Time for his close-up

What’s the matter with Ralph Nathaniel Twistleton-Wykeham Fiennes? In pictures, he looks so self-conscious and morose. Maybe it’s just his acting face.

In the flesh, though, he’s different. He is friendly. Midway through what must be an exhausting press junket at the Soho Hotel, he remains remarkably enthusiastic, and eager to discuss Coriolanus, his new film, of which he is both director and leading man.

‘It’s Shakespeare at his bleakest,’ he says, excitedly. ‘He’s not offering us, as he does in the comedies and in some of the histories, a sense that the future is full of hope. He is exposing the continual dysfunction of us humans as political or tribal entities, that we are constantly jockeying for power, position or angrily expressing our needs. I feel it’s a sort of evisceration of man — it ends with the evisceration of a man.’

Does Fiennes sound pretentious? He isn’t. He’s a bit of a thesp, perhaps — at one point, he picks up my copy of Coriolanus and starts loudly reciting a long scene — but there’s nothing wrong with that. He’s an actor, after all.
He played Coriolanus on the stage in 2000, and is clearly drawn to the conflicted figure of the Roman general. ‘It’s thrilling,’ he says, ‘I feel he is like some magnificent beast or animal; like a horse that has always been trained to be this pure thing. Then suddenly the trainer — his mother — turns around and says, “Can you actually be this entirely other thing?” So he tries but then suddenly it all fucks up and goes crazy.’

It’s said that Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s most political play. What with the cast (Fiennes and Vanessa Redgrave, who plays Volumnia, are both Unicef ambassadors), the present-day setting in Serbia, and the themes of starvation, power and corruption, it’s tempting to dismiss the film as luvvie propaganda about the evils of the modern world.