Ralph Fiennes devotes everything to his work — which makes him perfect for the role of the fanatical Brand, says Aleks Sirez
Ralph Fiennes has taken on the title role of Henrik Ibsen’s Brand. For anyone who hasn’t seen the play, it’s hard to convey the epic quality of this undertaking. Fiennes is onstage for almost three hours, talking all the time, and he has to make a religious fanatic, who sacrifices mother, wife and child to his mission, not only compelling but moving too. Yes, Brand’s up there with Hamlet, Lear and Peer Gynt. It is a role only the best actor of his generation is asked to perform.
After a short run in Stratford- upon-Avon, 40-year-old Fiennes is bringing Brand to the West End. In the play’s last scene, the outcast priest is mistaken for Jesus Christ by a deluded madwoman. Here, Fiennes’s Brand radiates holiness. You can almost see the halo. Maybe his next role should be Jesus. “Oh, I’ve already played the voice of Jesus,” he smiles. “I had this funny year in which I did two animated films: in one, I was the voice of Pharaoh, in the other, called The Miracle Maker, I was the son of God.”
Playing Jesus must be an ego boost, but when I meet him in Stratford, he is surprisingly diffident. The heart-throb Hollywood star doesn’t strut, preen or pose. He sits slightly hunched, a bit tense, the famous tiger eyes darting around the room. Only his expensive clothes signal his stardom: classy black shirt, slightly flared trousers and some fancy shoes.
Fiennes maintains that while Brand is “not an easy play, it is an extraordinary experience”. But surely the character is as chilly as a Norwegian fjord? “Yes, I suppose so,” he says, “but I find that when he’s inspired at the very end, he senses that God is in everything — that’s him at his best.” To illustrate his point, Fiennes mentions Wordsworth’s poem Tintern Abbey. Then he adds: “I also think that Brand’s ruthlessness comes from how he grew up: ‘I grew up alone, like one of the stones on the shore.’ He’s been dominated by his mother and his sense of love is completely upside down. He distrusts love. He is a damaged child who has this mission.”
Although audiences have warmed to him, Fiennes has worried about the show. “It’s a very dangerous role; you can easily slip into melodrama.” Watching his Brand, the puritan preacher is less in evidence than the modernist outsider. His body language reminds me of the angular figures in Van Gogh’s early paintings; his attitude is more Kafka and Dostoevsky than Scandinavian cleric. “Oh, good,” he says. “Brand is a religious existentialist. He’s an outsider finding his way.” Fiennes goes on to talk about Dostoevsky’s Memoirs from the House of the Dead. “There’s a wonderful bit when the prisoners put on a play, and they are all transformed, which is a powerful validation of the theatre.” But his enthusiasm suddenly stalls: “The last time I talked overearnestly about what theatre at its best can do, I was called pretentious.”
His interest in religion is not confined to Brand. “I was brought up,” he says, “by a pretty devout Catholic mother (the novelist Jennifer Lash, who died in 1993). My family — particularly on her side — is full of religious people.” A professor of theology rubs shoulders with a Benedictine monk and a Greek patriarch. “God was being discussed all the time, in a very unembarrassed way.”
The eldest of her six children, Ralph was born in Suffolk. At 13, he stopped going to church. “My mother was very upset,” he says. “She’d tried to make going to church a constructive and celebratory experience. But I didn’t buy into it.” As a teenager, Fiennes went through a phase of wanting to join the army, but settled on the Chelsea School of Art. “The foundation course was designed to throw ideas at you, mess up your preconceptions — that gave me the confidence to recognise that I really wanted to be an actor. I joined an amateur company and auditioned for Rada.” His parents encouraged him.
His mother was less proud of his success than of his complete integrity and depth of commitment. Fiennes has said, “I do judge other women by her”, pointing out that her emotional intensity could be both overpowering and exciting. In 1988, he joined the RSC, where Adrian Noble (who directs Brand as his last act as company supremo) recalls him giving “one of the three best auditions I’ve ever seen”. It was for Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a role he went on to play, as did his brother Joseph recently at the National.
After his big-screen debut, a brooding Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1992), came films full of moody introspection, tortured soul-searching and enigmatic loneliness. As well as Schindler’s List and The English Patient, he starred in Quiz Show, Onegin and The End of the Affair. Recently, he has played a schizophrenic in Spider and a serial killer in Red Dragon. Beneath the perfect smile lies a world of pain. His attempts to play light comedy — in The Avengers and in Maid in Manhattan, with J.Lo — have been unconvincing. Onstage, his most memorable parts have been Shakespeare’s Richard II and Coriolanus, while his baleful Hamlet won a Tony on Broadway in 1995.
His reputation for aloofness and arrogance is not borne out when you meet him — just as long as you talk about his work. Yes, he’s serious, but he’s also warm and willing to grapple with big subjects such as spirituality. Clearly, he likes roles that stretch him. “As an actor, your challenge is to get your mind around the psychology of another human being — and the more complex and contradictory the character, the more dramatic that is.”
He continues: “There’s a bit of Brand in repellent characters like Hitler, and there’s a bit of him in Blake and Wordsworth.” Talking of his role as a Nazi in Schindler’s List, he says quietly: “The human capacity to do evil is very disturbing. You have to confront certain things; the bit of you that might go there.” We talk about Michael Meyer’s biography of Ibsen: “Ibsen clearly felt some of the anger Brand feels. He loathed compromise, while being a loyal husband and affectionate father.”
Fiennes is attracted by the notion of sacrifice, “about having to go through something to get somewhere”. “You have to lose something to gain something. You have to go down before you can go up. Brand is too extreme for me, but I do think that being prepared to give up things is an issue.”
He’s never had any children, and I wonder whether he’s alluding to that. “Brand makes me ask: have I given up enough? What am I doing this for? Is what I do going to make things better or not?” He gives me a haunted glance before wrestling with “that Catholic bit that asks: what is the account at the end of the day? In your daily life, where’s your ounce of courage to face things truthfully?”.
We’re getting on well, then I ask about his private life. He gives me a hangdog look. “I’m very reluctant to say anything, I really am.” Since 1995, he’s been living with Francesca Annis, who played Gertrude to his Hamlet, which encouraged gossips to say he’s sleeping with his mother — she’s 18 years older than him. “I so know I didn’t marry my mother,” he once told an interviewer. “I started off finding it insulting, but now I find it stupid.”
In fact, what’s interesting is not Annis’s age but her job. Like Alex Kingston — whom Fiennes met at Rada, then married in 1993, before they broke up a year later — Annis is an actress. What Fiennes needs is not a mother but a loyal partner who understands what acting’s all about. Annis has seen his Brand and given him some suggestions.
“There is an understanding,” he says, “that if you’re going in front of an audience, you have to have your confidence intact. As an actor, you only give support. Once, I had a taste of losing confidence, and there’s nothing worse. It was when I was very young — suddenly, during a production, my confidence about my talent, my sense of cohesion, suddenly all went. It’s very fragile. More fragile than you might think.” The haunted look returns and reminds me that, like other great actors, Fiennes is doing us a favour. He puts himself through hell so that the audience can get an insight into being human. Like Brand, he is a man with a mission.
Brand opens at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, SW1, on June 4