Ralph Fiennes plays Charles Dickens in love
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From Shakespeare to “Harry Potter” to the new head of MI6 in the “James Bond” film, Ralph Fiennes has mined the complexity of his characters.
The 51-year-old British actor most recently turned his talents to unearthing the details of British author Charles Dickens’ extramarital affair.
Fiennes stars and directs “The Invisible Woman,” chronicling the hushed liaison between 19th century author Dickens and actress Nelly Ternan.
Lounging in the courtyard at Hollywood’s famed Chateau Marmont hotel, Fiennes spoke about deconstructing Dickens, playing heroes and villains and the next “Bond” film.
Q: What inspired you to bring Dickens and his love affair to the screen?
A: Audiences have a vague sense of a jolly man writing slightly sentimental, big sagas which are good entertainment and good stories, but they see the darkness of Dickens in this film. The domestic cruelty of Dickens. He’s a man of massive contrast and contradictions. I like that it might stir it up a bit, people might talk about it.
Q: How did Dickens’ love affair impact his portrayal of women?
A: Estella in “Great Expectations” is not a portrait of Nelly, but is Nelly filtered through Dickens’ anxiety about wanting and trying to reach her. I think Nelly resisted for a bit, and that plays out in, quote unquote, “Estella’s cold heart.” ... Nelly was quite tough, she was quite a strong-willed young girl, and I think his literary heroines all have bits of her in them.
Q: You’ve depicted literary characters but were you nervous about Dickens?
A: You’re always nervous, you just want any part to be truthful and alive and you want to honor what you think its truth is ... All the scenes paint a portrait of the Dickens that I felt I got to know reading — a vital family man, center of the party, center of attention, quite a controlling father, authoritative, capable of great kindness and charity. He can be a very genial host, charming, very funny, attentive, and he can be ruthless and tough and bossy and really cruel.
Q: You’ve played Shakespeare’s Romeo and J.K. Rowling’s Lord Voldemort. Which do you enjoy better?
A: I don’t want to play any more villains, I don’t enjoy it. I enjoy playing complicated people. We talk about good guys and bad guys, but it’s reductive. I wanted to be an actor because of Shakespeare, and his characters are full of ambivalence and ambiguity. They start out as one thing and end up another. If there’s an interesting journey for a character and the audience must work hard to follow the path of a character, I like that.
Q: How has Shakespearean evolved for audiences now?
A: My sense is that it’s going to be harder and harder for younger people to feel excited by the brilliant, athletic complexity of Shakespeare’s language, which for so many centuries has excited people by its beauty and its accuracy and its inventiveness of English, which is so extraordinary.
But we learn in times where English is so reduced by the ... awful communications of Twitter and Facebook that people are dumbing themselves down. The delight of expressing yourself in language or listening to someone, that’s being diluted.
Q: You’re the new head of MI6 in the next Bond film. Can you tell us about the character?
A: I can’t, I know nothing, I’ve not been told anything, I have no information, no dates, no sense of the journey of my character at all! I don’t!
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