Time Out London
February 5 - 12, 2003
By Brian Logan
Photography Pete Drinkell

Whatever happened to Joseph Fiennes? There was the dizzying ascent through theatre's ranks - at 25 he played Jesus for the RSC. Then came "Shakespeare in Love, the Oscar-guzzling smash that made Gwyneth Paltrow a megastar. But, just as Gwyneth was weeping over her Oscar and plotting her next celebrity romance, Joe shrank from the spotlights. He hasn't made a hit film since Shakespeare, he's avoided the front pages, and his only major theatre role in years, as Marlowe's Edward II, played out beyond the mainstream, in humble Sheffield.

From this week, though, he's back in the National Theatre's production of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. Fiennes' last job at the National was as a backstage dresser, aged 17, courtesy of big brother Ralph. "So there's a sort of poetic justice in getting back," he says. It's his first London stage role since Nick Grosso's A Real Classy Affair at the Royal Court in 1998.

His return is characteristically low-key. Love's Labour's Lost is anything but a star vehicle. Neither is it a surefire hit. "A lot of people say it's just a bunch of privileged aristrocrats barbing each other with wit," says Fiennes, "and to a certain extent that's true." Fiennes plays the wittiest of the wits, Berowne - one of three cohorts of the King of Navarre who agree to foreswear women in favour of the academic life. "He's a very mercurial character," says Fiennes. "He's a bit of a wrecker. His wit is extraordinary, he's very fast-thinking, and cruel with it." And yet Berowne falls in love despite himself, which will delight Fiennes' legion of female fans. Doe-eyed and vulnerable, this is an actor who at the height of his fame, wrote one critic, "cornered the market in agonised lovers".

There's nothing agonised about him in person - but he can come across as painstakingly serious-minded. He's full of pompous-sounding praise for the National's departing supremo, and director of Love's Labour's Lost, Trevor Nunn, "our country's finest director". But when asked if rehearsals are proving to be fun, Fiennes replies, "It's fun, but that's a by-product of the seriousness."

Nevertheless, this is what he wants to be doing. "What carried me through dressing at the National for three years, picking up underwear and smelly socks, wasn't the wage, it was my love of theatre." He'd like to do more, but it's not easy. "When you're making films, your life is either all go or stopped dead," he says. "It's difficult to logistically marry that momentum, or lack of it, with the theatre, where I have to book myself in advance. But the more years you let go by," he add, "it becomes terrifying to get back on stage. So I don't want to let the time run away from me."

He sounds like an actor whose career is frustratingly out of his own control. A theatre-lover who's performed onstage only twice in half a decade. An actor who claims to be "equally excited" by film, but two of those recent releases, Rancid Aluminium and Killing Me Softly, plumbed uncharted depths of awfulness. The latter threatened to take its star's reputation with it. "Joseph Fiennes is in danger of losing his sex-symbol status," ran one news story, "after steamy scenes from his latest movie with Heather Graham left cinema audiences laughing." The Guardian was more succinct: "Turkeys," ran the review, "don't come much plumper than this."

But the best revenge, they say, is to have a goodlife - and Fiennes seems content with his career's hit-and-miss-randomness. "What's that Russian saying?" he asks. "'How do you make God laugh? - Tell him your plans.' It's kind of true. I'm very flexible. I take things very much as they happen." Maybe this is hangover from his childhood, when the seven Fiennes siblings, plus painter mum and photographer dad, moved house 14 times. Maybe he's still anxious not to be seen to compete with the big brother whose career (RSC, movies, then a return to the theatre) set the template for his own. Or maybe Fiennes has relinquished control simply because he doesn't like exerting it. "I'm a believer," he says, "however naively, that someone will place me in a project because they've seen your work, rather than me being bullish or so ambitious that I get the part by other means. If that [philosophy] works, it works, and if it doesn't, it doesn't."

This diffidence certainly explains his low visibility post-Shakespeare in Love. (When the Oscar buzz was at its loudest, Fiennes went on a Buddhist retreat to Canada.) But he's edging his way back into the limelight. In 2002, he made three films back-to-back - "which I won't do again," he says. The first was "a very low-budget art-house movie - I never look at it in those terms, but I guess that's how it may seem." Leo", shot in Mississippi by first-time director Mehdi Norowzian and derived from James Joyce's Ulysses co-stars Sam Shepard and Dennis Hopper. The second was an Anglo-German feature about the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther. Fiennes clearly found the film a meaty challenge - even if his friends didn't always appreciate why. "Whenever I said I was doing Luther, people said "Oh, Vandross?" A future role, perhaps? "I don't think," he says, "that my range is that capable."

Last of the three was The Great Raid, directed in Australia by John (The Last Seduction) Dahl. The film focuses on events in a Japanese concentration camp at the end of WWII. To Fiennes, the experience - for which he submitted himself to a boot camp regime "consisting of a glass of water and a bowl of rice a day" - was "mind-blowing and horrific." There were compensations, though, if the rumours of his relationship with co-star Natalie Mendoza are to be believed. (Before Mendoza interrupted, the gossip columnists were busy pairing Fiennes off with Naomi Campbell.)

In the meantime, Fiennes has Love's Labour's Lost to grapple with. He hopes to become more of a fixture on the London stage - and has, incidentally, no truck with recent whinges about the filthiness of the West End beyond the theatres' doors. "Sorry for the theatres," he says, "but it's more profound than just dirty streets. It's about helping those who have been broken by poverty and who are coping as best they can."

As to whether he'll realise his intention to concentrate on theatre work - well, that's in the lap of his laughing God. "My love of theatre was what carried me into acting. The moment of collaboration between the actor and an audience, that moment of witness - nothing can take my love of that away." He pauses, to think. "But you can't plan what happens next. I just try to keep limber and loose and prepared."

"Love's Labour's Lost previews at the National Theatre, Olivier from February 15.