Ralph Fiennes on God, faith and his pacy new Vatican drama

When he was 13, Ralph Fiennes told his mother he wasn’t going to go to Mass any more. “My mother was a committed Catholic, very much so,” he says. In his early teens, the Fiennes family was living in Ireland. He went to a Catholic boys’ school. “I didn’t like the heaviness. There was a very claustrophobic, dominant feeling from the church in Ireland. I hated the sense of compulsion and constriction.”

So he bowed out, to his mother’s distress, but God was always at the dinner table. “On her side we had theologians and priests. My uncle’s a Greek archimandrite, my great-uncle was a Benedictine monk and recognised theologian and my mother’s second brother was also a famous Catholic theologian. Discussions of faith, God, belief: those were the … sorts of conversations going on around me when I was growing up. I know the atmosphere.”

That knowledge underpins his performance in Conclave, a pacy adaptation of Robert Harris’ novel about a papal election scripted by Peter Straughan, who has just won a Golden Globe for his incisive adaptation of Harris’ racy yarn, and directed by Edward Berger, whose last film was the multiple Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front (2023). Fiennes plays the softly-spoken Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, dean of the college of cardinals

After the death of an elderly Pope to whom he was personally devoted, Lawrence must set aside grief and his simmering doubts about the Church to which he has devoted his life to oversee the conclave. The assembled cardinals of all countries must be confined within the Vatican’s quarters, meeting each day to vote – and vote again – until a majority coalesces around the choice of a new Pope. “The genius of Fiennes’ performance is that so little of it is worn on the surface,” wrote Wendy Ide in The Observer when the film screened at the London Film Festival. “And yet he draws us in. We are invited to share Lawrence’s turmoil rather than just observe it.”

Lawrence is the fulcrum of a process that is as bitterly competitive as any boardroom battle, but for higher stakes. This election will be the last chance at the top job for most of the contenders, a couple of whom harbour ambitions as dangerous as coiled snakes, silent but ready to strike. At least one cardinal has been buying supporters for years; when Lawrence gets wind of this, along with numerous other muttered betrayals that rise like a tide over their days shut in the cloisters, he must decide what to do – whether to get evidence of wrongdoing from outside, whether as convener he should say anything at all. What is the godly thing?

He could pray for guidance, but his faith is tottering. “I felt empathy with a man struggling to find his path,” Fiennes said in an interview with The Times. “Lawrence’s instincts are to be more monastic. But he’s found himself in an institution where he’s got to be a bureaucrat. He wants the election to be beautifully done and all smooth, and it isn’t smooth because human frailty and fallibility comes at him from the shadows.”

There is also a more elevated, but no less vicious, battle over ideology. Stanley Tucci’s Cardinal Aldo Bellini is the reluctant candidate for the liberals; the vituperative Cardinal Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) makes no bones about his determination to mount the throne and restore old disciplines, bring back Latin and excise the kind of rot advocating women clergy, gay marriage and anything else he sees as a fad. There is some support for Cardinal Joshua Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) as potentially the first African Pope, but his homophobic attitudes will not sit well with wavering young Catholics in the West. And what would the outside world have to say? The Pope is a statesman as well as a spiritual leader. Optics are important.

Even Catholics do not know very much about the nitty-gritty of the election process, conducted in strict privacy as it is. Harris delved into its mechanics, which include numerous traditions of medieval provenance, meticulously. Berger and Fiennes followed this up with their own researches. “My mother is no longer here, but I told her sister – my aunt – about the film,” says Fiennes. “She said ‘oh, that will be very interesting, but everyone will be watching!’ Meaning that in the Catholic community, they’ll all know if you’re holding the crucifix correctly, so you’d better get it right!”

Fiennes insisted that they should have a religious adviser on set, an idea Berger immediately embraced. “To get those nuances that none of us would have a clue about. Things that are not about ostentation. There is an everyday-ness within the rituals, that is something I learned.”

Outside his family, he asked several cardinals and priests for advice and was impressed by how helpful they were. “They’re thinking philosophically a lot about these big questions,” he said in a US radio interview. “I didn’t meet anyone who I felt was locked in defensively in relation to ‘Here’s an actor playing a cardinal’.” They were very ready to acknowledge how challenging faith can be, that priests and even cardinals are only human. “I found it quite inspirational.”

What is striking in Conclave, in fact, is how delicately even the most poisonous of these people treat each other. As Tedesco approaches, Lawrence mutters that it would have been too much to hope that the challenges of travel would keep him away, before greeting him warmly. Common hypocrisy, you might say, but there is a strong sense that Lawrence is summoning his better self. Tedesco, for his part, is all bonhomie with these snowflakes he so deplores. Even with a cardinal whose sexual peccadilloes find him out, Lawrence is solicitous; he kneels to pray with him.

“I think that makes sense,” says Fiennes. “I think everything would be grounded in the conviction that we are all frail. I don’t think Lawrence would see himself as superior morally. ‘I’m your friend, I’m your guide, I’m your colleague; I see there is a transgression. I have to tell you this is not right but that doesn’t mean I would be furious or angry.’ Whatever power play they’re in, their whole training has to be grounded in humility. And therefore, isn’t it the nature of those lives that we have to gently help each other? And reflect back to each other where we go wrong?”

Nothing about their surroundings speaks of humility, however; Berger has an extraordinary eye for grandeur, for the flashes of red among the marbled interiors, for the shafts of heavenly light streaming through the clerestory windows, for the feasts brought in by the nuns (led by a remarkably powerful Isabella Rossellini), for the weighty heritage furniture in the papal bedchamber. Their robes, reproduced almost exactly but with somewhat cheaper fabrics than the Church would use, define them. That certainly doesn’t invoke a sense of pervasive humility, does it?

“It’s a weird paradox that while the acknowledgement of poverty is at the heart of Christ’s teachings, we see this particular Church having grown in its grandeur and goldenness,” Fiennes agrees. Obviously, that opulence works its own magic on the faithful. As a small child in the south of England, he recalls, there were two Catholic churches nearby. One was plain, austere, almost Protestant; his mother was instinctively drawn to it. “Then there was a very small Catholic chapel full of Baroque paintings and gold leaf everywhere. It was fancier and more fun; it felt more special, more ornate, and was tucked away in the wing of a country house.” The children would beg to go to that one; they wanted that pomp, ceremony and art. It worked for the medieval faithful; it worked for them.

Fiennes has never been cynical, he says, about that enduring need for wonder or the sense of community that churches can provide. “Look, I know the history of these churches. I think one can probably think of priests who have done terrible things – and they have, haven’t they? The Catholic Church has that padding of forgiveness. You can wash away your sins in confession which is possibly somewhat dubious, but nevertheless is a sort of safety net.” He shakes his head. “It’s a hornet’s nest.” At the same time, he says, “there are human beings in there struggling in their way to find better answers”.

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And, in a way, it continues to be familiar. The theatre is also a supportive community; Fiennes can even name a particular production where he felt that everyone brought out the best in each other (a Royal Shakespeare Company production of King John in 1988.) “The best the Church can be,” he said in a Guardian debate with his fellow cardinal characters, “is as a fantastic group. Groups everywhere are wonderfully self-supportive.” Working on a film, on the other hand, is not unlike the conclave.

“That’s so right,” Fiennes agrees. “I love the structure that doing a film gives me, because you have to be ready for your 5am pick-up, you know the scenes, your life is taken care of and although it’s not as literally closeted as the conclave, you embrace the mental sense of enclosure. I’m doing this, I can’t talk to you, I can’t deal with certain things, I’m doing a film. I’ve created a kind of mental tunnel and I can’t deal with anything outside it until I’ve finished.”

At the time, Berger chips in, it feels like home. “You come together and work on this one thing and somehow, it feels like a close-knit family.” That feeling may be illusory – Berger insists it is, that afterwards you are as alone as you ever were – but Fiennes keeps that faith. “We must keep intact,” he says, “the aspiration to an ideal.”

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