JF: Yes. This is really my first proper role in a film, apart from a fleeting
moment in Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty (1996). It's a rom-com, as they call
it, with a team of young British actors, and a delectable actress called
Monica Potter, who showed us Brits how to act properly on celluloid. But I'm
sure people will be able to tell it's my early work. I think everything I do
is my early work. I can't wait to get on to the later stuff.
GR: Do you feel as though the potential of your acting career is always down
the tracks? That's something I experienced in my twenties. I had this notion
that in my thirties or forties something interesting might happen, but I
never felt comfortable in my twenties. I always thought there was that carrot
on a stick.
JF: But what defined the carrot on a stick to you?
GR: The goal was always to make a living out of it. I suppose that's
reflective of my background, because the culture I grew up in Australia
didn't recognize that acting could actually be a day job.
JF: Although the film industry there has been pretty consistent, hasn't it?
I'm thinking back to 'Gallipoli'.
GR: Yeah, but at the time that film came out in 1981, which was when I was
in university, they only wanted guys with pecs. So basically, I had to wait
for things to change.
JF: No dandruff, just pecs. (laughs)
GR: No. The dandruff came later. So, tell me some of your reflections on
Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth (1998), because the only things those
two films have in common is me and you.
JF: Exactly. (laughs)
GR: They are pretty different projects - one was set in the 1560s and the
other in the 1590s. The difference between those two decades is comparable
to life in the '60s and life in the '90s in this century - it's a different
ball game. When we were doing these films, I felt that at best they'd have
limited art house releases, but instead they played to a broad, popular
audience. I wonder what impact this has had on you.
JF: It means that I'm offered countless scripts for men in tights. It's odd,
because I never have an idea where a film will go, and I certainly didn't
expect those two films to pop like they did.
GR: And now, with Elizabeth and Shakespeare having done well commercially,
there's a feeling that you could actually pitch films that are set in other
key creative moments of Western civilization. I mean, I love fifth-century
B.C. Athens and 1830s Paris and late-nineteenth-century Vienna and New York
in the '60s. These are kind of mythical time periods, and I feel as though
vibrant stories set in those eras could get told now.
JF: Do you think the industry is returning to a romance with storytelling?
GR: I don't know. Maybe there is something in the air at the end of a
millenium when people want stories that give a big picture and that contain
a great diversity of characters - as we had in Shakespeare in Love. I remember
some wonderful moments in the making of that film, like that uproarious,
excited readthrough at the very beginning that felt like we were embarking
on a theater project. There was wonderful, generous laughter from the company
assembled.
JF: You're right, it did feel like a company of players. They were the core
of it all, the reason for its success.
GR: That was a rare project, wasn't it, because there was a lovely, genuinely
thespy feel to it, but we never descended into a sort of -
JF: ... Luvieland.
GR: - an embarrassment of luviedom.So, tell me, if we were going to complete
our Tudor trilogy, what do you think we should do?
JF: What was that fruit you said you'd like to be?
GR: A kumquat.
JF: We'd have to call it The Tudor Kumquat.
August 1999
By Geoffrey Rush,
Photographs by Ellen von Unwerth
Transcribed by Beate
