It’s an unusually bright summer morning in New York, and the sun streaming through the windows of Soho House makes it hard to tell whether Ralph Fiennes, who is sitting on a velvet sofa in the lounge, is staring at the ground because the light is too strong for his famously pale blue-green eyes or because, as he admits several times during the course of an hour’s sit-down, interviews make him squirm. The problem with “these kinds of situations,” as he calls them, is that pesky journalists always want answers, and Fiennes doesn’t really believe in answers. He’s especially wary of what he calls “the pat response,” and so the replies he dispenses often end with him pointing out that their opposites could just as easily be true. Life, as the actor sees it, is enormously complicated, and, he says, “the human need to know and quantify and put labels on things and make language control and give shape to our lives, in the end, is useless.”
Fiennes as the Duke of Devonshire in The Duchess.
If Fiennes’s nihilistic musings make him sound more like a tramp in a Beckett play than a movie star, that’s no accident. The 46-year-old British actor, who has successfully shifted between stage and screen for most of his career, is in town for a limited run of First Love, an hour-long monologue adapted from a Beckett novella in which he plays a dejected homeless man. “He’s stripped to nothing and has to confront the pointlessness of everything,” Fiennes says with an odd burst of laughter. “And there’s an honesty in that which I find makes me very happy.”
He’s kept the monologue “on the boil,” he says, since first performing it in Sydney, Australia, last year, carrying it on tiny bits of paper everywhere he goes and rereading it during free moments. But long before Beckett’s bleakness was seared into his brain, say those who know him well, Fiennes was unwilling to embrace platitudes or gloss over life’s contradictions. “He’s a very complicated man,” says Jonathan Kent, who has directed Fiennes in five plays, including the much lauded 2006 production of Faith Healer, and recently cast him as Oedipus in a new translation of the classic, opening in October at London’s National Theatre. “Audiences come to him; they want to know his secrets. And somehow you’re always aware of the two sides of his characters, the dark and the light in them.”
Indeed, painting a multidimensional portrait was a major goal for Fiennes on his latest film project, The Duchess, opening in late September. Based on a 1999 biography by Amanda Foreman, the film tells the story of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Keira Knightley), a glamorous 18th-century society swan whose already loveless marriage to the icy Duke of Devonshire (Fiennes) turns even uglier when he takes up with her best friend. It’s hard to sympathize with Fiennes’s Duke: He berates his wife for failing to bear a son, rubs his extramarital dalliances in her face and, in one chilling scene, rapes her as their children and his mistress stand outside the bedroom door, listening to her scream. But Fiennes is unwilling to see his character as a villain—quite the opposite, in fact. “Oh, I love him!” he says between sips of espresso. “He knows who he is, he knows what he wants, and it’s great to play people with that sort of certainty because I don’t have it in my own life.”
