Vogue UK
April 2001
By Miranda Sawyer
Photographed by Perry Ogden

Handsome, intelligent, a talented actor and a hot date, according to Naomi Campbell. Joseph Fiennes is all of these things, Miranda Sawyer discovers. But he'd never admit it.

With his attention-grabbing combination of short, starry film career and long curly eyelashes, Joseph Alberic Fiennes could waltz into any private club, any premiere, any paparazzi feat,from London to LA. He's got several major film roles under his belt (including the lead in Shakespeare In Love and the Earl of Leicester in Elizabeth); he's young (30), feted ("gifted beyond belief" - Cate Blanchett; "head and shoulders above the rest" - Shakespeare director John Madden) and handsome (he came fourth as the person most Americans would like to kiss under the mistletoe at Christmas).

He's even got the title-speckled family tree: not only is he little brother to Schindler's List star Ralph, but he's explorer Sir Ranulph's third cousin once removed and, through some tortuous marital route, eighth cousin to the Prince of Wales. But Joe doesn't lord it up. He went to drama school with Ewan McGregor, he's just finished Enemy At the Gates with Jude Law; he's filming opposite Heather Graham in Killing Me Softly; and he's even, according to the tabloids, sharred torrid nights of passion with Naomi Campbell. But, despite ample opportunity, Joe Fiennes is no messy Met Bar man-boy. There's no photo-me-razzle, no front-page life. Joe likes to play things down.

"Can't we just have a conversation?" he asks, in his quiet, neutral voice, when I switch on my recorder. "Conversations are better - less one-sided. Don't you think?" Well, yes, except Joseph Fiennes' idea of a conversation - an interview - is as one-sided as he can make it. We spend an hour talking in the chintzy environs of the Portobello Hotel, and throughout, he tries to deflect attention from himself as much as he can. He asks me about my family when I ask about his, he inquires about my holiday plans instead of divulging his own, he talks about anything - including the weather("Has it been raining in London in the last week?" - he's been filming in the Lake District) - rather than his life, his tastes, his opinions, his feelings. When I leave the room to order coffee, he half jokes that he'll erase my tape. "I've done it before in an interview, when I gave an answer I didn't like." In his fleece and combat trousers, Joe looks younger than his years, but he steers our "conversation" like a veteran politician.

Eventually, in exasperation, I say: "You're very elusive." "Why, thank you," he coos sweetly. And then, the iceman melteth a little and explains, "I have a huge respect for this process, for publicity," he says, evenly, "for its potential and its actual impact. You respect it because it is so grotesquely powerful. It can penetrate far into people's lives, readers' lives, or the subject's life - it spreads all around the world. And its power is such that it can overwhelm you." He leans forward a touch. "There are certain areas that I keep private. I don't talk about my political beliefs or my personal life and I don't use interviews as counselling. I don't work out my problems or feelings in public, because whenever I read an article where somebody does that, I find it excruciating." With that, this serious young man nestles back into his chair and smiles. Oh dear.

Still, despite our chat-and-mouse game - me, trying not to sound too interested when he ventures towards the personal; him, sensing I'm about to pounce and retreating into his hole - it's hard not to like Joe Fiennes. He's personable, self-assured and clever, and though he tries his best to smother it, he has a wicked sense of humour. When we talk about anger, for instance, he says, "perhaps losing your temper is just a symptom of where you are in your life. No, I haven't had therapy! But I've read a lot of books, so I can talk cod psychology when I need to. Such as," he gives his little smile again, "in interviews."

A frustrating interviewee he may be, but as an actor, Joe is more than fulfilling. In 1998, after only two previous small film parts (in Stealing Beauty and Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence), Fiennes the Younger arrived out of nowhere to land slap in the middle of Elizabeth, playing a poised, romantic Dudley to Cate Blanchett's mesmerising lead. He followed this with more knickerbocker glory, swaggering through the title role in the Oscar-hoovering Shakespeare in Love. In both, he displayed the cool intelligence of his brother Ralph, but also a much rawer comic boisterousness. Despite his romantic-hero casting, he reminds me of a young wolf, with his tufty hair and his eat-all grin.

Straight afterward, ignoring Hollywoods's seductive advances (Miramax wanted to sign him for a two-picture deal), Joe hopped on stage for a month at London's Royal Court. And then, at the height of Shakespeare fever, when the more insecure would be milking the attention and ensuring future roles, Joe went on holiday to Canada. By himself. To a Buddhist retreat. "Actually, I'm thinking of going on another retreat," he offers. Then, of course, he immediatly takes it back: "But I might not. I haven't decided."

After his solo sojourn, Joe made Rancid Aluminium, which was dreadful. "I agree. I chose to do it because the role was so different from the men-in-tights parts I'd been playing, but it taught me that you have to look at the whole film, the director, the entire project, and not just your own part." So this time around, after yet another trip away - six months travelling around India - Joe has chosen more carefully. Over the past year and a half, he's clocked up Forever Mine, a film based in Seventies Miami; Killing Me Softly, based on the book by Nicci French; and, in between, the much anticipated Enemy At The Gates, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and co-starring Jude Law and Rachel Weisz. The film is based on truth: it tells the story of a russian farmer, Vassili Zaitsev (Law), who becomes a legend as a sniper in the battle of Stalingrad. Fiennes plays Danilov, a young political officer who uses Vassili's crack shot talents as propaganda to bolster the beleaguered russian troops. But eventually he falls victim to his own truth-tugging talents." No matter how principled you think you are," muses Joe, "you can twist your principles to suit yourself, you can use them as you wish. And at the same time, they can use you. You can really believe in a dogma, follow it to the letter and then find it has resulted in you acting in a repellant way." He looks pleased with the idea, stimulated by the concept.

Annaud couldn't be happier with Joe. He tells me later that he never writes a role for an actor, but that Fiennes was his dream choice. "I wanted a very articulate young actor - passionate but also cerebral." He recalls that while Jude Law would rely on his instincts ("he likes to just to do it"), Joe "loves to intellectualise". Annaud also points out the importance of both Jude's and Joe's theatre training. "Six pages of dialogue, and they would not make one mistake."

Theatre is indeed the key to Joe's wonderful film performances: when he left the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1993, he went straight into a gruelling six month eight-shows-a-week West End run of The Woman In Black. "It taught me to listen," he says. "You can run through a shopping list in part of your head as long as the rest of you is listening." He spent the first five years of his career on stage, joining the RSC for two years, and performing in Troilus and Cressida, Les Enfants du Paradis and As You Like It. This month, he appears in a production of Christopher Marlowe's Edward the Second in Sheffield. "A fantastic play," he says. "A wonderful part." He loves plays - they satisfy both his acting desires and his literary interests. "It's because I respond to the written word, I think. With film, the whole picture is not necessarily on the page - that's why the director is so important. With plays, it's all there, in the words."

Books were a mainstay of Joe's upbringing (the Fienneses didn't own a television). His background was both old-fashionably secure and boho-unstable. The family of nine moved around an incredible amount as father Mark and mother Jennifer (known as Jini) searched for the elusive balance between earning money and living a wonderful life. Mark was a farm hand-turnes-photographer; Jini, a painter and novelist. Joe's earliest memory is of West Cork, when he was about four; but the family was living in Southwark, South London, when he left school for the final time at 15. Sometimes there wasn't enough money and Jini educated the kids at home; as it was, Joe went to "15 different schools" around Ireland and Southern England. It must have been very difficult, though he says that their gypsy lifestyle helped him in his chosen career. Evertime the family moved, Joe changed his accent, adopted a new persona, played the right part in order to fit in to his new surroundings.

A dominant, mercurial character, Jini was a talented writer who was pronounced an "incurable hysteric" three times before she was 22. She died of breast cancer at the age of 55, in 1993 - the year Joe graduated from Guildhall. Despite her volatility, she included her children in everything and surrounded them with love and creativity, taking Ralph to see Laurence Olivier's Henry V when he was just five years old. Recently, Ralph, Joe and their sister Sophie have been involved in promoting her posthumous work Blood ties, giving readings in Dublin and the US. "I feel completely her child," says Joe. "I have no detachment, just involvement." He won't talk about her death, though. "Private," he says, instantly, when I try to bring up the matter. She was buried in a homemade coffin coloured blue.

The members of Joe's family are his friends, his gang. All apart from one, have a career in the performing arts. Ralph we know about; then there's Martha, who's a film director; Magnus, a musician and composer; and Sophie, a film producer. Only Jake, Joe's twin, opted for a different type of career; he's a gamekeeper. And Michael, a couple of years older than Ralph and fostered by the Fienneses when he was 10, became an archeaologist and historian. The very youngest, Joe followed the creative Fiennes path but, like his twin, he's an outdoorsy person.

He plays regularly in a sunday football team when he's home, and we spend quite some time talking about rock-climbing. He practises in a sports centre in North London and, while filming Killing Me Softly in Cumbria - appropriately enough, he plays a mountaineer - took the opportunity to climb a couple of peaks. Joe's absorbed and absorbing when he talks about his hobby, describing the concentration, the connection with nature, the "tiny piece of dental floss" that holds the rope for abseiling down again. It's a sport that seems to suit his need for both privacy and company: an individual conquest that's surrounded and supported by friends. Like acting.

At first, though, Joe thought he wanted to be a painter. He went to art school and travelled to Italy. "I was a builder," he tells me, though actually he was an architectural restorer working on a twelfth-century villa. Anyway, by the time he left, he knew he wanted to be an actor. Because his family lived in Southwark, he could join the Young Vic, which he did. He supported himself then and later working as a dresser. He also made a decision, at 18, that he wanted to perform in the theatre. He took the long term view. He wanted to be fully prepared - "to have served my apprenticeship" - when he was called upon to play more major roles. This seems an incredibly far-sighted and mature approach for a teenager, especially at a time when theatre was dying and television was becoming an increasingly dominant medium. Joe just shrugs and says, "I wanted to train properly."

His training payed off. He's rarely been out of a job for more than two months and his performances have been exemplary. Joe Fiennes, rather like Ralph, is a grave and focused man. He has worked very hard, and doesn't want to distract from that work by giving away too much about himself. After all, his brother, despite his best efforts, found his private life splashed across the tabloids when he left his wife for Francesca Annis. No wonder Joe is so low-key, so deliberately noncommital - he's naturally private, and his job makes him more so. He lives on his own ("I'm a neat freak") in a flat in Notting Hill. I mention girlfriends (he's had a couple of relationships - with the actresses Sara Griffiths and Catherine McCormack - as well as the gossip columns' Naomi Campbell affair) but refuses to elaborate at all. "Well, maybe I'm seeing someone....or...." I finish it for him. "Or maybe you're not".

Sometimes, though, the controlled body language changes, the cool persona cracks and Joe Fiennes flashes - with humour, with horror, with excitement - and you glimpse the energetic youth, the stride-about Shakespeare, the passion beneath the brain. When I talk to him about obsessive fans, he makes a wildly funny face and hunches forward in a Hammer House shudder. He tells me about having road rage during his run as Jesus Christ in Dennis Potter's Son of Man. "I'd be swearing like mad, hanging out of the window with my beard flying. And then I would give them Benediction." I ask him when he last hit someone and he says, "I saw this guy mugging a girl, so I chased him into a phone box and smashed him in the face. Then someone said, "Cut." And he roars, instead of just smiling.

Bernardo Bertolucci, who directed him in Stealing Beauty, said, "Joe has a kind of almost Zen abscence." I'm not sure I agree with that. I think that Joe Fiennes is always present, always concentrating. He just chooses not to let you know. He likes his secrets. I ask him what makes him laugh and he looks at me sideways and says, "I chuckle inwardly. A lot."