Still drawn to the flame

The first we see of Ralph Fiennes in the upcoming psychological thriller “Spider,” he is stepping gingerly onto the platform of a soot-stained London railway station, looking as disturbed and grimy as his surroundings.

It is immediately clear we are not in Bridget Jones’ London anymore. The man descending from the train is Spider, a schizophrenic with a terrible past, and he moves along the platform toward his destiny in the haunted, tortured manner upon which Fiennes has built a canon of characters over a 10-year career.

Spider joins those other dark souls of Fiennes’ list of screen credits, from the sadistic Nazi concentration camp commandant in “Schindler’s List” to the fatally burned pilot in “The English Patient,” all, as he put it in a recent interview in London, “screwed-up, angst-filled men who had either lost their love, were adulterous or are completely stressed out.”

The ability to tap into weirder minds has served Fiennes well. As he turns a youthful-looking 40 this month, the English actor’s award shelf already includes two Oscar nominations (supporting actor for “Schindler’s List,” and best actor for “English Patient) and a Tony Award for playing -- no surprise here -- Hamlet. But it is a cultivated style that also limits the variety of scripts coming his way.

“Ralph’s always doing that ‘I’m being burned at the stake’ thing,” is how one London theater producer somewhat cattily puts it. Which is one reason Fiennes is also appearing on American screens as a love-struck U.S. senator, swept away by Jennifer Lopez in Wayne Wang’s light, blatantly commercial “Maid in Manhattan,” which opened Friday. (“Spider” opens this coming Friday; “Maid” is being released by Sony, “Spider” by Sony Classics.)

“I just felt I was seen only as someone who did very serious, art-house-oriented films,” Fiennes says after a day’s rehearsal at London’s Royal National Theatre, where he is back to playing the very serious again as psychoanalyst Carl Jung in Christopher Hampton’s “The Talking Cure,” which opened here last week. “I don’t get offered any romantic comedies. I don’t get the parts that I guess Hugh Grant has cornered very brilliantly.”

He smiles at the reference to Grant, Britain’s foppish, bankable leading man. Even with the rake of an unfashionably early 20th century-style mustache he’s cultivated to play Jung, Fiennes’ good looks burn through in a way the blinking Grant will never match. There is less intensity to Fiennes off screen, no effort to create mystique. But he does complain that roles haven’t been coming his way because, he says, he is tagged as a “not many laughs, preoccupied with some inner struggle” kind of actor.

Enter “Maid in Manhattan,” during which the Fiennes character gets to, among other things, politely ogle Lopez’s famous bottom. “Perfect,” is the senator’s assessment (though given his own string of roles requiring him to, as they say in Britain, “get his kit off,” perhaps Fiennes is the one who should consider taking out some insurance on his rear).

“The film is a very warm, uncomplicated love letter to New York, and from the feedback I’m getting, people think I’m likable in it,” Fiennes says in a modest tone. “We’ll see,” he adds. “It’s made for this particular market, and I have no way of knowing. Is this people’s taste?”

Try and try again

Working with J.Lo Inc. is Fiennes’ second attempt to cast aside the “complicated” tag for a lighter screen identity. The first, taking debonair detective John Steed from the camp ‘60s British TV series up to the big screen in the 1998 film “The Avengers, “ failed miserably. “People at the time were behind that choice, agents and friends, saying, ‘We’re going to see you as something else -- this confident, easy, witty Englishman,’ ” Fiennes recalls with a pained grin. “Patrick Macnee, who was the real John Steed, read our script and said, ‘This is a really good “Avengers” episode. If only we’d had this quality ourselves.’ But it just didn’t translate.

“It was just one of those things that happens in the movie business,” Fiennes says and sighs. “But it did bruise me. You get knocked like that, you do think: ‘Ouch.’ ”

But he was not ready to withdraw into type, making nothing but film adaptations of classic Russian novels written in verse (though he did do one of them, 1998’s adaptation of Pushkin’s “Onegin” directed by his sister, Martha).

He recovered his commercial balance to make this fall’s horror thriller “Red Dragon,” starring as serial killer Francis Dolarhyde in the Hannibal Lecter prequel. Another dark character, but at least one in a movie aimed at making money (even if the film was something of a box-office disappointment).But Fiennes is pretty clear he does these parts to pay for the freedom to choose roles that stir his soul. And “Spider” is one of them, a movie he wanted to make so badly for so long that he deferred his fee (as did co-star Miranda Richardson and director David Cronenberg) when a block of financing fell through three weeks before shooting of the $8-million film began. It is a visceral performance that some say you could build an Oscar campaign around, which is why the film will have a short December release ahead of its wider February distribution.

The “previously published material” on which the movie is based is Patrick McGrath’s singular 1991 novel of the same name. It is the story of a man released from a psychiatric institution into a London halfway house, struggling to get a fix on the monstrous childhood event that is repeat-playing in his head.

“The novel has a major literary conceit at the center of it, in that a man whose personality is disintegrating is able to write so beautifully yet still be the basket case that he is,” Cronenberg said by phone from Toronto, where he lives.

The director’s solution was to drop the screenplay’s dependency on Spider narrating his story as he writes a journal in English. Instead, Fiennes as Spider scrawls notes obsessively in a script intelligible only to himself, taking “evidence” about the crime he believes has been committed.

Getting inside the role

The magic lies with Fiennes’ ability to wordlessly embody Spider’s thoughts, his pain, the kinetic crashing of conspiracies and confusion.

Indeed, anyone expecting to hear that famously silky, Shakespearean-trained voice had better go rent “Quiz Show” again. Fiennes’ Spider mumbles through the film, speaking in mantras that tug at his character’s memories. “If you listen to the mumbles, if you could really decipher them, they do all relate to Spider’s life and his obsessions and the loops he has going round in his head,” Cronenberg says.

But Cronenberg makes it clear he was not looking for “clinical accuracy” in the portrait of a schizophrenic. Still, Fiennes sought out schizophrenics before shooting began to get a sense of the range of behavior among the afflicted. And it was he who hit on Spider’s mumbling ways, improvising the bleak persona for an enthusiastic Cronenberg during rehearsals.

“There will be [people] who say: ‘This isn’t the way schizophrenics are; some are very normal people who have families and hold down jobs,” Fiennes says. “But I wanted to see what was out there and come back and weave it all together to create my own Spider. David wasn’t trying to do a documentary. He was making a piece of art. And I love that. I think that’s right.”

The result is a character who wears his inner damage like a coat. He is greasy, with splotchy skin and nicotine-stained fingers. Fiennes and Cronenberg, who attest to their friendship formed on the set (“He’s a lovely guy, very sweet. Not weak, but sweet,” the director says) shared an image of Spider looking a bit like Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. Spiky hair. Very angular face. “Sort of like a plucked hen,” Fiennes says.

But it is a professional tribute to Fiennes, a man with more than a smattering of nobility about him, that his shuffling, downcast Spider is so achingly authentic.

“Well what’s the truth to someone like Spider?” asks Fiennes rhetorically, almost impatient that the point is not being grasped. “He doesn’t wash. He smokes nonstop. He probably has a mouth like an ashtray. His feet probably smell. It’s an urban London skin that’s not washed. And that is how I imagined it.”

Throughout the eight-week-shoot, Cronenberg fretted about his friend’s appearance. “There were bones sticking out of his face behind his ears and I was kind of worried about him. He kept losing weight throughout the shoot. And he didn’t wash, I can tell you.”

“Oh I did bathe,” Fiennes says and laughs in response.

“It takes tremendous courage to dump your movie-star image in order to be the character,” says Robert Lantos, the Canadian producer who worked with Fiennes on “Sunshine,” in which he played three characters across separate generations of Hungarian Jews. “Most of the time when you’re watching movie stars you never forget you’re watching a movie star, nor do they let you forget that you’re watching a movie star.”

For “Sunshine,” Fiennes also lowered his price to ensure a movie he believed in got made. “The money was never an issue, though, and we waited for him for about a year because he was doing ‘Avengers,’ for which he was being paid a fortune.”

In the end, says Lantos, “if you want to make films that have something important to say and are challenging, then you have to accept the economic reality of that world. Ralph goes where his heart takes him. And if you’re a truly great actor, committed to your craft, you do exactly that.”

The challenge of the theater also provides Fiennes with retreat from the intrusions that accompany being a celebrity, A-list actor. (In Fiennes’ case, the media chatter here tends to focus on the 19-year age difference between him and Francesca Annis, the accomplished stage actress who is his partner. She is the older one of the couple.)

Yet the stage holds professional risks as well. “For so many of these personality actors who make it big in films, it becomes just too scary to go back on stage,” says Greg Hersov, artistic director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theater. “Fiennes has a robust stage career, but he keeps seeking out these huge roles that are tremendously testing.”

That uncertainty seems to be on Fiennes’ mind as he was preparing for “The Talking Cure’s” opening. After one rehearsal, he expresses mystification at how the quality of performances swings so wildly from one day to the next. But his appetite for roles that touch some strange zone of the soul remains great. After playing Jung, he’ll be back on the London stage in the spring doing Henrik Ibsen’s “Brand.” Ibsen, perhaps the heaviest going of all.

One more complicated part to master. One more crazy career move.