Quotes By Ralph Fiennes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I tried to play rugby but was never very good.

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

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

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!'

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

You dread that there will be real problems during filming.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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