The inhabitant of Hogwarts that everyone loves to hate, there’s no villain quite like Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort. Harry’s bete noire, classmate Draco Malfoy, pales in comparison to the films’ chief antagonist, who is revealed in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone as having killed Harry’s parents.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that, for the role, an actor was needed with a preternatural ability to exude evil and cunning.
Step forward, Ralph Fiennes. Making his debut as Voldemort in 2005’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and appeared every subsequent film, ending his tenure in the role with the fateful showdown with Harry at Hogwart’s in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2. But who is Ralph Fiennes, and what has he starred in recently?
Ralph Fiennes – celebrated star of stage and screen
Prior to his work as Voldemort, Fiennes was already Hollywood royalty, winning a BAFTA for his acclaimed work as a psychopathic concentration camp officer in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1992), and securing Academy Award nods for that role and for his work in The English Patient (1996).
In recent years, Fiennes has continued to be in demand. Fiennes’ work has almost exclusively been on film. His first major role following the conclusion of the Harry Potter series was as Mallory – later revealed to be the new “M” – in the critically acclaimed James Bond film Skyfall (2012); he reprised the role in 2016’s Spectre and in Daniel Craig’s send-off as 007, No Time To Die (2021). Around the same time, Fiennes also began to direct – Shakespeare adaptation Coriolanus (2011), Charles Dickens drama The Invisible Woman (2013), and Rudolf Nureyev biopic The White Crow (2018) all featured Fiennes behind the camera as well as in front of it.
An experienced genre actor
Among these weightier efforts, Fiennes also found the time to star in genre films. In 2012’s Clash of the Titans, he starred as Hades alongside Rosamund Pike and Liam Neeson, and – rather less creditably – as Professor Moriarty in the box-office bomb Holmes & Watson (2018). Happier times were had hamming it up as the quintessentially English butler to Bruce Wayne, Alfred Pennyworth, in The Lego Batman Movie (2017) and The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019).
But Fiennes’ most recent appearances have been in Netflix’s recent series of Roald Dahl adaptations. Having purchased the rights to Dahl’s voluminous oeuvre some years ago, Netflix have spent the last two years making versions of several of Dahl’s works, including his often neglected novellas and short stories. This year, Fiennes has appeared, playing Dahl himself, in The Swan, The Rat Catcher, Poison, and, most notably, in the first TV adaptation of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role. All four shorts were directed by Wes Anderson, marking for Fiennes a return to a collaborator that began almost a decade ago with his winning turn in Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).
