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Three answers: He has been pretty busy, playing intellectual types like Carl Jung and Ibsen's Brand onstage. He does not encourage the whole star thing. And, at 42, he's back in style as film's most winning lost soul. The Constant Gardener, an exhilarating take on John Le Carré's novel, by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) and screenwriter Jeffrey Caine, is one of five Fiennes films to be released in 2005 (see box). He's a decadent art historian in Chromophobia (still awaiting a U.S. distributor), an upper-class satire that involved three of the six Fiennes siblings: sister Martha wrote and directed; brother Magnus composed the music. (The brood also includes Joseph, who starred in Shakespeare in Love.)
Three of the films are art-house ornaments, but two have blockbuster eyes. He is the voice of a gun-crazy aristocrat in the animated comedy Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, due out in October. A month later, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, he will be the villainous Voldemort--"a full-on, red-blooded baddie," he says, happy to describe one of his roles without tiptoeing around the words aloof and tortured.
"I never use the word tortured," he says defensively and decisively, as he sits in the tea room of a posh Manhattan hotel. "I use it in response to someone saying it to me, but I don't ever ..." That is one of many Fiennes statements that evaporate in mid-sentence, leaving tantalizing verbal contrails. An actor whose art is in precision wants always to say the right thing--if he must do interviews at all.
He acknowledges that his vocation, his pleasure, is to be seen and heard. "As an actor, a part of you expects to be looked at. A part of you wants to be looked at. But when I'm playing a part, in my imagined world, I feel I'm not me. I may be using bits of me, but I love the sense that I'm being someone else." Yet while he's disappearing, he's also naked. "It seems to me a big enough statement about who you are to go onstage, where you're totally exposed. Your body, your voice, your gestures--everything you do is up there. So why can't you just leave it at that?"
Well, because acting is the pouring of a fictional spirit into an actual body. A star actor like Fiennes gradually becomes the sum of his roles--Amon Goeth in Schindler's List, the Count in The English Patient, Hamlet and Coriolanus onstage--conflated with his public persona. As for the public part, Fiennes doesn't give his fans much news to play with. He is divorced from actress Alex Kingston (ER) and has lived for a decade with actress Francesca Annis, 18 years his senior. He refuses to connect any dots between his roles and himself. And he rarely uses his fame as a bully pulpit; he marched against the Iraq invasion but anonymously, with a group of friends.
There are exceptions. As a UNICEF ambassador, he made trips to Uganda and Kyrgyzstan. After shooting The Constant Gardener in Kenya, he helped producer Simon Channing-Williams set up a fund to build a school near and clean up Lake Turkana, where the film's climactic scene is set. But even though the novel deals with the exploitation of Africa by the governments and drug companies of the "civilized world," Fiennes insists he was not looking to make a political film. "It was only when I saw the film in its first cut that I thought, 'This is about Africa.'"