‘We know all the horrors that surround these stories, and sometimes you can get to the truth more through fiction than through fact,” says Joseph Fiennes, the celebrated British actor best known for his starring role in Shakespeare in Love, who is attending the 24th Haifa International Film Festival to present his latest film, Spring 1941.

The movie, which was made by Israeli director Uri Barabash (Beyond the Walls), is based on an Ida Fink story and tells the story of Artur, a Jewish doctor in Poland (played by Fiennes) who goes into hiding with his wife and family during World War II. They are taken in by a Polish peasant woman and Fiennes’s character becomes involved in a complex romantic relationship with his host.

The question of whether he truly loves the woman or is playing along with her so that she will keep them hidden is left unanswered.

For Fiennes, this ambiguity was one element that drew him to this character: “This is a domestic drama. Like in a lot of Ida Fink stories, the ghosts of the Shoah are there, but the stories deal with very simple and economic moments. She describes it as ‘a scrap of time,’ and here we have a series of conflicts that you and I couldn’t possibly imagine with that level of intensity. I guess what it does is it just takes you by the hand and takes you to a crack in the window and you get to glimpse that scrap of time,” says the actor, who speaks with a quiet intensity and clear diction that makes whatever he says sound like a Shakespeare soliloquy.

BECAUSE OF his own “intellectual curiosity,” Fiennes did visit concentration camps and read historical accounts of the period, but he focused on the small details of the character in order to prepare for the role.

“Artur was a man who was fully integrated into Polish society – he was a doctor, a husband, a father. I looked for the keys to the character in the practical details of how he adjusted to his new life,” says Fiennes.

When in hiding, Artur begins helping on the Polish woman’s farm, and bonds with her as she teaches him basic tasks around her property, such as chopping wood, which at first are very difficult for him.

“Here he is, a brilliant surgeon, but he can’t chop wood. But learning to do it, he’s living life, he’s experiencing life, in the face of pressure that is so intense… Maybe getting in touch with milking a cow, and the practicality and the life-affirming quality of something so banal and simple might give you a burst of life in the face of impending doom,” Fiennes says.

“That’s what I love about the title. It’s ‘spring,’ which is about birth and new life, and ’1941,’ which is synonymous with the horrors we’re familiar with.”

Filming in Poland and getting to know Israeli, Polish and British cast and crew members was an intense experience for Fiennes, as was learning the history in greater depth. “The subject of the Poles at this time is difficult and complex. In the Polish community, some housed Jews and some turned them in. Unlike when you see a Nazi uniform, when you see a Polish character, you don’t know which way things are going to go,” he says.

ALTHOUGH FIENNES is world famous as a film actor, “film is a byproduct of my theater work,” he points out.

He was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and has appeared in many West End productions of both classical and contemporary plays. He supported himself as he studied acting, working as a dresser in the theater, “which means washing people’s underpants. Back then, I never dreamt about film.”

Although he loves working in film, he feels that, “Theater is an actor’s medium and film is a director’s medium.”

He combined his love of classical theater and film not long ago when he played Bassiano in Michael Radford’s Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino. In order to make the movie work for contemporary audiences, the text was trimmed down, but Fiennes is not a purist in that respect. “Whatever you do, the genius will always come through. You can set it on the moon and have everyone in crazy costumes, or you cut three-quarters of the text, but genius will always win.”

His next project, he hopes, will bring him back to the world of film, but as a director. He wants to make a script he is writing called Street Riders, about black cowboys in tough Philadelphia neighborhoods, which is based on a magazine article he became fascinated with.

This is the actor’s first visit to Israel. He plans to visit Jerusalem and to see as much of the country as he can. “It’s wonderful to come here with the calling card of this film,” says Fiennes.

Source: The Jerusalem Post

“I’ve been riding since the age of 16, but only got my full licence about three years ago,” he said. “I love the new BMWs and was really intrigued by them — especially the technical brilliance, wizardry and German engineering. I’m really excited about this bike and am looking forwards to getting out of town on it. I’ve got a couple of friends and we’re intent on touring the north of Italy and riding across the Alps into Switzerland. We’d also like to ride around the British Isles, which would be a great way to discover my own ‘back yard’.”

Although he comes from a large and successful family — Joseph is the brother to actor Ralph Fiennes and cousin to Sir Ranulph Fiennes (described in the Guinness Book of Records as “the world’s greatest living explorer”) — the 38-year-old is the only motorcyclist in his family, despite having five brothers and sisters. He certainly shares a sense of adventure with Sir Ranulph though, having travelled extensively in Africa, India and the far east, and he has the utmost respect for fellow actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman and their Long Way Round achievements to date.

“I actually spoke to Ewan about a good motorcycle insurance provider, because he’d know of course! I think it’s amazing what these guys did though and it was great that they documented it all to share with us. What I love is the idea of a motorcycle being like a horse of the modern age — there’s something much more intriguing and magnanimous about these guys clad in all their gear on these big German bikes than there would be travelling by car. A car is more bondaged and encased, whereas on a bike, you’re out there and you’re more accessible. It feels more immediate and it’s a great way to cross boundaries and see other cultures — and have them see you — because they know you’ve come a long way on a giant BMW into, say, Mongolia. I mean, what a thrill for both parties to see.”

One of the many privileges of Joseph’s work in film is that he gets to travel to and see lots of amazing places while on location. And while a ‘big trip’ is on his wish list, for the moment his packed schedule will keep him in London and the K 1200 R will help him get around town quickly, enjoyably and anonymously.

“It’s good to put a helmet on and ‘disappear’. For me, the bike is about making the hours work in the day — I couldn’t bear to drive in London and the buses are very slow, so just being able to jump on the bike and get to meetings in Soho and then quickly get back out to Notting Hill is great. Of course, there’s no congestion charge for bikes either, so that’s good. I think there should be a greater initiative to get more people riding, and all bus lanes should be open to motorcycles — that would really help things flow. With this BMW though, I’m looking forwards to getting out of town and into the country to try a bit more of the open road.”

For someone who is used to being chauffeured around on four wheels (film companies like to ensure their actors get to the studio safely and on time) Joseph wouldn’t ride while making a film because, apart from the insurance implications, he thinks that he could be too preoccupied with learning lines and getting ‘into character’ to concentrate properly and would probably end up as “an organ donor”, according to his doctor! However, when home in London, he insists on enjoying the freedom that motorcycling brings.

“Although acting will always be there, as it’s my absolute drive and passion, I’m moving more into producing and directing, and am getting really interested in the ‘making of’ aspects behind the camera. I’m just enjoying life at the moment — the bike is a good metaphor for that of course — because it gives the freedom to get out and enjoy what’s around you. You can have great plans, but in executing those plans, you can miss a trick in actually getting to that destination. Sometimes sitting back and watching the countryside go by is just as important as reaching the final place.”

In his latest role in The Escapist, British actor Joseph Fiennes plays the character of Lenny Drake — one of five prisoners who attempt to escape from a notorious London jail. In real life however, the only ‘escaping’ that the 38-year-old thespian needs to do is when he puts on his crash helmet and disappears among the Capital’s traffic on his new BMW K 1200 R.

When you live your life in the spotlight, one of the best ways to become ‘invisible’ is to ride a motorcycle. This allows Joseph to get from his home in London’s Notting Hill, to the West End where he is currently performing in Antony Weigh’s 2,000 Feet Away at the Bush Theatre.

As a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the stage is Fiennes’ first love, but it was his cinema portrayal of William Shakespeare (alongside Gwyneth Paltrow) in the 1998 smash hit, Shakespeare in Love, that Joseph Fiennes is perhaps best known. This was followed soon after by another Academy Award nominated film — Elizabeth — in which he played Robert Dudley opposite Cate Blanchett. After the tremendous success of these two films, Fiennes famously turned down a five-picture deal from a major studio to return to the theatre, and remains very selective about the characters he wishes to portray in films. The same could also be said for the motorcycles he rides.

 

Source: BMW Motorcycles

2,000 Feet Away, the debut drama by Anthony Weigh, which stars Joseph Fiennes, Ian Hart and Phyllis Logan, has extended its run at the Bush until 19 July.

The extra week of performances has been added due to popular demand, and extra tickets have been made available for all forthcoming performances.

Source: Official London Theater

Still best remembered for playing the frilly-shirted Bard in Shakespeare In Love, Joseph Fiennes plays Lenny, a taciturn hard nut who joins Brian Cox’s gang to bust out of prison in low-budget British thriller The Escapist, which is released this week. The 37-year-old can also be seen in the flesh in Anthony Weigh’s 2,000 Feet Away at London’s Bush Theatre.

What attracted you to the tough-man role in The Escapist?
I just thought the whole episode with him getting involved in a gruesome, gruelling fight to attain one tiny bit of equipment to help their escape – which was a diamond set in the tooth of a Celtic warrior named Two Ton – was fantastic.

How was it shooting that fight scene?
It took four hours to shoot. On a big-budget movie that would have been four days, so we were up against it. The adrenaline gets hold of you, you’ve got 100 or so inmates screaming in an echoing room and you’ve got to be aware you’re not going to knock each other out. I got a warning when I clocked my elbow into the other guy’s mouth and nearly took his tooth out. I kept seeing him checking it every day to see if it was still in place.

Was shooting in a prison a surreal experience?
It’s the same prison they used in The Italian Job. It’s other-worldly. It’s also got a very sad heritage. It’s where a lot of Irish revolutionaries were incarcerated. It’s full of desperate, unhappy ghosts. I wandered off once but came back pretty quick. I felt more comfortable with Two Ton taking punches at me than I did wandering the corridors.

Have you been offered any more tough-guy parts following The Escapist?
I haven’t seen any angry, skinhead cons coming my way yet but there’s time. I want to collect a mixed bag of characters that will hopefully challenge the perceptions of directors and producers who have only ever seen Shakespeare In Love.

Has it been hard breaking away from that frilly-shirted image?
I come from a theatre background where there are no restrictions. With films, if you’re successful in one area, it’s like: ‘Let’s not change anything.’ It’s been a challenge. I feel like I’m now getting a mixed bag, which is all I want.

Has it taken longer than you expected?
I was 26 when I did Shakespeare and now I’m coming up to 38 so, invariably, the parts are going to change. I played the Romeos in my 20s and now there’s been this crossover, where I’m playing more twisted characters. I love all the darker roles I’m playing now.

How important is theatre to you?
Theatre is the actor’s medium and it’s f*****g hard. They say the camera never lies – I think it lies like nothing else. It’s theatre that doesn’t lie. You get on stage and there’s no way out. It’s so much about the audience and how they react, whereas sometimes the only feedback you get on a film is when the grip says to you: ‘Oh, that was nice.’

Do you go to the theatre much?
Not as much as I should do because I’ve been travelling. The last thing I saw was Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in Speed-The-Plow.

Is there any sibling rivalry between you and Ralph?
No, there isn’t. That’s probably because there are seven of us and I’m the youngest and he’s the eldest. There’s competitiveness among one’s peers but not when there’s that big an age difference.

Where have you been recently?
I just went to Thailand for the first time, which was interesting. I spent a few weeks travelling around the country. I love to explore territories that I haven’t been to before. It’s all about discovery and Thailand’s a great place to explore, both within and outside of yourself. I don’t want to hang around until it’s too late and I can’t get on a plane. There’s a lot to see and a lot to do.

Are you as sporty as you used to be?
I haven’t rock-climbed for a bit but I have been skiing a lot. Whether it’s physical or mental, I like anything that’s a little bit stressful.

Source: Metro

When Joseph Fiennes was six years old he told a bunch of Irish nuns to “f*** off!” He was swinging on a statue of the Virgin Mary at the time, and the nuns were his teachers, near the Kilkenny home of his soon-to-be-famous family – including brother Magnus (now a composer), sister Sophie (now a film-maker) and eldest brother Ralph (an Alister). Fiennes was beaten with a bamboo stick for his indiscretion. The punishment was savage, he says. The bamboo broke on his body. Yet he tells it today, in the corner of a busy West London members’ bar, with a glimmer of pride in his eyes. “It was a good thrashing,” he says, with a slow blink of his trademark Bambi lashes and a half-smile of his beautiful bestubbled face. If he didn’t quite like it, then he certainly appreciated it.

Fiennes, you suspect, is a bit of a fighter. In person, the 38-year-old actor and former Shakespeare in Love pin-up is smoother than caramel. In crumpled jeans and crisp denim jacket, he’s good-humoured to a fault and keen to joke. But scratch the surface, or prod him on a pet hate (everything from the fame game to human-rights violations), and you get a glimpse of bubbling recalcitrance, fuelled by fierce intelligence, that seems to hint at deep simmering rage. “Image-conscious actors should get out of the business,” he says curtly, at one stage. “There’s a f***ing crisis in Burma, and China’s inextricably linked!” he roars, at another. Later still, he rails: “Most journalists are f***ing lazy!”

This antagonistic quality serves Fiennes well in his latest role, as Lenny Drake, a con with a hair-trigger temper in the outstanding “prison break” movie The Escapist. Here, in a non-chronological narrative whirl, he plays one of five oddball cons (including Brian Cox and Liam Cunningham) who attempt to escape from an unnamed London prison. He spends a lot of time pumped up, with ripped biceps exposed, punching things and people, knocking out teeth and banging inanimate objects. “I wanted Lenny to vibrate on a different level,” he says. “He’s just a very angry man.”

In some ways it’s a perverse antistar performance and so far removed from his traditional swoonsome image that his face is half-covered by a beige hoody for a huge chunk of the movie. I wonder was this a ploy? Was this Fiennes playing a game with his own image and with the audience?

“I don’t know if it’s a game with the audience,” he says sincerely. “I was just trying to show a guy who was completely immersed in himself.” He stops and smirks, before adding: “Although I did hear that Harvey Weinstein saw it and was like: ‘Is that Joe? You get him on the phone right now! I can’t tell if it’s Joe!’ ”

Similarly, Fiennes toyed with expectations last year in the underrated Running with Scissors, in which he played – sorry, ladies – a schizophrenic gay paedophile called Neil Bookman. It was the movie’s standout performance, with Fiennes strangely sympathetic behind a huge moustache, black leathers and twitchy eyes. Again, it was a rebarbative role and seemed to exist in the very act of tearing down preconceived notions of Fiennes on screen. “I was just serving the narrative and the audience,” Fiennes says, rejecting any wider implications of his role. “I was just serving the movie, and enjoying the range of the character.”

Though he won’t admit to consciously defiling his own poster-boy status, there’s a very real sense that the new Fiennes, madder and badder than ever, has emerged victorious from a hard-fought battle with the soft-featured sweetie that the world encountered in 1998 in Shakespeare in Love. “When you are involved with a film like Shakespeare, something that pops to that degree, then it can be very hard to escape,” he says. “But I’m 38 now, I’m not 26 any more. There’s been a decade of changes since Shakespeare, and they have informed my work. It’s not necessarily about killing my past but about running with the challenge of change.”

There were some very public postShakespeare flops (including the erotic thriller Killing Me Softly, the war movie The Great Raid), after which he seemed to disappear from our screens completely. He hadn’t – he was just finding it harder to get seen. “Part of being an actor is about rejection,” he says.

His past, he says, had prepared him for life’s ups and downs. His parents Mark, a photographer, and Jennifer, a novelist and painter, were peripatetic, and then some. Initially Wiltshire-based, they moved to the west of Ireland, where they refurbished houses and moved their brood of six Fiennes children through 14 different homes. He says that his memories of Ireland, despite the nuns, are mostly happy. However, when he returned to England, to South London, and to a starring role in a school play at his new comprehensive, he knew, he says, “that I’d landed in the right place”. I wonder then, with the bohemian parents, the creative family environment and the big brother movie star, if acting was not somewhat inevitable for him? “I’ve got a twin, Jacob, and he’s a gamekeeper,” he says. “So, no. I don’t think there was any inevitability to it.”

His ascent to movie stardom was speedy – Shakespeare in Love,after Elizabeth, was one of his first leading roles – but nonetheless accompanied by unhelpful comparisons with his older brother Ralph, then already a Hollywood player. Here Joseph was depicted as light, fluffy and pretty, while Ralph was dark, serious and handsome. Again, he fought it. He refused to mention Ralph in interviews, he snapped at journalists who did, and if there seemed to be an eccentricity in some of his postShakespeare choices (playing Martin Luther in the German biopic Luther?), it could only have sprung in part from that desire to be defined against anything other than his brother.

Today, of course, looking at him staring sternly out from The Escapist poster, his reinvention is complete, while references to Ralph are almost redundant. “If people don’t mention it any more,” he explains, “that’s because it’s not relevant any more.” He will be seen next as a grieving boyfriend in Against the Current, and, having already directed an award-winning short film, The Spirit, is working on his debut feature script with his director sister Martha (Onegin). He says that he’s still “incredibly close” to his siblings.

He has a girlfriend too, but he’s not mentioning her. Well, not until the affable film director Oliver Parker wanders over to our table and forces the truth out. “Where have you been?” he asks. “Er, Switzerland,” Fiennes says, nervously. “Why Switzerland?” Parker presses. “Love?” Reluctantly, Fiennes answers: “Yes, love.” He grins and shrugs, “There, you’ve got your scoop!” The love in question is the Swiss model Maria Dolores Dieguez, who, Fiennes coyly explains, has moved to London to be with him.

He finishes up in fine form, fulminating loudly against the IMF, governmental corruption, and the exploitation of natural resources in Third World countries. “I’m sorry, I’m ranting,” he says. “But it goes back to what Gandhi said: ‘You must be the change you want to see in the world.’ ” He says this softly, and with utter conviction. Then he stands up to leave, and swishes through the bar as he goes, a glorious icon of smooth masculine beauty, with colourful dashes of mystery and spikiness to seal the allure.

The Escapist is released on June 20 2008

The new attitude was on display as stars and celebrities, including British actor Joseph Fiennes, were due to gather for the Berlin premiere of a new film about the Baron.

It is set to mark a new departure for German war films, which usually reflect on the extremism, suffering and even lunacy of the Nazi era ­ if they get made at all.

The Red Baron in contrast, portrays a brilliant and honourable military figure whose life and early death in combat Germans can celebrate without blush.

The film, which at £14 million is one of Germany’s most expensive productions, stars Matthias Schweighoefer as the renowned pilot thought to have shot down about 80 Allied airmen in World War One.

It is based on a biography of the pilot published last year, which opens with him engaged in a dogfight only to pull out when he sees his adversary’s gun jammed.

“Our task is to bring down airplanes, not men, we are sportsmen not butchers,” Baron von Richthofen says in the film.

That is just the kind of honourable wartime exploit so long overshadowed by the barbarity of Baron von Richthofen’s military successors in the Nazi regime.

German-made films – including Downfall, the big-screen production about Hitler’s final days – have become braver in tackling military themes.

But not even the forthcoming Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as anti-Hitler plotter Claus von Stauffenberg, so unabashedly depicts a German as a wartime hero as the new Red Baron film.

“Historically there has been a reluctance, and there are strong voices in Germany still saying we’re not allowed to do this: a film about a German war hero,” said The Red Baron’s director, Nikolai Müllerschön.

But he insisted the film “makes a very clear statement against war”.

Indeed, even in the new film the “honourable” Baron von Richthofen is painted with a dark side, determined to strike terror in the hearts of his enemies and thrilling in the “hunt” to kill them.

Source: Telegraph

Nine in the morning on a Monday in Fulham, London.

The rain is so torrential that the Live crew waiting for Joseph Fiennes are more concerned with drying their clothes than whether the star of Shakespeare In Love will turn up.

He’s supposed to be a difficult interview and a thunderstorm is all the reason some actors need to stay in bed.

It looks like a wasted day when a motorcyclist pulls up outside the studio’s glass front, kills his engine and strides in, water streaming from his leathers.

A courier, everyone assumes, until he takes off his helmet and there’s Shakespeare himself, forming a large puddle and asking for a hand getting his bike out of the rain.

What did we discover about the chap who sucked a quill in Shakespeare In Love? 1) His beard covers his surfing scars. 2) He nearly froze to death on a mountain. 3) He’d rathertalk bikes than girls, if you don’t mind

Nine in the morning on a Monday in Fulham, London.

The rain is so torrential that the Live crew waiting for Joseph Fiennes are more concerned with drying their clothes than whether the star of Shakespeare In Love will turn up.

He’s supposed to be a difficult interview and a thunderstorm is all the reason some actors need to stay in bed.

It looks like a wasted day when a motorcyclist pulls up outside the studio’s glass front, kills his engine and strides in, water streaming from his leathers.

A courier, everyone assumes, until he takes off his helmet and there’s Shakespeare himself, forming a large puddle and asking for a hand getting his bike out of the rain.

Someone hands him an old dishcloth and he sets about getting his waterlogged Triumph polished to a high gleam.

Fiennes is not the man we were expecting.

True, he’s one of a large artistic family including actor brother Ralph, directors Sophie and Martha and composer Magnus.

And true, after breaking big in two hit films dressed in a flouncy shirt ? Elizabeth and Shakespeare In Love (both out in 1998) ? he took a long break from movies to concentrate on theatre.

But the man wiping down his Scrambler in a rugby shirt, brown boots and tattered jeans is as far from a quill-sucking thespian as it’s possible to be.

Now 37, he’s rangy, smiling, sweary, good company and full of stories.

Take, for example, his scraggy stubble.

There’s a reason you’ll never see him clean-shaven any more, and it leaves the women in the room wincing and covering their mouths.

“I was doing a film near Brisbane called The Great Raid [released in 2005],” he begins, in an accent that’s more west London street than Rada.

“It was a stormy day and the waves were huge. My friend with more experience of surfing said, ?Dude, I can’t go in there, it’s ridiculous.? But I was a novice, so I paddled out. I was focused on not annoying all the other surfers ? you know, that territorial thing, ?My wave! My wave!? So I waited just that second too long, and this 15ft breaker launched itself on top of me.”

Fiennes was under water for a long time.

“When you wipe out and go under,” he says, “you don’t know if your cord is caught in coral, whether you’re drowning. It’s like being in a washing machine.” Fiennes began to panic.

Then he was smashed in the face.

“I knew something bad had happened. I thought I’d been hit by a shark, just this immense impact.

“The board either went up in the air and down again, or went down and shot up? I couldn’t tell which way up I was, but anyway, it hit me. I was knocked out and it took my lip off.

“When I washed up on the beach, people were looking at me in horror. I felt my arms and legs; I couldn’t work out what was wrong.

“My friend said, ‘Your face is hanging off.’ It was literally gone from the mouth down, with my teeth and bone showing through.”

His friend asked two girls to give them a lift to hospital. “But they wouldn’t. I looked too scary,” he says.

The girls ran away; a lifeguard called an ambulance, but the ambulance never arrived.

So there they were, sitting on a beach on the other side of the world in a storm, one of them covered in blood with half a face.

“Now when I shave I’ve got a lot of scars,” Fiennes says, parting his whiskers to show a network of silvery wounds.

“The surgeon who fixed me said that it would help if I grew a beard so you can see where my lip ends, because it’s not pink any more.

“They rebuilt it with a bit of my earlobe. It was a nice bit of surgery. So that’s why I started with the stubble. I was filming for Miramax, and I couldn’t turn up without a lip.”

As film star anecdotes go, it beats the one about how Scientology put your life in perspective.

It also reveals more about Fiennes than just his scars. He’s a man’s man.

If he has a reputation as a cagey interview, that’s because female journalists keep trying to pry into his relationships, which, to be fair, have included actresses (Sara Griffiths, Catherine McCormack and more recently his Great Raid co-star Natalie Mendoza), models (a Swiss beauty queen, a rumoured fling with Naomi Campbell) and a make-up artist (Fiona Jolly, who met him on a magazine shoot and ended up buying a house with him).

You can’t blame them for digging, but he won’t play along.

Today he says his current girlfriend is the sexiest person he’s ever met, but he won’t reveal her name.

His taciturnity – like his taste for danger – harks back to actors of an earlier and far less pampered generation. Like Fiennes’s hero, Steve McQueen.

“McQueen was a forerunner to that school of actors who go through a script and say, ‘You know what? I don’t want to say that. Or that, or that.’ I love his quiet economy.”

It was McQueen, in fact, who inspired his £6,000 choice of transport on this thundery day that, once dried and polished, will be the star of our shoot.

“It’s a Triumph Scrambler 900 top speed’s about 110mph,” says Fiennes.

“It’s evocative for me of The Great Escape. It’s basically a Bonneville but with scrambler tyres and quirky-looking pipes fitted.

“In theory you could go out and jump over fences on it, but it’s a heavy bike, totally old school.

“I don’t think it could withstand the landing, so I haven’t done that, I just burn along country tracks.”

Fiennes loves machines almost as much as McQueen himself.

Proudly listing the classic English marques ? Triumph and Jaguar, Norton and BSA – he looks at the silver Triumph nameplate on the side of his bike and says, “That, in its heyday, was an extraordinary British company.”

In the past, he’s owned a Bonneville from the same factory, as well as a Thruxton, styled after the beautiful drop-handlebar racing bikes you’ll see in black-and-white photographs. Newer, lighter, faster bikes don’t impress him much.

“I’d far rather see The Great Escape than The Fast And The Furious,” is how he puts it.

“I tried a 675cc Triumph model called the Daytona Triple, but the acceleration on that is just remember Battlestar Galactica, when they launched the space fighters down those long tubes?

“It’s exactly that sort of vibe, with lots of flashing blue lights, just incredibly quick.

“It was too aggressive for me, too inviting – even accelerating from 0-30mph you could feel all the power wanting to be set free; just ridiculously dangerous in the wrong hands. But an extraordinary bit of engineering.”

It’s a different story when he’s in his Jaguar XKR and he’s hurtling around Millbrook at 170mph.

“It’s a speedbowl, a banked track,” he says.

“You’re not supposed to compete with each other but I found my lovely, luxurious Jag being overtaken by Subarus and Hondas and you’re like, Wait, that’s not right!”

Fiennes has been taking his life in his hands since he was 17, when he bought a Honda 125 that someone had tinkered with to make it 150cc. Every day on the road to art school he’d lean down low on the same corner, clip the footrest and fly off. Over-exuberance, he calls it.

“You’ve got to get a few scratches as a teenager.”

He’d already shrugged off his share of blows by that age.

Because his parents – a photographer and a novelist – supplemented their income by doing up houses, he went to “12 or 14″ different schools and became a “hideous little terror who beat people up”.

At one school in Ireland he was beaten so hard by a nun that her bamboo stick broke.

So right now, despite losing a lip the last time he surfed (and the fact that a boy was killed on the same beach the same day when a board hit him), he’s eager to get back in the waves.

And when I ask him about the high point of his career, he offers another story that most people would consider an ordeal.

“The great thing about films is that you have access to this whole world of experts who teach you the skills your character’s supposed to have,” he says.

“When I did Killing Me Softly, I decided I needed to research rock-climbing, so the producers sent me off on a course. I didn’t really need to do it, I just wanted to try it out.

“I learned at a place called The Castle in north London and before long I was climbing cliffs in Scotland.

“One day, I was on a peak about 2,000ft up, and it started raining really heavily.

“I pressed my face to the rock and felt my way up. It was freezing cold. I realised I couldn’t feel the rock any more.

“My hands had gone numb. I had to ask the guy I was with to watch my hands and tell me if I was holding the rock. That really is a point where you ask yourself, ?What the hell am I doing 2,000ft up a mountain asking someone else if I’m holding on??”

Fiennes says the elation when he finally reached the top was the biggest rush of his life.

“The adrenaline, the fear, then the elation? that’s what I do it for. For my next expedition I want to go ice-climbing. It’s incredibly dangerous, a challenging sport, but great fun and very beautiful.”

When he’s not half-dying on mountains ? which, considering his cousin Ranulph is a polar explorer, is surely no more than a family hobby ? Fiennes relaxes at home in west London, watching films on a big-screen TV or making them on his Apple Mac.

“I take a lot of footage with a little £80 Sony digicam. What I love is the editing software. Editing, for me, is film-making.”

He collects photography books, loves wine and likes a good Cohiba cigar.

Aesthetics are important to Fiennes who – for all his love of speed and danger – actually spends a great deal of the interview discussing film, photography, art and architecture, a taste inherited from his parents, both deceased.

Fiennes raises funds for Breakthrough Breast Cancer, the disease that took his mother at a young age, and works with young offenders for the Prince’s Trust.

He knows what it’s like to be a “problem pupil” after he was diagnosed dyslexic and eager to be anywhere but school.

He left at 16, hoping to go to art college, but first spent a summer shovelling horse dung in a stable. Even that wasn’t his worst job ever.

“The toughest was my four years at the National Theatre as a dresser,” he says.

“You’re washing pants and socks at 11 o’clock at night while the actors are in the pub. It’s paying your dues, the way footballers start off cleaning their heroes’ boots.

“I think everyone should do it. But it was tough. There are one or two very smelly actors out there.”

It was a long way from there, and a long struggle to emerge from brother Ralph’s shadow, to the five-picture deal he was offered in the wake of his triumph with Shakespeare In Love.

Fiennes rejected that contract, went to India for a year, then returned to the theatre, working for £200 a week at the Royal Court, his pants and socks washed by hands unknown.

This year, he’s very much back on Hollywood’s radar, with at least four films and one TV show set for release.

In British independent film The Escapist, he plays an accomplice to a man (Brian Cox) desperate to get out of prison to see his daughter.

In Spring 41, he plays the father of a Jewish family on the run in Poland during the war.

In TV pilot Four Ounces, he plays a transsexual ? and is dreading shaving his legs every day if the series is picked up. In German film The Red Baron, he plays the Canadian pilot who shoots the fighter ace down.

And in Against The Current, he plays a man battling depression who decides to swim the Hudson River.

“He goes upstate about 150 miles and swims back down to the Statue Of Liberty,” Fiennes says.

“It’s a road movie in water. I spent a lot of time in that river and it was god-awful on some days.

“Freezing cold, a lot of ?white jellyfish? ? floating condoms ? and huge tug-boats going past with 15ft propellers.

“It’s not like you’ve got ten scuba divers on hand to help you out ? it was one bloke in a dinghy.

“But the hairiest part was swimming past the nuclear power station that had seeped two years before.

“A lot of dead fish. So if I’m glowing, it’s not that I’m happy to be back in London, it’s because I’m radioactive.”

And with that, he gets back on his bike and rides off into the gloom, raindrops instantly vaporising in his nuclear glow. Joseph Fiennes: definitely not the man we were expecting.

Source: The Daily Mail