Playing disturbed -- or disturbing -- individuals isn't anything new for Ralph Fiennes.
Yet he says he was surprised to be approached for Spider, the low-budget art-house movie in which he portrays a mentally ill man who tries to suss out his childhood memories after years of being institutionalized.
After such films as The English Patient and The End of the Affair, Fiennes figures casting directors peg him as "more educated types of Englishmen and that sort of thing. And here I'm playing someone from a very working-class background who's got severe schizophrenia."
Fiennes defies leading-man typecasting about as much as he can in the film, playing the title character with a stooped, shuffling walk and nicotine-stained fingers. Dennis (Spider) Cleg chain-smokes, obsessively takes notes, and mutters and mumbles -- all while wearing four shirts.
"Clothes make the man," says one of Cleg's fellow residents at a halfway house. "The less you have of a man, the more the need for clothes."
Wearing one shirt and speaking with the eloquence of an actor trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Fiennes says in a recent interview in Manhattan that his character's limited verbal skills weren't "a problem at all."
"I loved the fact that I could just be a person and really not have to speak," he says.
Screenwriter Patrick McGrath, who adapted his own novel for the David Cronenberg-directed film, particularly admired that aspect of Fiennes's performance.
"Ralph is able to summon an enormous charge of internal, passionate, emotional and intellectual activity and transmit that, often inarticulately -- but transmit it with vividness," McGrath says. "Ralph is the perfect man to communicate the experience of a schizophrenic in torment."
The two-time Academy Award nominee first gained wide attention playing the creepy yet human concentration camp commandant in Schindler's List, the best-picture Oscar winner for 1993.
He played a cop turned street hustler in 1995's Strange Days, and the Tooth Fairy serial killer in last year's Hannibal Lecter prequel Red Dragon.
Even the more normal people he's portrayed in such films as Quiz Show and The English Patient were haunted, hunted or fatally flawed.
So making the romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan with Jennifer Lopez last year was a fun change of pace, Fiennes says, adding: "I'm not remotely averse to doing anything commercial."
There's an energy and confidence behind a big-budget picture, he says, compared to an independent film, which can have "a certain anxiety to it."
Fiennes notes how unashamed the producers of Red Dragon, particularly Dino De Laurentiis, were about it being a franchise movie and how (the actor adopts De Laurentiis's broken English) "we're gonna make-a this amount of money ... "
"I love that," Fiennes says of such brimming brio.
Contrast that with Spider, which had "a lot of committed people, a lot of them not being paid for a long time because they believe in the film." He reduced his salary and deferred payment too.
Coming from England, Fiennes -- the eldest of six children (including Shakespeare in Love star Joseph Fiennes) born to a photographer-father and novelist-mother -- thinks Hollywood is a hoot.
"You have these blue, blue skies and these great big soundstages, and little golf carts going around, and everyone saying, 'We'll do this, we'll do that,' and massive lighting crew, construction crew."
It all adds up to the feeling, he says with a droll stentorian tone, "This is movie-making!"
For now, though, he's going to concentrate on theatre work.
"That's become very important to me, for some reason," says Fiennes, who won a 1995 Tony for his portrayal of Hamlet. After recently starring as psychologist Carl Jung in Christopher Hampton's The Talking Cure on the London stage, he'll next tackle Henrik Ibsen's Brand there.
He has no films lined up and that's fine with him, but he jokes: "I might be nervous if you talk to me in June or July."
Fiennes turned 40 in December but says he's undaunted by the milestone: "I said to someone, I feel like I'm meant to be 40. It doesn't scare me."
Formerly married to ER cast member Alex Kingston, Fiennes has been with 58-year-old actress Francesca Annis for several years. The change in romantic partners served at the time as grist for tabloid tales -- something he tries to avoid.
"I'm always alert," Fiennes says of such coverage. "I think you have to be very careful."
Sporting a buzz cut he got "just for the hell of it," he can shrug off other slings and arrows. When asked, for instance, about the common view that The Avengers was his biggest career mistake, he says that every actor wants to be liked. But he adds:
"I also think you get smart pretty quickly to the fact that that's not always going to happen. And people are not going to like you, people are going to give you bad reviews. So what you're left with is the process -- the people you work with, the friendships that you make.
"And that's what has become more and more important to me."