"Evil may well be nearer the surface than we like to admit," said Ralph Fiennes. The 31-year-old actor pushed aside his teacup and picked up an imaginary rifle. He peered through the scope with one eye closed and squeezed the trigger.
For just an instant, he stopped being a diffident, sensitive young man with chiseled good looks and the slightly distracted, angst-ridden air of an existential poet. He looked more like Amon Goeth, the Nazi labor camp commandant who sits on his balcony and picks off victims with capricious abandon, using his rifle as if it were God's lightning, in Steven Spielberg's film on the Holocaust, "Schindler's List."His performance in the film has mesmerized audiences and catapulted Ralph Fiennes (pronounced rafe fines) from a British actor known primarily for Shakespearean roles to international stardom. Last week it brought him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. He has already won awards for the role from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.
Fiennes said he prepared himself for that harrowing scene by dredging up the memory of a primitive sensation. "It was like an extension of that boyish thrill with an air rifle when you aim at cans on a wall," he said. "That satisfaction when you hit a target - it gives you a kick. It's as basic as smashing a fly with your hand as a kid and standing in front of a windowpane for ages seeing how many flies you can kill." He started to smash the table with an open palm but checked himself and brought it down gently.
Now add to that sensation, he suggested, a desperate and psychotic personality with an unnatural void at the core, years of Nazi propaganda and conditioning, and the conviction that your Jewish victims are not humans but some sort of destructive virus, and you have the basic ingredients of Goeth, a man feeding his inner demons while believing he is "performing the state a service by popping the odd one off before breakfast."
Fiennes's Goeth is the antitheis of Oskar Schindler, the high-living German businessman and would-be war profiteer who, in the end, saves more than 1,000 Jews from certain death.
In preparing for the role, Fiennes steeped himself in Nazi literature and history and watched films ranging from Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" to SS recruiting movies showing combat training and "finely muscled Aryan young men doing gymnastics." He says he came to understand the appeal - "the sense of that power, the order and hierarchy, and the patriotism" - and how it touches "a sense of being part of a clan and the security that gives you."
He even used diet supplements to put on 26 pounds, which gave him a paunch and fleshy jowls. He had discovered from reading descriptions, including transcripts in the Imperial War Museum of interviews with survivors of the Plaszow labor camp in Poland, how grossness overcame Goeth's almost angelic-looking features. "So many of them wondered how a man who looked at first glance attractive and good could be so brutal," he said.
"I'm not a psychologist, but I'm convinced the brutality he became addicted to was related to his obesity. He also became an alcoholic and an insomniac. My own pet theory is that he was so steeped in this brutality that unconsciously, as a kind of remedy or palliative, he had to stuff himself with food and drink to numb his sensibilities."
All this, he said, helped him to develop an uncanny sense of Goeth, who came from a middle-class Roman Catholic family in Vienna. "I feel that inside this man there must have been some deep void, a lack of moral sensibility. He found in Hitler's ideals, the Nazi ideals and the SS in particular a wonderful release for himself, a channel for his anger and frustration."
"I felt a kind of sympathy for him," he said. "In a way, if you are involved in dehumanizing other people, you yourself become dehumanized. Everything that is unique about a human being's capacity to create and love and construct is destroyed and negated."
People who meet Fiennes these days invariably remark on how hard it is to reconcile him with the character of Goeth. He is polite, articulate, almost shy, and he is given to long pauses while he searches for just the right phrase. Gaunt and angular, with longish hair swept back over his ears, he has the look of an artist.
A painter, in fact, is what he originally wanted to become. In 1981 he went to art school in London but found he was drawn instead to the theater. He was accepted at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Three years after graduation, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company for two seasons, winning praise in roles such as Edmund in "King Lear" and Berowne in "Love's Labor's Lost."
There followed two film appearances with decidedly mixed results. He was praised for his portrayal of T.E. Lawrence in a two-hour television movie, "A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia." But the critics were unimpressed with his malevolent and destructive Heathcliff in Peter Kosminsky's ill-fated remake of "Wuthering Heights" for Paramount. It was that role, however, that convinced Steven Spielberg that Fiennes had enough depth to play Goeth.
In a film soon to be released, "The Quiz Show," directed by Robert Redford, Fiennes plays Charles Van Doren, the Columbia University instructor who agreed to participate as a contestant on "Twenty-One" the rigged television game show that became a major scandal of the 1950s.