VOGUE (U.S.), April 1999
By Julia Reed
Photograph by Bruce Weber

What happens when an actor tackles Shakespeare - not the plays but the man? For Joseph Fiennes, it's meant the dreaded specter of fame. But it's also yielded the perpetual traveler a sojourn in Miami, where Julia Reed catches up with him.

Shakespeare is surfing. Or, more accurately, Joseph Fiennes is trying, without much success, to stand upright on a surfboard. Fiennes has never surfed before, but it's a beautiful day in Miami, he's done with a photo shoot, and he has politely professed a desire to learn. Surfboards appear, directions are given. Fiennes throws himself into this new endeavor -- and the water -- with all the passion Will lavished on Viola. Alas, there is no surf to speak of and the wind is strange. Fiennes settles for a body board and paddles around so happily for so long that he seems to forget what had been billed as an afternoon of pressing appointments. When I leave him, he is taking yet another dip, this time in the pool.

He certainly appears to be having at least a bit of fun, but, he says, "At the end of the day, it's work." Though it is Super Bowl weekend, Fiennes has not come to Miami to watch Denver rout Atlanta, or even enjoy the city's aquatic pleasures. He is researching his role in Forever Mine, a Paul Schrader film set in the 1970's, in which he plays an all-American kid who is disfigured and comes back to avenge a lost love. Fiennes admires Schrader ("He is more European than most European directors") and his role is a new one for a man who spent three years in the Royal Shakespeare Company and who earned his current stardom wearing tights. Early in the script, he says, he "takes out" a Cuban nightclub owner and assumes his identity. In Miami, Fiennes has clocked many hours with the real thing, a man named George, whose every move the actor documents on his Sony Digital Camcorder. "It's great," he says of his new toy. Useful, too, because there on the tiny screen, he shows me his role model, walking, talking, surrounded by beautiful women. "Very Pacino," Fiennes says, delighted with the comparison, and I agree. George does indeed look like Al Pacino, or at least someone Pacino could easily play. He does not, as it happens, look a thing like Fiennes, but then Fiennes won't either. He'll wear a prosthetic device on his face and contact lenses that will render his famously long-lashed brown eyes (USA Today called them "bewitching") disconcertingly dull.

Forever Mine will be the first film Fiennes has shot outside Europe (in addition to Elizabeth and Shakespeare In Love, he has starred in the English romantic comedy Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel, and Laurence and the low-budget thriller Rancid Aluminium), but, at 29, he is already as well known as his elder brother Ralph on American soil. However, fame and Ralph are two subject clearly best left alone. In one newspaper profile he said he found "the so- called infringement of stardom grotesque." In another he termed comparisons to Ralph "absurd" and said he was waiting "for the one original journalist not to mention him." Naturally, I do not, sticking for the moment to the less prickly subject of Miami. "It's fantastic, that whole Cuban scene," he says, adding that he is dismayed by the legions of South Beach bodybuilders and hulking football fans who have temporarily invaded the city. "I feel so inferior. If you have anything under a 42 chest, you're not allowed into Miami."

Miami -- most of America, really -- is new to him, but he has been almost everywhere else. When Fiennes was growing up, his parents, his father, the photographer Mark, and his mother, the writer and painter Jennifer Lash -- moved the family fourteen times. Fiennes is one of seven children, all of whom, with the exception of his fraternal twin, Jake, a gamekeeper, have found careers in the arts. As a child, Fiennes says, he found the peripatetic lifestyle "an adventure, the norm." Now, he says, he understands the hardship it must have been to his parents and jokes that he found it difficult to make his own recent move to a flat in London's trendy Notting Hill: "How they did it, I'll never know."

His mother, known as Jini, died of cancer in 1993, but her influence on her children seems deeply felt. There was no television but lots of books. "She was an extraordinary encouragement," Fiennes has said of Lash. She understood the whole creative process, and nature." Now when I ask about her influence, he says, "I'm evading, I'm moving into a patch where I get evasive. It's something I hold dear to me." He will say that two years ago, he and Ralph, who is eight years his senior, did a reading in Dublin of Lash's novel Blood Ties, which is set in Ireland's west country. Fiennes, who lived there from the time he was four until he was eight, says the book is his favorite. "It was an impressionable age. I have very distinct memories. With her other books, I was so young the references don't register."

I venture that it must have been daunting for his mother to pursue her art and take care of such a large family. "She had a lot of guts," he says. "She had a lot of get-up-and-go."

It must be said that Fiennes has his own share of get-up-and-go. When not working he likes to "explore countries." Last year he went to Costa Rica on his own. Entirely? "Oh, yes. Part of the joy is in the isolation. There is great liberty in that." Recently he went to Nevis, where he did "the hardest climb in the Caribbean, an old volcanic mountain. Part of it was sheer rock; we had to get ropes and things." But at the top there was a reward: "a plateau full of hummingbirds."

Fiennes is most animated when he describes his travels. He practically swoons over the treasures of Madrid's Prado ("the Goyas!") and the more earthly pleasures of Granada's food ("the tapas!"). He says Scotland is "very special" to him, and describes an "amazing" Easter weekend in Rome, where he saw both the Pope and the Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo. To Nevis he too "a load of books," and he is currently reading Dostoevsky's The Idiot. He is a fan of the late Raymond Carver and recommend to me an Irish novel, Death and Nightingales, by Eugene McCabe. "It's a great gothic political thriller."

The reading and the travel are a way "to get stimulus outside of work, to get away from anyone who has any connection to that world." Thankfully, he doesn't include politics on his list of diversions, and expresses surprise at the much-publicized political involvement of so many American actors. "I have no wish to give you my views on politics. If I wanted to be a politician, I'd go into that field."

I tell him I'm relieved and he tells me he could never settle in Hollywood. "I'm European. I don't feel the need to move. Actors are nomadic by trade, but I wouldn't uproot from my home and my base." Anyway, he fears Hollywood would prove too narrow a world. "There's not much else there. I'm sure that would feed a neurosis. It's so constant."

On the beach, Fiennes seems relatively neurosis-free, until I decide to torture him by pointing out the jellyfish that are virtually carpeting the sand. I, Richard Nixon-like, have shoes on, Fiennes has on very little at all, and he shoots me a look. "Oh, God," he says. "Now I think I've been stung." He is laughing, playing at checking himself for stings, but he eyes the Atlantic with newfound wariness. "He doesn't talk politics and he doesn't go where the jellyfish are," he says, grinning. "A regular Joe, really." And then he dives back in.