Ralph Fiennes Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

It's great to be on a set where there's time and there's focus and there's also a kind of adrenaline thrill on a set where people are saying: "We have to get this shot, we've have to go, we've got to move on!" — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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!' — Ralph Fiennes

The film depends on the audience's belief in this relationship. — Ralph Fiennes

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

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. — Ralph Fiennes

When you get into the edit you'll understand what making a film is. You'll see all the things you missed and all the possibilities you have from what you shot. — Ralph Fiennes

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

Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur. — Ralph Fiennes

Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself. — Ralph Fiennes

Success ... Is all about being able to extend love to people ... not in a big capital-letter sense but in the everyday; little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word — Ralph Fiennes

Performance is made in the editing room, and I've come to see the truth in that - the idea that they say performances are usually made in the editing room because what you film is the raw material. I think just going through the process of saying, "Which take do we use? Why is that the take we want? I want that take can you edit again, I'm not sure that's the one, I think it's this one." And just because you go through that process, I think somehow it's made me sort of more open about the [actor's] possibilities. — Ralph Fiennes

Unicef wants to encourage a sense of stability for a child. — Ralph Fiennes

I have a lot of stuff I want to talk about and offer up. It would be odd not to have ideas about something. — Ralph Fiennes

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

I tried to play rugby but was never very good. — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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

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

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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

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

I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both. — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes

Gardeners are good at nurturing, and they have a great quality of patience, they're tender. They have to be persistent. — Ralph Fiennes

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

You dread that there will be real problems during filming. — Ralph Fiennes

You have to just dive over the edge. You haven't got time to mess about. — Ralph Fiennes

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

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

I respond to a part just intuitively when I read a script. — Ralph Fiennes

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

You feel yourself working to show something. I've learned to distrust that feeling. — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes

Education, awareness and prevention are the key, but stigmatisation and exclusion from family is what makes people suffer most — Ralph Fiennes

I like to keep fit, but I never lift very heavy weights. — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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

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. — Ralph Fiennes

I think I feel more like you're an actor for hire and you take the jobs you want to take, obviously, and some pay well and some don't pay well at all but you go on a gut feeling and it's all a big adventure. — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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

Ridicule is also a weapon against forces of evil. Really clever, intelligent ridicule. — Ralph Fiennes

There are those moments when you shake someone's hand, have a conversation with someone, and suddenly your all bound together because you share your humanity in one simple moment. — Ralph Fiennes

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

I can't go and shoot people in the back of the head because It's a kids' movie, which is actually quite a good test because you haven't got the overt threat of a knife in the face. — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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

News reports can overwhelm us. We can be appalled, we can sympathise. But what is hard to grasp is the sense that, at this moment, people are working, organising - not just at an executive level, but on the floor, in the warehouse. A man is packing a box of oral rehydration tablets; maternity kits are being prepared; education kits are being packed. And somewhere, tomorrow, those boxes will be unpacked and a child with life-threatening diarrhoea will be saved, a baby will be born in more hygienic circumstances, a girl will receive her first exercise book and her first pencil. — Ralph Fiennes

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

I have grown up loving Shakespeare. — Ralph Fiennes

Going to the movies was a big event in my youth. My father would be the initiator - he'd have me put on a jacket to see a film. — Ralph Fiennes

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

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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

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. — Ralph Fiennes

I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai. — Ralph Fiennes

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." — Ralph Fiennes

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

I learned a lot about acting - watching not just myself but other actors and learning how to distinguish between two great takes. It's also about one's own taste in performance. — Ralph Fiennes

The actor shouldn't edit themselves or be anxious. And the actors that I admire are always the ones who are inventive and their imaginative life in free-willing. It's a director's job to go, "No here, don't do that, go there." — Ralph Fiennes

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

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

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

There is a humanitarian impulse that one aspires to and there are days when one doesn't do it very well. — Ralph Fiennes

People fear they won't get what they want. — Ralph Fiennes

I spent the past week here in India getting a sense of the reality of HIV and AIDS in people's lives. Fathers and mothers are dying, leaving children with no support. Stigma and discrimination is ruining the family lives. There is an urgent need for education, information, and increased awareness of HIV and AIDS. The response needs to be now. We cannot afford to become fatigued. — Ralph Fiennes

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

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. — Ralph Fiennes

I'm interested in the spirits of people. In the theatre, there's the acting part of acting - and I'm not saying that can't be great - and there's the essence. To explore that essence, you need a key, a look, a gesture, an insight that unlocks the person's soul. — Ralph Fiennes

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

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. — Ralph Fiennes

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. — Ralph Fiennes