For someone who prefers to stay out of the public eye, Joseph Fiennes was quite a busy man last Sunday. At the 75th Golden Globes, he expertly fielded lensmen, showed support to the evening’s cause in full-black, impeccably groomed beard and a Time’s Up pin, and took the stage with the cast and crew of his newest project, The Handmaid’s Tale. They took home the statuette for Best Drama TV Series. The show, with three nominations, also won his co-star, Elisabeth Moss, the Best Actress award for her role as Offred.
It speaks volumes of the Hulu original, based on Margaret Atwood’s terrifyingly prescient novel of the same name, that the English actor, with a reputation for being a recluse and a difficult interview, stepped out to show it support. Fiennes plays Commander Fred Waterford, one of the founders of a theocratic and totalitarian society, where women are stripped of their human rights and their identities. In spite of the dystopian premise, he believes it is a world that is very much “present” and happening now. “Everything that is depicted is everything we have witnessed to date. Whether you look at a religion, be it Christianity or Islam, or whatever, there are certain rules and restrictions on women, so we’ve experienced it. With Trump and the administration, I feel like (though) it was written 30 years ago, it was prescient then and it’s been prescient every day since then up to now,” he had said in an interview to syfy.com, which reports on fiction and fantasy news.
Control, corruption, privilege
The series, which premiered last April, has captured popular imagination for this very relevance to our times. Last year, when the US House of Representatives passed the American Health Care Act, women took to social media, posting messages like “...and you thought Handmaid’s Tale was just a fictional story”. And Fiennes, who has borrowed facets of his character from real men (perhaps even in government), is saddened by the truth of it all. Over the telephone from Los Angeles, he says, “For me, Fred is a study of male control, of the corrosive effects of power and privilege, and everything that is corrupt in our society. I see that in tune with the privileges I myself have been given, to understand how their abuse can prove so profoundly corrosive in a patriarchal society.” He shares it was such a “creepy character” to inhabit and there were times he couldn’t wait to get off the set and scream.
Actor Joseph Fiennes arrives for the BAFTA Los Angeles Awards Season Tea Party at the Four Season Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, on January 6, 2018. / AFP PHOTO / CHRIS DELMAS
In fact, one of the scenes that has affected him the most was also the one that elicited the strongest reactions when it aired — The Ceremony, a state-sanctioned ritualised rape of handmaidens, which showed a fully-clothed Fiennes having sex with Offred as his wife holds the latter’s arms over her head. Referring to the unsettling sequence that underlines patriarchal power, the 47-year-old admits it took a lot of humour off set, many discussions on set, and a conscious effort not to “over-intellectualise it”, to get through it.
Family first, always
Before The Handmaid’s Tale hit screens, you could have been forgiven for wondering where the actor had disappeared to. Especially since nearly two decades ago, it had looked like there would be no stopping him in showbiz — with the much-acclaimed Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love winning awards, and young women swooning over his artfully teased hair and intense eyes. Instead, he mostly dropped out of the spotlight. “Even 25 years later in the business, I know that (my) true compassion will never lie with the business that I love, but with my family that I love,” he quips, recounting an incident from the start of his career that cemented this certainty. “I was working on a play and I had to ask permission from all the cast members and the director to miss a show to attend my mother’s memorial service. That was a humiliating exercise for me, but I still did it,” recalls Fiennes, who comes from a large artistic family that includes his actor brother Ralph (whom he’s sometimes mistaken for), filmmaker sisters Sophie and Martha, and composer sibling, Magnus. Did it leave him disillusioned? Just the opposite, he says. “It brought in a wonderful clarity, and with clarity came freedom where I knew that what I do in my profession is just business. Though I love it, I would never rely on it with my heart.”
In the last couple of years, however, he did briefly hit headlines — for both the right and wrong reasons. While Risen, often described as the unofficial sequel to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, had him taking gladiator classes and winning applause in 2016 for his role as a sceptical Roman tribune, early last year saw him burning his fingers with his turn as Michael Jackson. The trailer for the episode of Urban Myths , a Sky comedy-drama series, was booed on social media for being a “horrific” interpretation, and even had the former King of Pop’s daughter, Paris, tweeting that it made her want to “vomit”. It was immediately axed, though the English actor defended it as “a satire... like an SNL sketch”.
A stand for feminism
Currently shooting the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale , Fiennes says the storyline veers away from the book, giving them all an opportunity to explore the complexity, the society, its “momentum and politics, and whether it’s sexual or not”. We wonder, how necessary is it for an actor to strike a chord with each character he portrays? “It’s almost impossible,” he notes, though “there will always be an emergence with some part of yourself, whether conscious or subconscious. That’s inescapable”. He adds there are “many things Fred and I are most diametrically opposed to, and that’s where I find a connection with him”. As the season progresses, he feels, despite the men being pretty thinly drawn (the story is from Offred’s perspective), we will see it’s a difficult and complex character. “A part of him is fighting for the good, fighting to reach out to moral comfort in a world which is full of moral decay,” he explains.
But, most importantly, he admits, the show has made him a stronger feminist. At the Golden Globes, he picked Oprah Winfrey’s speech as the biggest moment, sharing, “It’s great to be a part of an important movement that I truly believe will bring about a big change. It’s time we evenly distribute power and finally address sexual assaults not just in my industry but in others as well.” Closer to home, he stresses that the three most important people in his life are his wife (María Dolores Diéguez, a Swiss model of Spanish origin) and two daughters, and that the show jolted him into a much more alert state of the inequality amongst the sexes. As he admitted to Hollywood.com, he now feels “much more switched on to feminism, and what it means and stands for. I want my daughters to live in a world where there is equality and parity of pay. We’ve got a long way to go”.
Season one of The Handmaid’s Tale premieres on AXN on February 5, and continues every Monday at 10 pm.
