Ralph Fiennes on choosing acting roles: "I like characters that have contradictions inside them"

In the new film “Conclave,” based on the Robert Harris novel, Ralph Fiennes is a Vatican insider, the cardinal tasked with running the gathering of the entire College of Cardinals in Rome to select a new pope.

The film is partially set in the Sistine Chapel, literally “the room where it happens” when the election of a pope is concerned. But as imagined in the film, not serene.

“Conclave,” which also Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rosselini, is a taut thriller with a shock of an ending you just don’t see coming. Fiennes, as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, navigates the intrigue, the treachery even, of papal politics – a reluctant player consumed with doubt. As he tells the collected cardinals, “If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”

This “Doubting Thomas” is a very Ralph Fiennes sort of character. “I like characters that have contradictions inside them,” he said. His reaction to reading the part of Lawrence was, “Oh, I love this, this is a human. He’s not a saint. He’s a good man trying to find his way.

“I was brought up a Catholic and then rebelled when I was 13,” Fiennes said. “My mother was a committed Catholic. So, ‘God questions’ have been in my family since I was a child.”

Did he come away with any answers to his own questions? “No, I came away with more questions,” he said.

In a key scene with Cardinal Bellini (played by Tucci), Fiennes’ Lawrence lets slip that even his conflicted character has ambitions to be pope.

“I used to think that acting was about becoming someone else – you changed completely, and you were not recognizable,” he said. “To a certain extent, it can be about that. But as I’ve got older, I’ve thought, no. The springboard is yourself.”

To watch a trailer for “Conclave” click on the video player below:

In “The Return,” out in December, Fiennes, now 61, plays Odysseus, the once-proud king finally home after the Trojan War. “He’s exhausted. He’s emaciated and also just, I think, not at all the warrior,” he said. “He’s diminished as a man.”

Fiennes had to transform himself physically for the role: “We said he should look ropey – like, literally he’s been at sea.” 

Slowly reclaiming his identity, Odysseus finally faces his wife, Penelope, played by Juliette Binoche.

The chance to work again with Binoche, a longtime friend, was what convinced Fiennes to do the film (their third together). “We’ve been given this gift of these famous iconic parts,” Fiennes said. “It may sound a bit airy-fairy, but I think all actors have, Oh, this role has come to me, and I’m meant to do it. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, I’m meant to do this, it’s come to me and this other person is doing it.“

“The English Patient” was another one of those, for both of them. It won nine Academy Awards, including best supporting actress for Binoche. Fiennes received one of his two career Oscar nominations. 

He’s played dozens of singular characters, good and bad, in both films and plays. In addition to Gustave in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” he was Voldemort, a noseless monster in the Harry Potter series, and a Nazi concentration camp commandant in “Schindler’s List.”

We saw Fiennes most recently on “Sunday Morning,” in 2022, on stage as Robert Moses, supremely confident, power-hungry, the man who shaped 20th century New York City, in the play, “Straight Line Crazy.”

In New York last week, discussing acting, Fiennes described the excitement of playing arrogance: “You’re given a sports car, where you can rev it up with anger and contempt, and there’s no compromise, and it’s shocking,” he said, “but it’s thrilling to play. You challenge your audience with it: Argue with me if you dare, you will not win. I know the answer. And that’s a great provocation.”

Teichner asked, “Have any of the characters you’ve played affected your life after you’ve played them?”

“Characters mark you,” Fiennes replied. “There’s often a time of a kind of mourning if you’ve loved playing a part and you’ve given it everything. It’s not that you let go of the part, but you’re feeling a kind of mental exhaustion. You need time to just shake it away.”

But only until another role finds him…

“People sometimes say, ‘What do you want to play?’ And I go, well, I could tick off a few Shakespeare parts or well-known Ibsen parts. But actually, that’s not really it. I want to be surprised by a new script, something I’ve never heard of, and you go, Oooh, yes. Oh my God, what is this new thing? I’ve not heard of it, I’ve not read the source material.  And this all feels, it feels good, it feels right.”

     
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Story produced by Mikaela Bufano and Reid Orvedahl. Editor: Carol Ross. 

     
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