It’s early May, and actor Joseph Fiennes, most famous for playing the sadistic and stoic Commander Fred Waterford in The Handmaid’s Tale and Timothy Howard in American Horror Story, to name a few, is facing a new kind of adversity: He doesn’t want his children to “run away from [him] and [his] work.”
Fiennes tells Shondaland in a recent interview, “I’ve got family. I kind of would love to honor them in a way that sees me in a slightly warmer light.” But he doesn’t need to commit to a project outside his comfort zone immediately. He’s currently promoting The Mother, out on Netflix on May 12, in which he plays an ex-SAS member turned assassin opposite Jennifer Lopez.
For more than two decades, Fiennes has become a recognizable screen presence who can effortlessly leverage the grim with the cerebral. It is challenging to imagine a role that could top that of Commander Waterford, the leader of the Republic of Gilead, a dystopian theocracy that threatens to strip women of their rights in The Handmaid’s Tale. Mostly silent, alternating between menacing and mysterious, his character in The Mother, Adrian Lovell, trains Lopez’s titular character when she serves in Afghanistan and looms over her and her daughter Zoe as they run away from him and a fellow assassin, played by Gael García Bernal. The FBI strips Lopez’s character of her parental rights, but the child remains a bargaining chip. By the movie’s end, Lovell has been, at best, an emotional terrorist and physical abuser to both the mother and Zoe.
Fiennes often fleshes out characters where there were once two-dimensional, icy villains, and conversations with director Niki Caro (2020’s Mulan, The Zookeeper’s Wife) helped him find a way into his character. In this new role, as much as he’s done to date, he pokes and prods at masculine ideals, in this case warping them into a much cruder shape. Both saw the power of stripping Lovell down to a combination of silence and rage to preserve who and what he is.
“He certainly contains something, but his rage is mostly the toxic patriarchal nightmare. Adrian feels like someone has stolen his thunder,” Fiennes shares with Shondaland. “I think he also has rage against Jennifer’s character because of leaving him, because I think in his mind there might have been an opportunity for a relationship, but also completely destroying his empire in terms of human trafficking.”
Seeing Fiennes, who isn’t dressed in an impeccably tailored suit like the ones most of his characters wear and instead sports a black crewneck T-shirt, it’s hard to find Lovell’s uncompromising rigidity in Fiennes’ easygoing demeanor. He’s proud of his work in The Mother. He becomes animated when discussing The Mother’s filming locations in Vancouver and the Canary Islands and how they enhance an already “epic” film, and his family, who have given him context for why he works as hard as he does. His family and the fact that he’s not on social media also keep him grounded.
So, how does someone play a character so despicable? “Maybe it’s just having lovely suits to amplify the villainy,” he jokes. “It’s not who I am really.”
Fiennes ended up channeling “the element where you think you might trust someone and that confidence that steals you momentarily” and the feeling of helplessness when that person “reveals themselves as your worst nightmare.” While he’s clear about his character’s motives, any rationalization would have led to comparisons about what he would do versus what his character would do. “I found that to be exciting and challenging.”
He reveals that his character “commits a heinous crime that sets the tone for the movie that sets him up as a very unlikable person” and admits that he had difficulty processing the material when he first read it.
“I spoke to [director] Niki [Caro] about how an audience would digest it, and I’m glad it has not ruffled any feathers because it’s something you’ve never seen before,” he says, adding that it’s an act of violence that’s hard to see and digest. “You can’t redeem the character after that.”
Curiosity and adaptability are crucial in entertainment, but change is also inevitable when you’ve been in the industry for as long as Fiennes has. Having glowered and waved guns nearly as many ways as possible on-screen, Fiennes thinks about the other contours of the industry he wishes to navigate at least once.
“I want to do a rom-com,” he shares with a laugh.
But if anyone is willing to prove people wrong and take on the challenge, he has the gravitas and range — after all, it’s Fiennes. Time and time again, he manages to captivate audiences while disappearing in front of our very eyes.
Fiennes returns to parenthood, an anchoring force in his life and part of what drew him to the film. Fiennes shares the film’s belief that motherhood is complicated and nuanced and feels that the film was made with enough care to show frank conversations about these experiences and, at times, unlikable mothers, who were uncommon not too long ago.
“It’s got this core of a compassionate relationship between a mother and a daughter,” Fiennes says. “And it’s something that when this comes out, we should celebrate mothers and what they sacrifice and how they protect. And I love it for that.”
Alicia Ramírez is an entertainment journalist in New York City. She has written for NBC News,Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Grammy.com, and other outlets and publications. You can follow Alicia on Instagram at @aliciaramgar.
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