“I wasn’t always in character,” says Ralph Fiennes of his titular turn in Spider, in which he plays a psychotic schizophrenic with an Oedipal complex to shame Norman Bates. “The crew wasn’t calling me Spider off-set, but on some days, it was very hard to leave that world behind.” The bleakness of that world—think Cast Away in an institution—created by director David Cronenberg from the novel by Patrick McGrath, is what drew Fiennes to the part. “I was attracted to this figure, alone and cut off. This is a man who’s physically cautious, linguistically cautious. It’s a huge effort for him to put a sentence together. He’s watchful, but he’s not stupid; he’s alert, but he’s not letting anything out. I thought this would be a great challenge to play.” Fiennes had been committed to the project for nearly ten years. “I’m attracted to playing tragic figures, I suppose. I certainly play more tragic roles than comedic ones,” he says, launching into a riff about Maid in Manhattan, the film that the two-time Oscar-nominated, Tony Award–winning Englishman took next. “When I got the script for this uncomplicated comedy where Jennifer Lopez wears a nice dress and we fall in love, I thought, Yes, this is very good,” he says. “I’m so used to looking for the odd sharp angles and dark hidden corners that it took me a while to buy into, but after Spider, I thought, This is just what I need.”