Ralph Fiennes on His Initial “Misplaced Snobbery” Towards ‘Harry Potter’ and Why He May Be Done Directing
Ralph Fiennes began a nearly two-hour conversation at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Thursday by addressing the important thing first: the pronunciation of his first name.
“It’s one of those funky old English things; my parents dealt me this hand with this name,” the actor — whose name is produced “Rafe” — told the crowd inside Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre. “I can hear my father — [me] coming back from school, saying, ‘People keep saying it’s Ralph, it’s Ralph.’ And my father said, ‘No, they’re wrong.'”
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Fiennes was honored with the festival’s outstanding performer of the year award, and sat down with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg for a look back at his long career. The conversation began with a discussion of Fiennes’ discovery of his love of acting and his big break in Wuthering Heights, which caught Steven Spielberg’s attention as he was casting 1993’s Schindler’s List.
Looking back on that moment — which led to his first Oscar nomination — the actor recalled, “It was a very bewildering time to be part of this film and the success it was receiving. My mother died at the end of ’93, just as the film was being launched and being considered for all kinds of awards. It was, as you can imagine, extremely painful to lose the woman, your mother, who has inspired you and supported you and all of her children. So it was a very odd and painful time, but having gone through all the grief and loss that you would imagine, I feel she’s watching.”
The pair touched on his involvement in Quiz Show, The English Patient and an audition for Shakespeare in Love opposite then-lead Julia Roberts, as Fiennes quipped, “I liked Julia Roberts but I don’t think she liked me.” The star also looked back on playing Voldemort in several of the Harry Potter films, noting that he originally wasn’t interested in the role as he was “just ignorant.”
“I hadn’t seen the films in order to dislike them, I just hadn’t seen them and I hadn’t read the books. I was aware of their big success. I think I was probably guilty of a sort of totally misplaced snobbery of witches and goblins and things,” Fiennes said of being approached to play Voldemort. “I was resistant, until I told my sister Martha that I’ve been asked to play this Voldemort person. She said, ‘Voldemort, you’ve been asked to play Voldemort? You have to do it! Ralph you don’t realize, you don’t realize,'” which quickly convinced him.
Continuing through his resumé of In Bruges, the James Bond franchise, The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Menu, Fiennes spoke about his journey with behind the camera as well — which began with 2011’s Coriolanus — and if there would be another directing project on the horizon.
“I’m not sure there is. I tried to put a film together recently, the climb is very difficult for independent films,” he admitted, noting how his 2018 film The White Crow “was very, very hard to make. I find the finance aspect of it, I found it very, very bruising, the uncertainty of it all. So it’s left me quite kind of — I have loved many aspects of directing and working with actors and working with heads of department, but the anxiety of finance, if it’s an independent film, I found really, really tough on that film.”
The attention then turned to Conclave, for which Fiennes was recently nominated for an Oscar and has been racking up recognition for over the past several months. “Conclave was one of those things where I had a feeling of that connecting to the part — you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but it’s good when you have that feeling,” he said. In the film, Fiennes plays Cardinal Lawrence, who is tasked with leading the selection of a new pope as he uncovers a trail of secrets along the way.
“There are parts where you feel that would be fun to do, that’s not really me, but it’ll test me, like In Bruges — that character’s a long way from my lived experience, but a great part, and some parts are closer to your lived experience,” he continued. “Clearly, I’m not a priest, but I felt there was something — yes it functions as a political thriller, but there’s a search for who is the right leader of a faith that has the right qualities of a spiritual leader. The Pope is real, the Pope exists. So whoever the Pope is is important in our world, so there is a meaning there that resonated with me, and I felt Lawrence is the part who has to guide the Conclave with real integrity and wisdom. And in the course, he’s carrying conflicts himself, and he weakens a moment and his own ambition comes forward. But I think there was a sort of poetic harmony in all the elements.”
Conclave director Edward Berger was on hand to present Fiennes with his award, as the star told the crowd, “Looking back at some of my work tonight with Scott, I just realized how profoundly lucky I’ve been to have had these opportunities and have shared them with so many remarkable people. The terrible fires that have devastated and wounded your sister city, Los Angeles, are an immediate shock. They shock us into realizing who we are in a community — civic, local or international — and when we witness terrible and traumatic destruction and loss, it can short circuit our awareness to recognize, to see again, what we value. I value the transformative power of art, low or high art, the art of storytelling.”
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