Joseph Fiennes reveals secrets of becoming Gareth Southgate: "Dear England is about grappling with ghosts"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

When Joseph Fiennes was cast as Shakespeare in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, he was a jobbing actor, five years out of drama school. To play the greatest Englishman who ever lived – a part that, according to producer Ed Zwick, “every actor in England” had auditioned for, from Paul McGann, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth to his own older brother, Ralph – Fiennes decided that research was key.

So, Fiennes took himself to John Sandoe’s in Chelsea, where books and shelves sit higgledy-piggledy and cheek-by-jowl, giving the place the look and feel of a storybook bookshop. “I was gathering together all these Shakespeare biographies and books I couldn’t afford when I saw – literally across the pile of books, by a bookshelf opposite – Tom Stoppard,” Fiennes recalls. “And I was like, ‘That’s a bit weird.’”

It was weird, or more accurately serendipitous, because Britain’s foremost living playwright had co-written the script of Shakespeare in Love. Fiennes plucked up the courage and introduced himself, explained his situation and asked if Stoppard could advise him on how to play the Bard. Stoppard, who Fiennes describes as a “charismatic, relaxing presence in possession of a fierce intellect and a knowing playfulness,” invited him to his house.

“So we went for a cup of tea at his place,” the actor recalls, “and, essentially, he said to ditch all the academic books. For every expert, there’s another expert who cancels that expert’s theory out. Throw it all away. So I asked, ‘How do I get to the truth?’ He said, ‘Joe. The best way to get to the truth is fantasy.’”

Fiennes has taken Stoppard’s advice to use his imagination to get to the truth of a character ever since – and never more so than when that character is a real person. Like Richard Ratcliffe, who Fiennes played last year in Prisoner 951, the story of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, played by recent Bafta winner Narges Rashidi, which was written by Stephen Butchard and directed by Philippa Lowthorpe.

“I’ve had more people of all ages and backgrounds email and message me about Prisoner 951 who found it affecting and more important than anything else I’ve done,” he says. “And working with Philippa was, hands down, the best experience I’ve had with a director.”

Stoppard’s advice was again invaluable when Fiennes came to play Gareth Southgate, first on stage in the play Dear England by James Graham and now in the TV adaptation starting this week on BBC One. It’s not that research isn’t important, Fiennes stresses, it’s the way it’s used – as an engine rather than as a brake. “James [Graham] has brought his element of truth – brilliantly researched, hours of talking to Gareth and to the FA and to other people – and then there’s this bit where you have to jump off with your imagination.

“We’re not pretending to do a documentary. This is a fictitious look behind the scenes at the FA and at Gareth’s work with the England team in an attempt to explore bigger ideas beyond football, like national identity, masculinity and racism. It’s the marriage between imagination and research that proves really fruitful.”

It’s certainly proved fruitful as far as Dear England is concerned. After the play’s success in theatres, it has struck a chord as a state-of-the-nation piece of art (if the nation is England, that is). Playing Southgate is, inevitably, harder than playing Shakespeare because we only have an idea of what the playwright was like. With Southgate, we have the living and breathing man to compare Fiennes’s character to. How did the actor perfect his performance?

“I would religiously play his audiobook, which is very insightful about his growing up, being a young man, his experience of playing and managing,” Fiennes says. “Hearing his voice, the intonations, the choices of grammar, understanding and absorbing all of that, and watching Sky Sports. That gives you the way he presents himself. Then, of course, I embraced James’s script.”

In doing all this, along with wearing a prosthetic nose and false teeth, Fiennes says, “Gareth just arrived, very immediately as a sort of entity or spirit I channelled. It wasn’t effortless but I didn’t feel I had to work too hard, probably because James is a good writer and I had kind of grown up with Gareth. It took a lot of energy to nuance it, but I felt Gareth at a very intrinsic level.”

Having enjoyed such success with Dear England on stage – he was nominated for an Olivier Award for his performance – Fiennes says he was “watchful” about the transfer to TV and that a recalibration of the character was necessary. “The play was broad and colourful and full of comedy, whereas the TV version looks through a more dramatic lens,” he says. “There are funny lines from the play that you are wedded to that just don’t work on TV.”

Meanwhile, other aspects of the story become more magnified – not least the idea that Gareth’s work managing his new England squad – changing the culture, introducing more sports psychology to the team, going on team-building exercises, encouraging journalling – was part of his own redemption for missing the penalty at the 1996 Euros that sent England out.

“Because film or TV becomes exciting with what’s not said, when you can get close-ups on the looks between characters, you can get to the dialogue beneath the dialogue, which you can’t get in theatre, and I loved focusing in on that.”

For Fiennes, Dear England is about “grappling with ghosts”. “We all have these critical junctures in our lives, which, if you don’t address them, they will perpetuate. Gareth is grappling with his ghosts and there’s a form of healing through helping others.”

I ask Fiennes to elaborate on critical junctures in his own life but he dodges the question – twice. “I wouldn’t want to bore you or anyone reading,” he says. So instead, and as happens so often when men would rather not be vulnerable, we talk about football. “I love watching it live, being in the stand, because I love the company. I come from a large family [Fiennes is one of six children], I work in companies in the theatre, I love the ‘us all piling in together,’” he enthuses. “There’s different cultural points of view but ultimately we’re all there to support and serve something other than ourselves.”

Is he competitive himself? “I’m competitive, not to necessarily lift the cup to say ‘I won’, but physically to get the dopamine rewards of the exertion. I love the skeletal stress,” he says. “We’ve got a Jack Russell and I’m like a Jack Russell. I’ll run after everything.”

And in running after everything, Fiennes, who was so good as the chilling, charming Commander Fred Waterford in The Handmaid’s Tale, finds seeing life and work in terms of “failure” and “success” as unhelpful. “I paid my way through drama school while being a dresser at the National Theatre and for anyone that wants to go into the world of acting or film-making, go and pick up the pants and make the cups of tea and wait in the wings or behind the camera and see how it all works. Because there’s a multitude of people that are engaged in making the machine run.

“To this day, aged 56, if I go onto a film set or into a theatre, I understand that before I stepped into that room, there’s been six months of sweat, blood and tears to get that far. The success is the participation, the process, and what a privilege it is. Even if it is a failure in anyone’s eyes, the fact that you’re there, you’re exercising something, and you’ll learn from it. And actually, if something fails, as [Samuel] Beckett said, that’s great. Fail again. Keep failing. But there’s no failure if I’m working and breathing.”

With the England team back in action in the World Cup in June, it’s a lesson the players could do well to heed.

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