Ralph Fiennes must infuriate fellow actors who lack his range, which almost defies believability. Over the past 25 years, the English actor has readily conquered Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Shaw, and collaborated with Spielberg, Minghella, and Anderson. He has played sinister villains, idiosyncratic Lotharios, and earnest romantic leads. An indie darling, Fiennes also regularly titillates the masses in blockbusters such as the Harry Potter franchise and Clash of the Titans. His latest spate of projects is neither less diverse nor less envy-inspiring. This month, he appears as M in the new James Bond film, Spectre, and is co-starring in Hail, Caesar!, the latest Coen brothers farce, to be released in February. Considering his sprawling résumé, it’s hard to believe that he once doubted that he had the stuff to act in the first place. Below, Fiennes, eternally boyish at 52, talks about his affection for anachronistic turns of phrase, why he roots for the bad guy, and his teenage infatuation with Ian Fleming novels.
EVERYONE MISPRONOUNCES his first name (it’s “Rafe”), which he inherited from a relative, who sensibly went by Rusty. Some of Fiennes’s friends call him Riff-Raff.
HE ALSO has a vexingly complicated triplicate surname: Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, a legacy bestowed upon him by long-forgotten ancestors.
HIS FAMILY is exuberantly creative: His father was a photographer, his mother a painter; he has actor and musician siblings, of which there are six. The family tree also includes a famous explorer, Ranulph Fiennes, and—on a faraway branch—royalty. (Prince Charles is a distant relation.)
Related: These Classic James Bond Movie Posters Have a License to Slay
AT FIRST he planned on becoming a painter: he was happiest “in the art room of my school.” Yet one day, while doing an art project, he realized that he was actually designing a little set—his first inkling that he might be destined for the stage.
HIS EARLIEST role: one of three kings in a Nativity play, at age eight. “We had to sing ‘We Three Kings’ … and I couldn’t really sing. A girl who was very good at singing stood behind the curtain and sang over me.”
HE HAS a red-brick house in London—designed more than a hundred years ago for “carpenters, furniture-makers, glaziers, and people in that sort of business”—and a loft in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.
BUT HE truly adores his little rented house in Umbria, which is surrounded by poppies in the spring and wildflowers in the summer. “I love it because it’s basic … I go alone and love reading there.”
HE IS teaching himself to be a photographer and often carries a small digital Leica everywhere. “I like to have a camera close by. It makes you see differently.” But he admits that he’s not exactly pushy with it. “I’m not very good at getting into people’s faces.” His inspirations: Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Saul Leiter.
HE LOVES directors who challenge him on set. “Sometimes it’s good to have your preparation taken out from under your feet. It throws you. I wish that would happen more.”
Related: Test-Driving James Bond’s Snazzy New Aston Martin
BUT HE dislikes obviously sympathetic characters: “I like audiences being confused as to who they should root for. I want to root for the barf bag.”
HE RARELY watches his own films.
BY THE age of 14, he was a full-blown, self-described James Bond nerd: “But not the films, the books. They were all these crappy, scruffy paperbacks. I could tell you the names of all the girls, and all the baddies.”
HIS FAVORITE James Bond on film: It’s a toss-up between Sean Connery and Daniel Craig. Although he also carries a torch for Roger Moore: “He had a lightness of touch.”
LIKE BOND, he has an affinity for martinis.
UNLIKE BOND, he takes his martinis stirred, not shaken.
Related: Monica Bellucci, Léa Seydoux, and Naomie Harris Shake Up the New James Bond Film
THE LIVING directors he’s still keen to collaborate with: Michael Haneke (Amour, The White Ribbon) and Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida).
HISTORICAL DIRECTORS he would have loved to act for: Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, whose La Dolce Vita is Fiennes’s favorite film. “It’s got everything in it: the metropolitan world, the vanity of the metropolitan man, the modern person lost-looking. And it’s funny.”
HE GETS upset when his dressing-room rituals—stretching, sipping tea—are disturbed, for fear that his performance will be jinxed. “But then sometimes I go, ‘Oh, fuck it—I should risk jinxing it.’ ”
THE ONLY novel he has read over and over: Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which he’s been through three times. Why so few other books get a second glance-through: “Because life seems to be rushing by.”
HE HAS a penchant for endearingly old-fashioned expressions, including “loosey-goosey” and “bugger’s muddle” (i.e., a total fiasco).
HE ALSO likes to abide by certain profound mantras: “ ‘This too shall pass.’ That’s a good one. And also ‘Let it go, just let it go.’ That’s the hard one.”
