Two-time Oscar nominee Ralph Fiennes is having one of the best and busiest years of his already accomplished career.
In addition to the critically acclaimed film, Conclave, a religious thriller that may bring him a third Oscar nomination, he is in three other movies.
The Return
The movie takes liberties with Homer. “The script did away with monsters,” said Fiennes. “It was the end of ‘The Odyssey,’ and there’s no goddess Athena to help Odysseus look pretty and give him a fuller head of hair or make him more useful. We embrace the idea that he is a man after 20 years of travel, 10 years at war, 20 years lost. He’s washed up naked, with nothing. He’s given a blanket. All I wear is one red piece of cloth I wrapped around me, and a loin cloth.”
Fiennes plays Odysseus as a lost and wandering soul. “I’m impelled to come to the place where I’m from,” he said, “but I am disoriented. Inside myself, I have a sense of deep psychic psychological displacement. I’m not sure if I want to be here even as I am here. And that was a wonderful challenge to play. I’m back here, but I don’t know how to talk to my wife. My confidence in myself is shattered, but I am still who I am, and that is weird. It’s quite a paradoxical state to be in. He goes to the palace. He looks at the suitors. He still has an inner steel. He’s waiting for his moment. He doesn’t come home in full heroic mode, hardly.”
28 Years Later
Next up: Fiennes plays a good doctor in 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s follow-up to “28 Days Later.” “It’s three films, of which two have been shot,” he said. “Britain is 28 years into this terrible plague of infected people who are violent, rabid humans with a few pockets of uninfected communities. It centers on a young boy who wants to find a doctor to help his dying mother. He leads his mother through this northern English terrain. Around them hiding in forests and hills are the infected. But he finds a doctor who is a man we might think is going to be weird and odd, but actually is a force for good.”
The Choral
Fiennes also stars in Alan Bennett’s The Choral, about a small community north of England during World War One trying to put on a song concert.
“All the young men are going off to the war in France and are dying,” said Fiennes. “And they hire new chorus master to perform a piece.” They can’t go to the usual German composers, so Fiennes’ character proposes a difficult choral piece by the English conductor Edward Elgar. “We have an amateur group of singers being inducted into a very demanding choral piece. How do they get there? The film is a study in the community, the little relationships and the gossipy back-biting things that are happening, the young people having their first love affairs and flirtations and attractions. As they work on this piece, conducted by my character, who’s a bit of a strict, aloof martinet, they manage to do it before all the young men are called up.”
