Intelligent Life has a new interview with Ralph Fiennes who plays Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films.  The interview is mostly about his other projects, mainly Coriolanus, but he talks a about the Potter series VERY briefly.  Read the full interview here.

In the autumn he spent nine weeks on the permanent “Harry Potter” set at Leavesden Studios, filming Part 1 of “The Deathly Hallows”, his fourth appearance as the evil Voldemort. “It’s quite fun. I’m looked after; it takes the pressure off the huge anxiety.” We had lunch in his trailer, Fiennes in full make-up, with a veined scalp, yellowy little teeth, and long stained nails emphasising his feminine fingers. I asked if anything was different in his life. “No,” he replied firmly, “I’m a single man and I intend to stay that way. I think, ‘shall I call up so-and-so?’ and then I decide I’m too tired.”

Today, aged 47, Fiennes is no longer considered A-list by Hollywood. “He’s not hot,” says one studio executive. “Someone like Liam Neeson has a far more commercial sensibility in the films he takes on. Fiennes is a thesp.” The occasional shot at the mass market has backfired on him: “I felt completely lost as that Cary Grant type in ‘Maid in Manhattan’,” he says. “I didn’t know what to do.” But in roles that call for a transformation Fiennes is superb—never more so than as the disconcertingly fleshy, sadistic SS officer in “Schindler’s List”. “It freed him,” says Peter Eyre, who played Polonius to Fiennes’s Hamlet. “He wasn’t a romantic lead: he had to find something else. Olivier was said to be a character actor in the body of a matinée idol, and the same may be true of Ralph.”

To watch Fiennes’s films back to back is to be struck by his range, whether as the tatterdemalion clergyman in “Oscar and Lucinda” or the murmuring vagrant in David Cronenberg’s “Spider”. In 2008 he was both a foul-mouthed East End villain (“In Bruges”) and an 18th-century duke in “The Duchess”—an unforgettable depiction of an aristocrat whose chilly reserve masked a core of compassion. In “Bernard and Doris” (2006), an HBO film little-known outside America, he was a transvestite, alcoholic Irish butler. It would have been easy to ham, but Fiennes gave Bernard a quiet dignity, edging to decadence in tentative gradations.

“Ralph has made very specific choices,” says Juliette Binoche, his co-star in his first film, “Wuthering Heights”, and again in “The English Patient”. “He’s not part of the system, he hasn’t moved to Hollywood. He’s decided to follow his soul.” That soul keeps leading Fiennes back to the theatre. “I wouldn’t have had it any other way,” he says. “Theatre gives you an arena for emoting that film ultimately can’t compete with—that sense of something connecting in the room.”

Thanks very much to reader Vincent for the tip!