There comes a time in a British actor's life when the shadows have lengthened, and those English teeth no longer look quirky but queer; that eccentric gleam turned from Steptoe and Son to Jekyll and Hyde. Ralph Fiennes has crossed that threshold. OK, so Fiennes has a very nice set of gnashers, but his latest screen appearance wafting malevolently around as Hades in Clash of the Titans like some crimped-hair Greco-Roman Fu Manchu confirms the change. He's gone Rent-a-Villain.
I could say, by way of consolation, it has happened to many a fine actor, but it only ever happens to fine actors. They're the ones with the skill set to showcase the deviant personality traits Hollywood likes in its antagonists, nemeses, malefactors, éminences grises, blackguards, criminal masterminds, dark lords, and end-of-level bosses. Being English is one of the most important deviant traits, for some reason that I'm sure has to do with the American war of independence. Once your 40th birthday has passed when leading-man potential is receding with your hairline and you've started to get "the look" expect the call any day.
Cancelling Christmas, in his capacity as Prince of Thieves' Sheriff of Nottingham in 1991, was what sealed villainhood for Alan Rickman, though he had of course worked peevish wonders as a Teutonic terrorist a few years previously, with Bruce Willis in Die Hard. Throughout the Eighties and Nineties, Rickman was on a rotational Hollywood evildoers' programme, along with Malcolm McDowell, Gary Oldman, Jeremy Irons, and longest serving member and committee chair Tim Curry.
Now, like the last representative of some bygone order, the mantle has fallen on Fiennes. Amazingly, Hollywood mistook him for a leading man (something fellow lantern-jaw Irons also had to deal with) as recently as 2002's Maid in Manhattan, though Kathryn Bigelow was trying as far back as 1995, casting him in her virtual-reality thriller Strange Days as street hustler Lenny Nero. He's turned out more Nero than Lenny, though, and it's no coincidence that his biggest triumph in the The English Patient, was also loaded with amnesia, tortured emotions, Hungarian cartography, facial disfiguration and the "search for identity". Even when he was the hero, Fiennes seemed determined to prove a villain. There's something dank about him, a sourness and impatience constantly threatening to bubble up to the surface and taint everything. Properly, thoroughly tapped, the run-off has had formidable results: Fiennes's performance as Amon Goeth in Schindler's List is a true portrayal of evil, in the banal sense.
Unsurprisingly, Fiennes has advanced quickly, stepping into the role of Voldemort for the Harry Potter franchise as to the gothic manor born. He first appears gowned and noseless like a plastic-surgery outpatient wandering out of a Beverly Hills clinic in the graveyard resurrection scene in Goblet of Fire. Admittedly, even Ronnie Corbett would unnerve in ‘Mort's death's-head prosthetics, but the lack of a conk highlights Fiennes's vulpine slash of a mouth. He wreaks real damage: effectively vicious in mocking wizardly conventions ("Come on now, Harry, the niceties must be observed!") as he bullies Daniel Radcliffe from the off; unleashing dark magic in his duel with Dumbledore in Order of the Phoenix.
It would have been easy for Fiennes to just Xerox the malignancy and fax it through for Clash of the Titans. But he differentiates them nicely; his lord of the underworld is less animalistic and more ethereal than Voldemort, with a sibilant whisper that employs the old passive-aggressive strategy for drawing attention from noisy surroundings. So he may be Rent-a-Villain, but at least he's doing bespoke options.
The Fiennes approach is having trickledown effects in the UK film industry, too, where he is currently offering a discount on ne'er-do-wells. He rustled up an unsettling combination of casual violence and a weird fastidiousness ("I want a normal gun for a normal person!") for his estuary gangland boss in In Bruges; and we're about to understand just how far the banality of evil can go when he red-tapes up everyone's lives as the dead-eyed insurance executive in Ricky Gervais's Cemetery Junction.
The danger with becoming cinematic shorthand for evil is that the wind changes, and you're stuck that way permanently wearing a cape, heavy eyeshadow and spitting resentful one-liners at a blur of speccy child stars. Fiennes is probably too great a talent to get trapped in the novelty slot (he's already lining up his adaptation of Coriolanus, another unlikeable hero, as his directorial debut), but greater talents have fallen further. For the moment, if he's in the getup, he's the classiest panto act in town. If nefariousness is necessary, you know who to call. Try the Yellow Pages; look under "V".
