In the new film ‘Conclave’, based on the novel by Robert Harris, Ralph Fiennes is a Vatican insider, the cardinal charged with leading the meeting of the entire College of Cardinals in Rome to appoint a new Pope to select.

The film is partly set in the Sistine Chapel, literally ‘the room where it happens’ when it comes to the election of a pope. But as presented in the film, not serene.

‘Conclave’, which also stars Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rosselini, is a tight thriller with a shock ending that you just don’t see coming. Fiennes, as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, navigates the intrigues, and even betrayals, of papal politics – a reluctant player consumed by doubt. As he tells the assembled cardinals, “If there were only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith.”

This “Doubting Thomas” is a typical Ralph Fiennes character. “I like characters that have contradictions within them,” he said. His reaction to reading Lawrence’s role was, “Oh, I love this, this is a human being. He’s not a saint. He’s a good man trying to find his way.

“I was raised Catholic and rebelled when I was 13,” Fiennes said. “My mother was a devout Catholic. So ‘questions about God’ have been present in my family since childhood.”

Did he get answers to his own questions? “No, I came away with more questions,” he said.

In a key scene with Cardinal Bellini (played by Tucci), Fiennes’ Lawrence reveals that even his conflicted character has ambitions to become pope.

“I used to think acting was about becoming someone else – you changed completely and you weren’t recognisable,” he said. “To some extent it can be about that. But as I got older, I thought: no. The springboard is you.”

To watch a trailer for “Conclave,” click on the video player below:

In “The Return,” out in December, Fiennes, now 61, plays Odysseus, the once-proud king who finally came home after the Trojan War. ‘He’s exhausted. He’s emaciated and just, I guess, not a warrior at all,” he said. “He is diminished as a man.”

Fiennes had to physically transform himself for the role: “We told him to look shabby – like he’s literally been at sea.”

Odysseus slowly recovers his identity and is finally confronted by his wife Penelope, played by Juliette Binoche.

The chance to work again with Binoche, an old friend, was what convinced Fiennes to make the film (their third together). “We were gifted these famous iconic parts,” Fiennes said. “It may sound a bit flippant, but I think all actors have that: Oh, this role has come to me, and I’m meant to do it. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, I’m meant to do this, it comes to me and this other person does it.“

‘The English Patient’ was another one, for both of them. The film won nine Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actress for Binoche. Fiennes received one of his two career Oscar nominations.

He’s played dozens of special characters, all right And bad, both in films and in plays. Besides Gustave in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” he was Voldemort, a noseless monster in the Harry Potter series, and a Nazi concentration camp commander in “Schindler’s List.”

We last saw Fiennes on ‘Sunday Morning’, in 2022on stage as Robert Moses, supremely confident, power-hungry, the man who shaped 20th century New York City, in the play “Straight Line Crazy.”

Last week in New York, discussing acting, Fiennes described the thrill of playing arrogance: “You get a sports car, where you can rev it with anger and contempt, and there’s no compromise, and it’s shocking” , he said. “but that’s true exciting to play. You challenge your audience with: Argue with me if you dare, you won’t win. I know the answer. And that is a big provocation.”

Teichner asked, “Have any of the characters you played affected your life after playing them?”

“Characters mark you,” Fiennes replied. “There’s often a time of grieving when you loved playing a role and you gave it your all. It’s not that you let go of the role, but you feel a kind of mental exhaustion. You need time to just shake it off. “

But only until another scroll finds him…

“People sometimes say, ‘What do you want to play?’ And I could tick off a few Shakespeare parts or well-known Ibsen parts. But actually I don’t want to be surprised by a new script, something I’ve never heard of, and you go, Oooh, yes. Oh my God, what is this new thing? I’ve never heard of it, I haven’t read the source material. And this all feels, it feels good, it feels good.”

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Story produced by Mikaela Bufano and Reid Orvedahl. Editor: Carol Ross.

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