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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.
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

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

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

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

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