Fiennes’s inner psyche appears to be not so much a closed book as a blank page. It’s not that Fiennes, now 70, isn’t a charming and engaging conversationalist. It’s just that he doesn’t appear to do introspection and says he’s bad at “hypotheses or inward-looking philosophy”. Ask him a question that invites him to look inwards, and he answers it with a story about something he has done. It is as though for him Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the active and contemplative life is absolute.
Article in the FT Weekend Magazine (20/21 September)