Ralph Fiennes

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

“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 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.”

“I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.”

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

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

“It was just two energies between two people, you can't prescribe that.”

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

“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.”

“He's really sort of the devil. He's completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It's about power with Voldemort. It's an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.”

“I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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