Ralph Fiennes
Film Focus - October 2, 2006
It's not every day you get to meet Harry Potter's nemesis. What we discover, as we're introduced to Ralph "Voldemort" Fiennes is that he's actually quite nice, really.
At the World Premiere of Wallace And Grommit and the Curse of the Ware-Rabbit, in which he plays a similarly nasty piece of work (nemesis here of not a fourteen year-old wizard but rather a pest-busting man who sounds awfully like Peter Sallis), Fiennes told us he couldn't wait to see just how Voldemort would appear in the finished film. "I haven't seen it yet," he said, "and it's very hard to describe Voldemort in this film."
Nevertheless, Fiennes told us we'd be in for a shock. "It's a scary scene," he told Film Focus, "There's a real menace in the scene; the tone is quite unlike anything we've seen in Potter before. It's a scary, scary, scary scene..."
Regaining his composure long enough to think back on the filming, Fiennes said working with Daniel Radcliff (Harry) was an experience not lost on a screen-veteran like himself. "Dan's very good," he said, "working with him was wonderful. Poor guy, he had to be so patient. I had to do all this waffling and talking about how I'm the Master of the Universe and how I'm evil and I'm going to kill him and he has to stand there all tied up, writhing around and groaning with pain while I'm monologuing towards him.
"The Evil-Genius monologue bit - no film is complete without it! I just love playing evil characters!"
And with that, he was off to introduce the film, sporting, we thought, a slight sparkle of menace in his eyes. But not before he reminded us that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was out in November and we should, "Go and see it, you won't want to miss it."
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