Sexy? Sure. But Ralph Fiennes also oozes stubbornness and arrogance in BAM's
paired productions of Coriolanus and Richard II

A postcard on the rack at Britain's National Portrait Gallery shows Ralph Fiennes in a black leather jacket, glowering into the camera. To his film audience, the air is a familiar one: With his trademark expression of smoldering eroticism and rebellion, the actor looks like a patrician version of young Marlon Brando. Perhaps that's why it comes as a surprise that the
everyday, unshaven Ralph Fiennes is distinctly soft-spoken and eloquent as he discusses Shakespeare.

"My mother first played me a recording of Laurence Olivier doing speeches from Hamlet and Henry V, and I thought, This is magic," he says, settling on a bar stool in the makeshift lobby of London's Gainsborough Studios. "I didn't know what it all meant, but the sound of the words excited me."

These days, he's still fired by Shakespeare's complexities. The dyspeptic duo that Fiennes has been drawing to life on this dilapidated soundstage (where Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Lady Vanishes) includes, on alternating nights, two of the playwright's most challenging creations: Richard II, the petulant English king, and Coriolanus, the arrogant Roman general who is banished by
the masses he has fought to protect.

The two parts allow for little of the sexual Fahrenheit that Fiennes, 37, tends to generate on-screen. In fact, when the New York leg of the tour opened at BAM last week (a project of London's Almeida Theatre, it will travel to Tokyo next), it may leave fans longing for the sensitive, repressed men engaged in illicit romances who populate his film portfolio: Count Almasy
of The English Patient (1995), Maurice Bendrix in The End of the Affair (1999), and three generations of Hungarian fathers and sons in this year's Sunshine. (In 1999's Onegin, directed by Fiennes's sister Martha, he played the quintessential Byronic hero, even fighting a duel over a woman.) But the actor hopes audiences will still be seduced by his stage presence and
classical range.

They have been before. A decade ago, Fiennes strutted his stuff at the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Troilus (in Troilus and Cressida), Henry VI and a devilishly handsome Edmund in King Lear. Fiennes's mesmerizing performance in the latter play was a precursor to his star-making performance as Amon
Goeth, the Nazi commandant in 1993's Schindler's List. Since screen fame hit, he has managed only two stage appearances: In 1995, his vehement, swiftly spoken Hamlet at Broadway's Belasco Theater won him a Tony; in 1997, he played the title character of Chekhov's Ivanov in London and Moscow.

Despite his experience with Shakespeare, Fiennes acknowledges that Richard II and Coriolanus are a break from the expected. "I suppose I'm seen as a nervy, intellectual sort of actor who is good at playing angst-ridden people," he says. But these plays are about powerful men, who, by their very conditioning, are unable to wield that power with any real wisdom or balance.

It's refreshing to play someone who can just say, 'Oh, you bunch of shits! Hang the lot of you!'" The notion of alternating them, Fiennes says, came as he was kicking around ideas for a return to Shakespeare with director Jonathan Kent. "Richard II is a part I've always wanted to play," he explains. "And while I've also wanted to play Coriolanus, no one would ever cast me as Coriolanus."

Kent says he had no trouble accepting the idea. "Ralph is fastidious in his taste," the director explains. "And there's a fastidiousness of spirit and taste in Coriolanus”he can't bring himself to compromise." Says Fiennes: "There's something in all of us where we want to say, 'This is the way I want it. This is the way it is, and fuck anyone else's opinion. I don't give a shit.' That's not always smart, and it's not smart in Coriolanus's case."

He adds, however, that he is rarely prey to such instincts. Indeed, the star obligingly agrees to move to a balcony seat overlooking the cavernous soundstage when dollies clattering across the concrete floor threaten to overwhelm the conversation. High above the stage, he speaks about the
challenges of each play. "Coriolanus is vocally and physically more demanding," he says. "There are many more public scenes of confrontation, and there is this whole battle that takes place in the first act, which is very exhausting—although it sort of gives you an adrenaline buzz for the rest of the play." His stamina, he says, comes from yoga and gym work ("I've always been hopeless at sports").

Intellectually, however, Richard II is the trickier role. "The mentality of Richard is much more elusive," Fiennes says. "He's a man of switchback temperament, of ups and downs. Coriolanus says what he believes at the beginning and sticks to it, right through, until he's manipulated by his mother."

Kent has taken some creative costuming liberties with this production: He's kept a medieval look for Richard, but for Coriolanus, he's mixed modern dress with togas to emphasize that the play is, even today, "politically aggressive and in-your-face," as Fiennes notes. Despite their ongoing relevance, Fiennes says he is eager to move beyond the classics. "With these Shakespeare plays, everyone has their idea about Richard or Hamlet or Coriolanus. They've seen so-and-so do it, and that was the one for them. I'm dying to do something that is original." And among the modern playwrights, who would his first choice be? Mamet? Pinter?

"Well, they're great writers, so sure, if I were offered one of their plays, I would leap at it," Fiennes says. "But there are younger writers around who are writing really interesting stuff. I would love to do Patrick Marber [Closer], for instance. I like his writing a lot. Or maybe there is someone out there we haven't heard of yet. I would like to go into the unknown."

Richard II and Coriolanus alternate nights at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater, Through October 1.