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Joseph Fiennes rises to the occasion of ‘Risen'

The first stage experience British actor Joseph Fiennes can recall is when, at 7 years old, he was chosen to play Joseph in a school production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat."

"I felt as though I'd been picked up by the scruff of the neck and dropped off in the right department, and when we started rehearsing, I felt at home," said Fiennes, 45, who stars in the new film "Risen" as Clavius, a fictional Roman military tribune who is ordered to find the body of Jesus when it disappears shortly after the crucifixion.

Fiennes did a bit of acting, then got sidetracked by an interest in art, but by the time he was 18, working as a stage manager and acting in youth theater productions, he knew the stage was his future. Parts in a couple of successful 1998 films - "Elizabeth" and "Shakespeare in Love" - briefly took him away from live performance, but since then he's balanced his career by jumping back and forth between screen and stage. He spoke in Los Angeles about his experience making "Risen."

Q: Was there always a plan for you to do both theater and film?

A: No. I went to drama school when I was 18 to do theater. I loved film. I watched David Lean and Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg. But being in a film just wasn't on the radar. Years later, I was doing "A View from the Bridge" in the West End. A lot of directors come to the theater for potential actors for their movies, and I lucked out and got a bit part, maybe two lines, from Bernardo Bertolucci for "Stealing Beauty." He was a maestro of cinema and I thought, "I'm not going to turn THAT down." So that's where I got lucky, but it was by virtue of my theater work.

Q: You've worked with many different film directors. What happens these days, after you get a script and read it and say yes? In the case of "Risen," did you get to make suggestions to [director] Kevin Reynolds?

A: Some directors are wonderfully collaborative, and there are others who, you just trust their vision. For "Risen," I met with Kevin Reynolds in an airport lounge in Madrid. I was a big fan of his work ("The Count of Monte Cristo," "Waterworld"), and we talked for two hours or more about the movie. He was wonderfully embracing in hearing my ideas about the script, or my response to the script. I think we both agreed that yes, this has to adhere to the narrative, which is so dear to so many people. But at the same time, it's a film, and by virtue of it being a film, it's an adaptation of events, and you can't help that because you put on a different lens and there's lighting and you act: It's an interpretation. That was a big part of the discussion. That was a great example of a very collaborative director.

Q: What initially attracted you to the script?

A: The hook for me was that we could travel this narrative through the eyes of a non-believer, a skeptic, a Roman military soldier. Here's a man who's part of the death squad, if you like, at the crucifixion, and now we've got to travel with him, and the question was is anybody [in the audience] going to like this guy, with him being part of the team that crucified Christ? So that was the big challenge. The other big take away from the film is the detective element. The mindset of the Roman was such that they were surgical in battle and in thought, and none more so than a military tribune such as Clavius. So it was great to have that element driving the momentum. The angle I loved is that you have a ticking clock because his superiors are breathing down his neck to get this body, which must be a hoax, and nothing, in all of his training or in his brilliant analytical mind, can prepare him for what's around the corner.

Q: Is it true that you worked with a real detective to prepare for the role?

A: Yes, a wonderful man in Malta, where we shot. Because the film has a structure of a certain amount of interrogations, I was asking, "How do I do this? How do I give color to several different variants of the same theme? How would someone extract information?" So I thought, well, let's get a professional.

Q: Your character spends a lot of the film in silence. Lots of deep thinking. Is interior acting a whole different ballgame than using words?

A: Yeah, it is. I think syntax can come in many forms, and I believe that cinema is at its most exciting when we hear the thoughts, or we understand a different sense of something. For example, I might say, "Good morning," but then we get a close-up and it means, "I want to ring your neck!" It's all about what's NOT said. So I think what IS said is probably less powerful in cinema than what's not said. That's what I was going for in this film.

"Risen" opens on Feb. 19.

Ed Symkus covers movies for More Content Now.