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.

Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur.

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.

I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.

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.

It was just two energies between two people, you can’t prescribe that.

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.

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

I’m sure acting is a deeply neurotic thing to do.

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

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

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

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.

You’re meant to be playing the distillation of evil, which can be anything.

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

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

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.

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.

The film depends on the audience’s belief in this relationship.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Kenya doesn’t have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film.

You feel yourself working to show something. I’ve learned to distrust that feeling.

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

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

We’d all like to believe that perhaps people could stop killing each other.

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.

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

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.

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