RALPH FIENNES

I have grown up loving Shakespeare.

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

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

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.

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 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.

I tried to play rugby but was never very good.

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.

Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

You dread that there will be real problems during filming.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.