Ralph Fiennes Quotes

I was only interested in my scene, and I had to go through thousands and thousands of other scenes. I got my scene and I read it many, many, many, many, many times. That was my research.

Unicef's education initiative does not seek to impose, but to initiate and integrate. It does, however, aim to address the huge bias towards education for boys at the expense of girls in so many cultures.

We are now living in a jungle where the strong eats the weak,we are not better than the Arabs to despise them.

One of the things that binds us as a family is a shared sense of humor.

I felt it [Shakespeare's Coriolanus] is sort of an examination of our dysfunction as a nationalistic, tribal entities. I think the world is rocking and cracking open in weird and worrying places. And I think Coriolanus, the play, reflected that.

I tried to play rugby but was never very good.

In the studio system, things are expected of a film. By the first, second, third act, there's a generic language that comes out of the more commercial system.

When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.

In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time.

I don't plan a career. That doesn't work for me. I just have to go with my gut.

It's not great if someone gives you sort of bland praise without giving you clear direction and say, "This is good, let's try it like this." I have worked with someone who seemed quite inarticulate and just would say, "That's good, that's good." That's very frustrating because - it's nice to know something is good but you know it can always change.

I've never felt fallow in the sense that there's been no work.

I was grateful to have two weeks to shoot this one scene in Harry Potter. It's a big, big scene, but they have to deliver. And they have high expectations.

I admire the world of the books and the characters that she's created, but I'm not an addict of Harry Potter. I don't feel possessive about it.

There's a lot of people who feel there's a tabloid journalist who had it coming.

Actors use who they are to be someone else, but I would hate to ever think I'm playing myself. It's imagining being someone else that is the key motivating thing for me. So when people want to know about me, it makes me a bit unnerved.

I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.

He's really sort of the devil. He's completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It's about power with Voldemort. It's an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.

I don't feel particularly comfortable about actors using whatever power they may have to push their beliefs, unless they're extremely well informed.

It was just two energies between two people, you can't prescribe that.

People fear they won't get what they want.

There's a challenge to playing these fantasy figures because they are fantasy figures. You have to enter into this sort of imaginative world of the writer.

I guess I'd love to be surprised by something I had never thought of.

In Shakespeare, keep it simple. Don't over-inflect. The speech needs to be naturalistic and simple and accessible as much as possible.

When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.

It [the scene] can be something given to you and you go, "Ah this is a good idea, I can work with this." Sometimes it cuts right across your instinct and that's when I might resist. Even if the director might be insistent, I think it's very important to say, "Look, I'm not feeling this. I'll try to make it work but I got to let you know."

I veer away from trying to understand why I act. I just know I need to do it.

The tensions between authority and the people need to be heard, especially when they are suffering and they can't eat.

Unicef wants to encourage a sense of stability for a child.

Little moments can have a feeling and a texture that is very real.

What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.

When I first filmed things, they were always slightly awkward.

I have grown up loving Shakespeare.

I got to read some writings by serial killers, and they got inside my head. They were quite disturbing. I read disturbing stuff about that very detached way of manipulating people to do things.

You're meant to be playing the distillation of evil, which can be anything.

Kenya doesn't have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film.

I'm more relaxed about how the editing process will create a performance and that, in a way, gives me a sense of freedom.

Having gone through editing process, I can see that in actor's faces there's point where they're not managing their performance and that's, I think, the best place to be. You've done the homework, you've learned the lines, at that point you just sort of let it out.

We'd all like to believe that perhaps people could stop killing each other.

I don't feel I'm playing villains all the time.

If I had a gun to my head and I had to choose between theater and film I'd choose theater.

The world is a giant community now. This excuse of distance, time, doesn't work ... We're all so connected. We can't spend every second of our lives worrying about another family miles away but we somehow have to factor it in where we can.

God is not anything human. God is a force, God is chaos, God is unknown. God is terror and enlightenment at the same time.

We're in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter ... [Language] is being eroded
it's changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.

I have a great editor and I enjoy, in a masochistic way, being ruthless about my own performance. There's an initial point in the editing, if you're directing yourself, especially in my case, where you go, "Ouch, ouch, ouch, I can't watch this." And then, there's a point where you become hard-nosed and just take your neurosis away and go, "What's working? That's okay. That's okay. We can lose that, and lose that." You get objective about it.

And although I've been very fortunate in the film work that's come my way, I need to get back to the stage. If I'm away for a maximum of two years, I feel something's wrong.

I'm not very good at being domesticated. I've tried. The domestic life I find claustrophobic - the rituals and habits and patterns.

I'm sure acting is a deeply neurotic thing to do.

The sets were fantastic. The Harry Potter sets are brilliant. You do get transported for a second.

There is a tension in relationships between wanting to return to the womb, but also wanting to be free. Because sometimes the woman's attentions can be overly maternal, and you want to go, 'Ahhhh!'

As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

Awards are like applause, and every actor likes to hear applause.

So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.

I couldn't get as big as a bodybuilder. I tried to put on as much weight in the right places as I could. My weightlifting was impressive for me, but not for some of the guys I see down at the gym.

Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur.

I went out to Mount Kilimanjaro, which I thought was very beautiful, but there were a lot of people there.

When you meet women, don't pretend to be anything that you're not.