British Actors You Should Know: Ralph Fiennes

Ralph Fiennes is one of the most prolific British performers working today. He's had roles in prestige dramas, weirdo comedies, blockbuster franchises, and one-off independent films, playing everything from James Bond's boss and Greek hero Odysseus to a Nazi commandant and a wizard supervillain. He's nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards for the third time in 2025, an accolade he has somehow never won before. (Let's go Team Conclave!)

In fact, one of the surest ways you can be sure that Fiennes is a next-level actor is how many times he's been up for a major award and somehow never taken home the trophy. He's been nominated for seven Golden Globes, six Screen Actors Guild Awards, four Saturn Awards, four Satellite Awards, and an Emmy, all to go home empty-handed. He's been up for a BAFTA seven times and only won once. 

To put it plainly, Fiennes has been so consistently excellent for so long that it seems as though a lot of critics and awards bodies seem to be taking him and his skill for granted. Nine of his co-stars have been nominated for Oscars for performances given opposite him, and three of them have won. (To be fair, the man has a BAFTA and a Tony Award, so he's not completely lacking in awards hardware, but this, I think we can all agree, is truly getting ridiculous!!) 

On the eve of another Oscars ceremony, it seems worthwhile to look back at some of Fiennes's best performances, if only so we can all get angry all over again at how many awards should be cluttering up his mantle. 

It's a truth universally acknowledged that you're either a Charlotte Brontë or an Emily Brontë person. If you're an Emily enthusiast, you already love the dark, overly dramatic world of Wuthering Heights, complete with the sweeping, passionate, and often extremely toxic romance at its center. And if you're looking for the absolute perfect on-screen representation of exactly why this love story is so compelling, look no further than the 1992 feature film adaptation. 

Fiennes is the Platonic ideal of Heathcliff: Tortured, brooding, wildly unkempt, and toeing an edge of madness — essentially embodying the guy everyone in your family told you not to date when you were a teenager. This isn't his only onscreen partnership with actress Juliette Binoche that will appear on this list. But it is one of the most emotionally compelling, making it super easy to believe in the desperate, near-cosmic nature of Cathy and Heathcliff's love.

Wuthering Heights is streaming on Tubi.

Steven Spielberg's historical epic Schindler's List tells the story of a courageous industrialist who managed to save over 1,200 Jews from near-certain death at Nazi concentration camps during World War II. But while everyone certainly (and rightly) remembers the film as a towering achievement thanks to its gut-wrenchingly accurate portrayal of historical events, too many have forgotten that it was powered by a pair of unbelievable performances at its center. Don't get me wrong, Liam Neeson is tremendous as Oskar Schindler, a man who rescued so many, but remained forever haunted by those he couldn't save. But Ralph Fiennes's performance in this film is next level. (So much so that it's often extremely difficult to watch.) 

Fiennes should have won an Oscar for his terrifying, deeply nuanced, and often downright unhinged performance as Nazi concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth. Running the gamut from charming to sadistic, he's captivating during every moment he's onscreen. Goeth was a real person who committed unspeakable atrocities, but Fiennes's portrayal never feels like a caricature and is all the more terrifying because of that fact.  

Schindler's List is streaming on Netflix.

Fiennes was nominated for another Oscar that he probably should have won for the sweeping, achingly romantic 1996 film The English Patient, an adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel of the same name. The story of the titular "English patient", a badly burned man whom flashbacks reveal to be a handsome Hungarian aristocrat named Count Almásy, who flew map-making missions over the desert for British intelligence.

Fiennes's performance is quiet but powerful, infused with a sort of Shakespearean grandeur and tragedy in even the smallest of moments. Almásy's doomed romance with Kristin Scott Thomas's Katherine Clifton is gorgeously moving, and if you don't tear up at least a little during the scene where he's carrying his dying lover through the desert, I don't know what to tell you.

The English Patient is streaming on MGM+.

For all that Fiennes has movie star good looks, broods like a champion, and exudes tortured longing as easily as he breathes, he rarely gets cast as a romantic lead. (Which, as anyone who has seen The English Patient can tell you, is ridiculous. The man was born to pine handsomely!) Perhaps Fiennes is simply too intense of a performer to convince casting directors he can also do romance, or maybe he simply doesn't gravitate to those sorts of roles. Whatever the reason, it's a damn shame, is what I'm saying. 

This is a lot to convey that The Constant Gardener is worth watching not just because it's a solid film, but specifically because Fiennes gets to be in romantic mode for once. (Even if the romance aspect of the story goes hand in hand with tragedy.) Here, he plays a good guy intelligence officer who falls in love with a political activist, played by Rachel Weisz, who is murdered after she discovers some dangerous information. The film intersperses the story of Justin's search for Tessa's killer with flashbacks depicting their romance and it's all sorts of painful and gorgeous in the best ways.

The Constant Gardener is available as a streaming rental on Amazon Prime.

Like many British actors of his generation, Fiennes was cast in the Harry Potter movies. The eight films across the franchise were of varying quality, but you can't argue with the outstanding array of talented performers (Maggie Smith! Imelda Staunton! Alan Rickman! Helena Bonham Carter! Kenneth Branagh!) who lined up to take even the smallest of parts in the story of the magical Boy Who Lived. But even among that group, Fiennes is special. Because Fiennes played Voldemort.

Fiennes's debut as He Who Must Not Be Named didn't take place until the fourth film, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but boy did he make every appearance thereafter count. In full icy psychopath mode and boasting a hauntingly sunken and ashen visage, the actor essentially breathes malevolence, attacking every ridiculous spell like it's a Shakespeare monologue and waving his wand like a dancing master. Given how much the prosthetics changed and/or restricted his facial movements, it's Fiennes's voice that does most of the heavy lifting here, running the gamut from animalistic snarls and unbridled fury to quiet calculation and serpent-like cunning. 

The Harry Potter franchise is currently dividing its time between streaming on Max and Peacock.

Fiennes is onscreen for less than twenty minutes in Martin McDonagh's (The Banshees of Inisherin) black comedy In Bruges, but his role is an absolutely unforgettable one. 

When hapless hitmen Ray (Colin Ferrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) make a mess of their latest assignment, it's their boss Harry who must journey to Belgium to clean up after them. The very picture of "I'm just here so I don't get fined" Fiennes's Harry reacts to everything he encounters, be it individual pieces of information or the actions of his bumbling charges as if it's the most annoying thing on the planet. And he has two methods of responding to that: An incredible verbal outburst or a shocking display of violence.

In Bruges is streaming on YouTube TV.

At first glance (or at first perfunctory skim through his acting resume), Fiennes doesn't seem like an actor who's particularly interested in comedy. This is what happens when you make your name performing Shakespeare's tragedy and starring in award-winning prestige dramas. But, as The Grand Budapest Hotel so amply illustrates, Fiennes is a remarkably gifted comedic actor, a man who deeply understands the mechanics of humor and who has an incredibly droll (and dry) wit. 

In Wes Anderson's werido masterpiece, Fiennes plays the outlandish Gustav, the legendary (and hilarious)concierge of the titular hotel, who takes a ridiculous amount of pride in the establishment and delights in ruling the staff with an iron fist. Fiennes throws himself wholeheartedly into the film's most ridiculous elements: running from the police, sexually servicing old ladies, getting entrapped in a complicated conspiracy that lands him in jail. It's an utter swerve for Fiennes as an actor and a through delight to watch.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is streaming on Hulu, or on Disney+ under the Hulu tile.

An utterly charming old-fashioned historical drama about the discovery of the Sutton Hoo hoard, The Dig sees Fiennes play one of his most normal and relatable characters. (Maybe that's weird to say, but let's face it, the man has a long history of being cast as an array of aristocrats, nobles, religious leaders, and other prestige-feeling figures much more frequently than as an everyday Englishman.) 

Here, he plays Basil Brown, a working-class, self-taught archeologist hired by landowner Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) to begin digging near the ancient burial mounds on her rural property. His discovery was one of the most significant in British history, an almost fully intact Viking ship, with a burial chamber full of dazzling riches. (Fun fact: You can still see the Sutton Hoo hoard at the British Museum today and it's hard to overstate what a huge deal it still is, or how much it changed our understanding of Anglo-Saxon history.) 

Fiennes's performance is delightfully understated and his chemistry with Mulligan is straight-up adorable. 

The Dig is streaming on Netflix.

The role of The Menu's Julian, a renowned chef who invites a select group of patrons to his private island for a night of elaborate and disturbingly unique fine dining, was written for Fiennes and it shows. The unsettling, dark humor of the part fits him like a glove and he's (pardon the pun) delicious in it from start to finish.

Gifted with with multiple, knife-bright monologues and a complicated vengeance plot, Fiennes's performance runs the gamut between delusional, longing, dissatisfied, fed up, and cruel, with a heaping help of dark humor and even vulnerability on top. 

The Menu is streaming on Netflix.

In 2021, Fiennes put on a one-man stage production of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, the work that is most widely credited with helping the author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. The work is four linked meditations (Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding) on everything from time and memory to enlightenment and the divine. One of Eliot’s most overtly religious works, the poems blend the author’s own Anglo-Catholicism with mystical and philosophical elements from both Eastern and Western traditions. 

Fiennes performed the stage version of Four Quartets throughout the U.K. in 2021, in a production he staged and directed himself. The cinematic version, shot shortly after the show completed its run, was directed and edited by his sister, filmmaker Sophie Fiennes.

Four Quartets is streaming on Amazon's Prime Video.

Given that it's a movie about one of the Catholic Church's most mysterious bureaucratic events — the election of a new pope — Conclave probably has no right to be as genuinely exciting as it is. But the drama, which follows the story of a group of cardinals gathered to hold a papal election, is absolutely riveting from start to finish, a story that uses the thrills of petty politics to explore larger themes, of faith, doubt, and progress. 

Fiennes stars as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, Dean of the College of Cardinals at the Vatican, whose job requires him to wrangle the different factions convening within the Holy See even as his own belief in his personal vocation wavers. In a subtle, soulful performance, Fiennes wordlessly conveys the depth of Lawrence's emotional struggle as he wrestles with his own doubts and puts in the hard work that real faith so often requires.

Conclave is streaming on Peacock.

A retelling of Homer'sThe Odyssey, The Return eschews the epic poem's supernatural elements, jettisoning sirens and cyclopes in favor of a more human story of loss and trauma. The film focuses on the final third of the poem in which Odysseus finally returns to his homeland of Ithaca and Fiennes, boasting a sinewy muscles and sharply defined abs, plays the famous Greek hero as a man haunted by the legendary deeds that have won him fame the world over. 

(Our reviewer wasn't a fan, but yours truly loved it, so your mileage can and will vary depending on your opinions about Homer.)

The Return is available as a streaming rental via Fandango at Home.