We are at a corner table in a breakfast place in Chelsea, Joseph Fiennes opposite me on the banquette with his jack russell, Noa. “Dog duty,” he says, apologetic. Noa looks at me, brown eyes also apologetic. They’ve been in Hyde Park, he says, he lost track, didn’t have time to take her home. Nature is where he’s at his best, where he feels cleansed, connected, observant – his sentences are decorative like this. “It’s when I’m at my happiest, on hours-long, rain-drenched walks. Hot cheeks, freezing hands.” In an ideal world he’d be trekking or wild swimming in the rugged landscape of the Tramuntana in Spain. But if it must be London, “nothing beats Hyde Park”. Fiennes is tidy in a cashmere cardie and thick twill chinos. Noa has a snazzy yellow collar. Anyway, she’s well-behaved, he says: “Aren’t you, Noa?” She curls up to prove it. The scene is a masterclass in unhurried wholesomeness. Until he says Noa will savage me if I’m mean.
Fiennes was launched into the national consciousness as the doe-eyed, luscious-lashed 28-year-old star of Shakespeare in Love opposite Gwyneth Paltrow. He’s self-deprecating about his career since, saying to one interviewer that it condemned him to a decade of “flouncy shirts and horses” and to me that he’s been “pretty much a supporting actor for an actress throughout”. While he’s worked alongside impressive women – Cate Blanchett, Helen Mirren, Elisabeth Moss, Rachel Weisz, Eva Green – his own standout roles include the chilling Commander Waterford in The Handmaid’s Tale (whom he describes as “insidious”). Now 55, he jokes, he’s mostly “playing dads”. Not least Young Sherlock’s dad in the Amazon series – young Sherlock being his real-life nephew Hero Fiennes Tiffin – but also a gripping portrayal of Richard Ratcliffe, husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was held hostage in Iran for six years, in Prisoner 951.
We are here to talk about Dear England. Fiennes played England manager Gareth Southgate at the National Theatre in London and now the team behind the stage production (Fiennes, writer James Graham, director Rupert Goold) have adapted it into a four-parter for the BBC. The story is built around Southgate’s “quiet revolution”. How the missing of a penalty in 1996 changed the direction and thinking of his life, and how he used that knowledge to transform the England squad. It tackles mental health, racism, huge expectation and, Fiennes says, “national pain versus performance”. Among other things, Southgate introduced a performance psychologist, journalling and boot camp commando training to help the team throw off the curse of missed penalties and “two world wars and one World Cup”.
While the play was set against the backdrop of changing “English” identity – Graham constantly updating to reflect rising nationalism in the UK – Fiennes says it’s been revised again for the screen and “framed much more as a drama”. That said, his portrayal of Southgate remains little changed. Each morning while the play ran, he rose at 4.30am to shut himself in a small room to rehearse his script (he had decorators in and the sound of drilling or Capital FM or whatever would interrupt his focus if he did it any later). Then each evening he’d set aside two hours before curtain-up to become Gareth Southgate, or at least his interpretation of the man. Fiennes, described as “generous casting” by Southgate, had a prosthetic nose fitted, yellowed teeth, beard clipped. He immersed in Southgate’s quiet containment, inhabited his gestures, while absorbing, through Southgate’s audiobook Anything Is Possible, the England manager’s blurred consonants and halting patterns of speech. Beyond mimicry he found “an emotional connection to what this extraordinary coach was dealing with. I don’t know why.” He found Southgate “innately there”, one of the unique times where a character “just settled in an effortless way”.
Back then he hadn’t even met Southgate. He was presenting at The King’s Trust awards in June last year when he felt a tap on the shoulder. “I was about to step on stage, looking at the introduction card in my hand, and I turned and there was me, but not me. Me, who I’d been playing for two years. And in the most lovely, unassuming voice, he just went, ‘Hello.’ I said, ‘Gareth, hello!’ and fell apart. I was way too gushing. He was very cool and calm. I said, ‘I thought you might have a go at me for not quite … ’ I never ask for photographs, but I asked for a photo of us.”
Fiennes doesn’t love being interviewed. Today, he’ll gently nudge our conversation into a sort of two-way friendly chat (“And what about you, do you have a process for interviewing?”). But he has a straight-backed self-possession, doesn’t flinch when a fire alarm goes off and meets my gaze dead on, unlike his brother, Ralph Fiennes, whom I interviewed in 2016 and who sat hunched and far away on a sofa, needing to be coaxed – “Little bit closer still” – so I could hear what he said.
To understand any of the Fiennes children, perhaps you have to understand something of their extraordinary background. Their mother was the painter and novelist Jennifer “Jini” Lash (described by the author Dodie Smith as “almost too interesting to be true”); their father, Mark, a photographer and illustrator. The siblings are all epic achievers – alongside actors Ralph and Joseph are film directors Martha and Sophie, composer Magnus Fiennes and Joseph’s twin Jake, conservationist at the 25,000-acre Holkham Estate in Norfolk. There is also their adopted brother, the archaeologist Michael Emery, and the explorer Sir Ranulph is a third cousin. (Joseph Fiennes has made two National Geographic documentaries recreating “Ran’s” greatest journeys – an expedition down the Nile and a 1,500-mile trip from British Columbia to Vancover.)
The children had an itinerant existence, trying to escape, as Fiennes understands it, their “very precarious” financial woes. “It was seven bodies to clothe, seven mouths to feed and very little, if any, income.” He remembers going to the post office with his mum to collect the family allowance: “But, God, it was enough for a pint of milk and butter or something. It was tiny and when males are hungry at that age … ” His parents, nonetheless, “understood the value of nature” and he describes a wild and adventure-filled childhood, some of it in the West Country, “muddy and messy, camps in woods, never washing your hands. Snotty noses, jumpers with holes. It was pure liberation, freedom – nature. It was damp and cold, spitting logs or filling up the coal, gardening or washing the potatoes and feeding the dogs. It was on the go all the time, and I loved it.”
There was no time for sibling rivalry, he says, “just the exhilaration of the physical”. And anyway, their personalities were “fiercely different”. Jake – he smiles saying this – was into roadkill. “You’d open the freezer and there’d be a ferret, an owl, a bit of fox, or something he was trying to taxidermy. I found that disgusting.” He describes navigating country lanes on a hand-me-down girl’s bike “far too big for me”, roaming free for “seven, nine hours. Out. Gone. No phone. In winter it was slushy runs down hills on a plastic bag, in summer, playing on Stonehenge slabs.”
The freedom of home sharply contrasted with school. He attended 14 in all, and the boys were disciplined with belts, rulers and canes, “not for being rude, not for swearing. For being ‘enthusiastic’, for being ‘energetic’, for being alive as a young boy in Tisbury in 1982.” In Ireland, where they moved, he experienced “horror beatings” by nuns in Kilkenny, as well as the idyll of village life in Kilcrohane. “The sweet shop owner gave my twin and I a glass jar of lollipops for the journey back to the UK. God, we must’ve been so high on the worst type of sugar.” Transport was a VW campervan, “painted a mad colour, either bright blue or yellow. It was how we escorted our mother’s coffin, crazy with ribbons,” he adds. Jini died of breast cancer aged 55.
I ask how it feels to be that exact age now. “I feel every day my life is just beginning – this or that opportunity comes in for work, and I keep evolving and pushing. That she was robbed of that haunts me. My mother is indelibly marked into my creative psyche. Not a moment goes by without her force.” His brother Ralph talked about being “in the frontline of her pain” as the firstborn, and of her “emotional fragility”. He was hyperaware of her frustration, he said, of her wanting to paint, to write, of the conflict between motherhood and the creative drive. “My mother never hid anything,” he said in 2016. “In a way, it makes you quite responsible [as a child]. Their problems were our problems: ‘We have no money, we don’t know what to do, we’ll have to sell this, we’ll have to go there.’ Or in those explosive moments, when it’s all too much, she would say, ‘Why do we have so many children?’ in front of us.” At the same time Ralph was funny about how chaos turned him into a tidy obsessive – turning jars so the labels face out, agonising over crumbs, spills, damp teacloths; how an unmade bed or clothes-strewn floor had him repeating “Accept!” Right now, Joseph is brushing white dog hairs from his lap, saying of Noa, “Her hair gets everywhere. I feel really embarrassed.”
In some ways he renewed his mother’s connection to Spain when he met and married Maria Dolores Diéguez, an actor and model, and moved to Mallorca to raise their two daughters, 16 and 14 (and Noa, of course, who is six). His wife’s family are in Galicia, he says, and there’s “a Celtic magic there and some very wild places”. They’ve also done some of the Camino de Santiago routes with the children. “Before my mother passed she spent a year walking through France and Spain, and then to Santiago where she wrote her book On Pilgrimage, so serendipitously, it’s been a way to quietly connect with her as a pilgrim.”
The family moved back to London a couple of years ago, in part because Brexit rules ended freedom of movement. Right now, his home is filled with GCSE artwork, marbling technique sending him into a spiral about paint dripping on the carpet. Does he feel more English or European? “Depends what day it is. The compassion within my house is clearly European.” They gather for every meal, for instance. “We’ve had breakfast, lunch and supper together every day since the girls were born. We’re at the table and we talk. No devices.”
His daughters are on social media only “when I allow them to be. I am the controller.” He jokes that it’s always said that the two toughest jobs in the country are prime minister and England coach, but he would add parent to that list. “It is impossible. We are up against the fucking nightmare of tech companies and devices and the disruption of brain chemistry that hijacks our kids in the most valuable and poignant part of their lives – their childhood. On the way here, I’m walking the dog, I’m picking up poo, and at the same time I’m trying to manage screen time and being bombarded with messages: ‘Can you release my phone?’ It’s such a hard thing to say no and to insist on no devices in the bedroom after a certain time. But I do that, yes, 100%.”
He calls social media “the great manipulation”, the single most important factor in the rise of extreme politics, including Trump in the US and Reform in the UK. “And it’s driven by big business, by billionaires.” Here he rails about the onslaught against kids his children’s age. The targeting of young girls by cosmetic companies on platforms such as Instagram, “because children as young as 10 are trying to buy beauty products that make themselves look really young … It’s mad. As a parent, you’re not up against the influence of someone else talking to your child. You’re up against Zuckerberg’s team of scientists. So how the fuck are you going to win? You’re not going to win. And it’s a daily struggle, a daily event, and it’s exhausting, and we need help.”
The lack of proper legislation on vapes, too, blows his mind. He was with his friend the hypnotherapist Max Kirsten earlier this week, whose treatment rooms are filled with huge plastic containers of vapes his patients have surrendered in treatment. You can see the evolution of the marketing, he says, starting with the sleek black early vapes, such as Juuls, with their computer component likeness. Gradually these bleed into “crayon” colours, pineapple ice or blueberry flavours and the like. “You can see what these companies are saying is: ‘Let’s target the kids, get them signed up as early as possible.’ And I’m fucking livid with it. I hate it. This is where a government [should step in].”
He gives examples of issues that trigger a huge fuss in Britain. Taking the knee in sport, for instance (which he supports). If they are going to make a fuss, why not over this? “Let’s block fucking social media. Let’s stop companies targeting kids. Young, fragile brains. Don’t flip-flop around. Where is the government? Why aren’t they bringing in heavy legislation against these companies? Stand up, Keir, this is your kids’ generation.”
He pauses and looks at his hands, neatly clasped on the table. “Sorry. It just drives me nuts. I might be quiet on certain things, but I’ll be very loud on others.”
Given that he’s not a smoker, I ask what he was having hypnotherapy for. He hmms, eyes drifting for a moment to the window, and then says he wanted to support his friend, but wasn’t sure what to be treated for. “I said, ‘Do you know what, Max? I eat way too fast and I think that’s coming from growing up around a table of so many children and the idea of, if I don’t get in there, it’ll all be gone.’ Invariably, it was gone,” he adds, “because there were bigger hands. And if you wanted seconds you had to be quick. So I said, ‘Max, NLP me, reprogram my awful habit of just inhaling food way too quick.’” He is very lean, did it work? “Suffice to say, I still eat really fast. But in Max’s defence I only did one session.”
Like Ralph, Joseph Fiennes went to art school before he decided to act and accepted a place at the Guildhall School of Drama in London. From there, he trained at the Young Vic and did two seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Funnily enough, he’d auditioned for a bit-part when Shakespeare in Love was originally cast with Julia Roberts and Daniel Day-Lewis as the leads. That production fell apart. The director John Madden came onboard, along with playwright Tom Stoppard who worked his magic on the script. Meanwhile, Fiennes had done two films and a West End production, and was working in The Pit theatre at London’s Barbican when he was approached again to audition, this time for the lead. Was it stressful? “Are you kidding me? It was hugely nerve-racking. Suddenly I’m in New York. I mean, nothing to lose, no expectations, just giving it my all in a chemistry reading with Gwyneth. That in itself was a win. And then getting the news, I was on cloud nine. I thought, ‘OK, research.’ My process! I’ll start with the books.” He was in John Sandoe’s bookshop, a stone’s throw from where we are now, “trying to buy all these books I couldn’t afford, on Shakespeare and on his identity, whether he was the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon or whatever. I wanted to deliver.” He laughs. “And literally, across the pile of books I was looking at, I saw Tom Stoppard. I did a double-take. I was like, my God, wow. Do I dare pluck up the courage? I was only 20-odd. So I went over and said, ‘Um, hello Mr Stoppard. I’ve just been offered a part in a film you’re writing or have written, um, Shakespeare in Love?’ And he said, ‘Yes! Well. Joe. Why don’t you come to tea? What are you doing right now?’”
“Er, nothing. Oh my God.”
“Why don’t you come over? We can have a think and talk in my library.”
“So I went along to his place, which I thought would be Victorian with a wood-panelled library, leather-bound books – something out of a film set. And it was the opposite. Sort of 80s modern in Chelsea Wharf.” Fiennes remembers Stoppard chain-smoking, never finishing a cigarette before putting it out. “He had such a wonderful, charismatic, relaxing presence,” he says of the writer, who died last November. “And a fierce intellect, a knowing playfulness. He left me with this tiny bit of knowledge: ‘Joe, forget these books. There’ll be one brilliant academic who cancels out another brilliant academic and it’ll go on until you’re down a rabbit hole. Put it aside. The best way to the truth? Fantasy.’”
After Shakespeare in Love, Fiennes appeared to have the world at his feet. He was a brilliant young actor, intelligent, smouldering, who could handle comic bite. Harvey Weinstein, now serving a 23-year sentence for sex crimes (which Fiennes was unaware of at the time), but whose company Miramax made the film, offered him a five-picture deal (similar to the one Matt Damon signed after Good Will Hunting, which took him on to The Talented Mr Ripley and Dogma). So what happened? For years, Fiennes swerved the question with vague answers about stage being his first love. Yes, he made good films such as Enemy at the Gates, The Merchant of Venice and Hercules, but no one understood why he mostly placed his talent in independent movies such as Leo, Luther and The Escapist, as well as theatre.
In 2023, Fiennes finally described at least some of what happened when he was summoned to meet Weinstein in his hotel room, contract and pen, we assume, on the table in front of him. Weinstein, he said, told him he was in charge of his career now, that he had to sign the deal or he would not work in Hollywood again. “The way he explained it was a shock,” Fiennes said. He looked at Weinstein, aware that this great hulk of a man was trying to bully him, and felt “very present”. His words “didn’t sit well”, Fiennes said. Who knows if somewhere, stirring in his subconscious, was the memory of the nun who beat him so hard, the bamboo switch snapped in her hand. Somehow, he found inner strength. “You know what,” he said, “I’m not beholden to that. I’m stepping away.” Did Weinstein hurt his career? “I don’t think it helped me. Hurt? No, maybe not hurt. But he made it clear that he wouldn’t support me. He’d make a very strong movement not to support me. I was out of the family. But I was very happy not to be in the family.”
Fiennes asks that we don’t get into it today. So instead, we talk round it. He says acting on gut instinct, coupled with a love of the stage, meant he always had a “gentle sense of ‘there will always be an opportunity even if I have to carve it out myself’”. He describes his 30-year career as “a pathway of knowledge, the growth of self”, taken from creative experiences, but also those he worked with. How does he feel about ageing? “It’s all in the knees.” He laughs. “I tick over like an old classic. I do my oil check, water, tyres. In my head, I do sometimes feel like I’m still in my early 20s. That I can run there and climb that, I’ve got the energy. But the reality is, I’m out of breath before I know it. I pull a hamstring or a shoulder and I’m like ‘Joe, you’re just pushing it.’”
He’s sublimely content. “Every decade I go, ‘This is the decade I’m happiest in.’ There’s a great relaxation that comes with age.” He is “lucky and blessed that I’ve lasted this long doing the thing I love” (in an industry where 90% of professional actors are unemployed at any given time). “There’s no compassion in our business.”
To illustrate, he tells a story about how, aged about 23, he asked to miss a matinee performance of “a big West End gig” (maths suggests this was his stage debut, The Woman in Black at the Fortune theatre) to attend his mother’s memorial the year after she died. The producers demurred. They “felt it too risky” to send on his understudy. They played for time, asking him to come into work and ask each actor in turn if they’d agree to his missing a performance – “Which they did, immediately,” he says, even if the request was oddly humiliating. The producer then instructed the director to prevent him from going. “So I locked him in my dressing room and caught the train to the service. The understudy was tremendous and grateful for the opportunity. From that moment on, I understood the business. That this world, however much I love it, won’t always return the compassion when you need it.”
The waitress brings some dog biscuits and Fiennes is effusive – “Thank you very, very much. You’ve made a friend for life. Thank you. You’re very kind.”
Dear England, Fiennes says, is a play about critical junctures: “a moment of trauma you have to exorcise and relive” in order to “unshackle ghosts” by confronting them “again and again and again, until you’re mentally free”. He says the way Southgate coached his team was in part an exorcism of his own ghosts in 1996. I ask if it’s related to the Freudian idea of wiederholungszwang (the unconscious tendency to repeat a traumatic event) and he laughs: “Work that word into the headline, because no one will get beyond it.”
His personal critical junctures he won’t be drawn on. “I have a few very painful, traumatic experiences I’m working through, but I couldn’t share those,” he says, his voice uncertain, quickly adding, “I wouldn’t want to bore the readers. I think we all have something we relive and filter that informs us.”
But he’s interested in the parallels between Dear England and Prisoner 951, and the truths they reveal about the nature of British government. The handling of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case showed both ruthless self-interest and ineptitude. Ruthlessness in that the real reason she was detained in prisons in Iran, away from her daughter (22 months old when she was arrested), was a 40-year-old £400m debt the government didn’t want to pay. It was owed to the Iranians by a state-owned arms company for tanks and armoured vehicles the British had sold and failed to deliver after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. “We get into what Eisenhower called ‘the industrial military complex’,” Fiennes says. “It’s part of our national identity. So there’s ‘sweet Britain’, ‘the quintessence of Englishness’, then you peel that away and you’ve got this fierce complexity surrounding the military. It’s interesting.”
He wrestles with his own Englishness, with the idea of identity as an individual versus the cultural identity of a country. He makes a sharp distinction between nationalism and pride. For instance, he was horrified by the overnight appearance of St George’s flags painted on all the roundabouts he passed on the way to filming. Nonetheless, he feels “great pride” when he sees athletes, or actors for that matter, or film-makers, or opera singers, “that hail from these shores, representing great themes of life and the human condition”. I suggest he is from the generation traditionally thought of as quietist. He bridles: “I mean, I wouldn’t use this as a place to position myself, but I’ve got my own very strong views privately. I wish I was Glenda Jackson and could fiercely” – I think he’s going to say “voice them”, but he settles for – “be somewhat different.”
Some actors won’t take extremist rightwing parts, given the rightwards lurch of the current climate. As a political man, is there a boundary he won’t cross? “One of my brother’s most extraordinary performances is in Schindler’s List,” he says of Ralph’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of the Nazi commandant Amon Göth. “I looked at that and I was so challenged. I didn’t recognise him – really. And it was good I didn’t recognise him; I got to see and to understand the banality of evil. So, it’s important that we visit [those issues] in the most articulate way, as Spielberg did, in order to understand. I wouldn’t step back from those parts because, although it’s an ugly conversation, it has to be had. Especially if it allows us to move ourselves forward. So I welcome all characters if seeing them allows us to go beyond that critical juncture.”
What’s interesting is how explicitly political Dear England has become in its transfer to the BBC. I check with Fiennes whether it was intentional to place footage of Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Nigel Farage railing against the squad for taking the knee (as a supportive gesture to teammates being racially abused) so close to the scene of three Black players missing their penalties in the 2020 Euros, played in 2021. Are they implying these politicians destroyed the England dream? “Imagine being booed and heckled,” Fiennes says evenly. “Imagine being bombarded with this sort of hate when you’re trying to do your best. You’re only 18 years old, you’re facing huge expectations, you’re facing racism. I mean, yes, you want your politicians to support you.
“It’s all very well Theresa May coming out and saying how lovely it is that Gareth is doing so well with the boys when it’s all good. But let’s get beyond the good. Let’s talk about how it works, the psychological mechanics in play; elite athletes representing their country. If you’re a second-generation player from another part of the world and you’re questioned [about your race] and abused because of that, how do you then rally to the identification of the flag and feel passionate? You need support across the board, not just fans, not just other players and coaches, but government support. So yes, to answer your question.”
Dear England is coming later this month to BBC iPlayer and BBC One.