With Ralph Fiennes starring in the culinary thriller The Menu, David Michael Brown looks back at the formidable actor’s screen career and plates an eight-course meal made of his tastiest performances.
The Menu
One of the finest actors working today, Ralph Fiennes has consistently delivered astonishing performances since he first came to the world’s attention in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. From Robert Redford’s Quiz Show to his most recent turn in The Menu, he has cooked up a formidable career. And yes, that includes Maid in Manhattan.
In his latest culinary delight, Fiennes channels his inner Heston Blumenthal as Chef Slowik, a high-brow celebrity chef who serves his pampered affluent clientele at Hawthorne, his exclusive remote island set restaurant where they harvest, ferment and gel.
Mixing food porn with pitch-black comedy, The Menu is a deliciously wicked concoction by Succession director Mark Mylod. Fiennes serves up a magnetic performance as a man driven by obsession. And the amuse-bouche is a killer.
To celebrate his performance in this cinematic comestible, here are some of Ralph Fiennes’s tastiest roles…
M. Gustave in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Fiennes plays the fastidious hotel concierge M. Gustave residing over the titular establishment in Wes Anderson’s masterpiece. Obsessed with giving the hotel residents a first-class experience, Gustave finds himself framed for the murder of a wealthy dowager (Tilda Swinton). Soon he and his hapless protégé Zero (Tony Revolori) are searching for a priceless Renaissance painting that will prove his innocence.
Fiennes is astonishing playing the hotel employee with the requisite amount of stiff upper lip to accompany his chain-smoking, womanising way. Part concierge, part James Bond, all quirky brilliance. The exquisitely crafted The Grand Budapest Hotel may feature the director’s de rigueur ensemble but despite the presence of Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, F. Murray Abraham, Edward Norton and more, it is Fiennes who shines.
Harry in In Bruges (2008)
Martin McDonagh’s Belgian travelogue is a marvellous showcase of Fiennes’s dark side. The pitch-black comedy stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson—soon to be reunited in The Banshees of Inisherin—as hitman Ray and his partner Ken who are awaiting orders from their ruthless boss Harry (Fiennes) who has ordered them to hole up in Bruges in Belgium after a hit goes wrong.
A volatile swearing whirlwind of vicious energy, Fiennes’s firecracker delivery is brilliant, only matched in cockney gangster terms by Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast. Biting, acerbic and wilfully scathing, Fiennes has a ball letting rip and his character is incredulous that anyone could not enjoy spending time in the Belgium city, “How’s a fairytale town not somebody’s fucking thing?”
Amon Göth in Schindler’s List (1993)
Steven Spielberg’s stunning black-and-white adaptation of Australian novelist Thomas Keneally’s 1982 best seller Schindler’s Ark. The powerful drama told the inspiring true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II.
The film took home seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director but did not take home any acting awards, despite nominations for Liam Neeson as Schindler and a terrifying Fiennes as evil incarnate, SS officer Amon Göth. Ben Kingsley was also magnificent as Schindler’s Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern.
Lenny Nero in Strange Days (1995)
Fiennes headlined Kathryn Bigelow’s dazzling high-concept follow-up to Point Break during a time of turmoil for the City of Angels. Based on a story by James Cameron and inspired by the incendiary race riots that had inflamed greater Los Angeles in 1992, Strange Days fed on the world’s paranoia of the impending end of the century to deliver a bleak but visually stunning sci-fi thriller.
Joined on screen by Juliette Lewis, Angela Basset and Tom Sizemore, a dishevelled Fiennes plays a lovelorn cop turned sleazy street hustler dealing on the black market. He sells illegal SQUID technology that records memories and physical sensations directly from the wearer’s cerebral cortex onto a MiniDisc-like device for playback. The disturbing dark side of which sees the wearer experiencing rape and murder from the point of view of the victim.
Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
Fiennes will be best known to the younglings for his performances as malevolent wizard Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010) and Part 2 (2011). Almost unrecognisable under stunning prosthetics by two-time Oscar winner Mark Coulier, an initially reticent Fiennes’s made-up face was then augmented by the finest CGI that money can buy.
With his reptilian features, translucent skin, pointed teeth and two slits where his nose used to be, He Who Must Not Be Named is the stuff of kids’ nightmares and the perfect foil for his fresh-faced adversaries at Hogwarts. And in the final film of the series, we finally get to see Voldemort go postal and wage war with the titular boy wizard.
Gareth Mallory in Skyfall (2012)
Fiennes made his Bond debut in Sam Mendes playing Gareth Mallory, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and a former SAS Lieutenant Colonel. He was promoted to the head of the Secret Intelligence Service when… SPOILER ALERT Judi Dench’s M—in charge since 1995’s GoldenEye starring Pierce Brosnan—was killed by Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a disgruntled ex-M16 agent with severe abandonment issues.
Initially played as a stick-in-the-mud bureaucrat, Mallory showed his true colours when he threw himself in front of a bullet to save M when Silva and his henchmen rudely interrupted a government hearing. Fiennes continued his association with 007 in Spectre in 2015 and last year’s No Time to Die.
Almásy in The English Patient (1996)
Winner of nine Oscars, but not for Fiennes who was nominated for Best Actor, The English Patient, directed by Anthony Minghella and based on Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel of the same name, was the sweepingly romantic epic that saw Fiennes upping the debonaire charm.
Acting under a tonne of prosthetics, he plays Hungarian cartographer László Almásy, a badly burned plane crash victim during WWII. Juliette Binoche, fresh from her performances in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy, plays the young nurse who tends to him as we learn, in flashback, who the scarred patient with the English accent is. As we witness his doomed love affair with Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) unravel, Willem Dafoe, as Canadian Intelligence operative David Caravaggio, is trying to discover if the patient is the spy who helped betray him to the Germans.
Charles Van Doren in Quiz Show (1994)
Robert Redford’s brilliantly constructed dramatisation of one of the most controversial periods in American television history is exquisitely performed by three exceptional leads.
John Turturro plays working-class Herbie Stempel, the reigning champion on NBC’s popular quiz show Twenty-One. Fiennes took on the role of his successor, university instructor Charles Van Doren. The son of a prominent literary family, his handsome features and calm demeanour made him an instant hit with the show’s sponsors who wanted him to replace the belligerent and abrasive Stempel. It was Van Doren who testified before the U.S. Congress that he had been given the correct answers by the producers which led to his unheralded winning streak on the show.
Northern Exposure star Rob Morrow plays Richard Goodwin, a young congressional lawyer investigating rigged television shows who uncovers the corruption that threatens to bring down the whole system.
