The Toronto Sun
March 17, 2001
By Bruce Kirkland

Joseph Fiennes takes the road less travelled, by choice and with enormous satisfaction.

After the extraordinary surprise success of Shakespeare In Love -- in which he played the amorous Will -- Hollywood came a-calling.

But Joseph, the younger brother of actor Ralph Fiennes, rejected most of the Hollywood offers he got -- "they were all men in tights," he scoffs at the lack of imagination producers showed -- and headed home.

"I went straight back to the theatre," Fiennes says of those head-spinning days only two years ago. "I went straight back to the Royal Court, which is a small, intimate theatre in London and went back to what I love best and to a sort of calmness, which was great.

"I didn't respond to the screenplays and I didn't feel that I had to sustain the 'heat' of the moment. It didn't matter. I work from a different perspective. I didn't just walk away but I did want to feel in control."

Now, at 30, you can see Fiennes in his most significant screen role since Shakespeare In Love. He co-stars in Jean-Jacques Annaud's epic-scale World War II film Enemy At The Gates, which is a slice of the story of the Battle of Stalingrad. It opened across North America yesterday.

Fiennes plays opposite Jude Law, Ed Harris and Rachel Weisz as the catalyst for the story. He is a Soviet propaganda officer whose manipulations determine the fates of the others. Oddly, his is the only major character in the film who was not plucked out of the historical records.

"He's purely fictitious," Fiennes tells The Sun about his character, Danilov. "Almost certainly, there were put in place by Stalin political commissars like him, men who certainly didn't have any military training. Which is another thing I found interesting: He is totally inept when it comes to weaponry. He can't even fire a gun."

Instead, Danilov manipulates the accounts of the exploits of a Russian peasant (Law) who has become a sniper on the front lines. The publicity turns the sniper, Vassili Zaitsev, into a national hero, which actually happened during the protracted battle of 1942-43. The Nazis, worrying that a hero could rally the Russian military and the people to resist the German invasion, send their own sniper (Harris) to kill Zaitsev and seize control in the propaganda war.

Fiennes says he loved playing a fictitious character in a real-life saga, especially after portraying historical figures such as Shakespeare, renegade British nobleman Sir Robert Dudley in Elizabeth and Christ in Dennis Potter's stage production Son Of Man. And his next gig is back on stage in Sheffield in the title role of Marlowe's Edward II.

While he finds all these roles stimulating, "It is also challenge for me to have a blank sheet, as it were, and use the impressions of a character from a script rather than being a slave to history, as I have in the past in the representation of well-known figures. I felt great freedom in that."

In the doomed Danilov, Fiennes also found the most interesting character in Enemy At The Gates.

"He was full of conflict and complexity and contradiction," Fiennes says, "all the elements which are very human.

"He started out for me from a very pure place and was seized with this utopian ideal of the Party and (then) he is ultimately destroyed by understanding that communism under Stalin is as bad an evil as Nazism.

"He tragically comes to a point of pure stillness and grief at the horror of war and the horror of the machine that he became. He is driven to distraction and ultimately, in a redemptive moment, has to give up his life to bring an end to the evil that he has brought about."

Fiennes took the role because this tragic arc fascinated him, not because he thought he could renew his star profile.

"I don't feel pressured myself in terms of getting a body of work for other people," he says of most actors' pathological need to please as they become more famous. "It's purely from own own instinct and my own drive."