Fiennes fragile beauty rigged for Gardener lead

Theto decipher Ralph Fiennes just may be, of all things, "Maid in Manhattan," the ghastly movie he made with Jennifer Lopez that came and went like a cold sore in 2002. The man can deliver a shimmering portrait of Nazi evil in "Schindler's List" or a brilliant Hamlet on Broadway, but what he can't uncork is a guy -- an unintrospective, untortured male of the species -- and it was a guy he had to play in the Lopez disaster. "I've always ... I've always ... I don't know ... I've never been part ... of what they call clubable," he says with a fractured elegance. "I distrust being part of a self-conscious group. I mean, the whole thing about the guys going down to the pub together. ... I've always, somehow ... I'd rather go by myself. That's still true today." Imagine, then, the challenge he faced in playing an orthodox male lead -- a handsome, pedestrian American politician -- in an orthodox romantic comedy. "I didn't pull it off, really," he says. "It's a simple enough part. That's probably a challenge for me -- to do what someone like Hugh Grant does so well. That sort of effortless, just-being- present-and-let-the-comedy-happen thing. I admire that. I find that hard. I can access inner tension quite quickly as an actor, but to have that guy thing -- 'Yeah, yeah, that's fine' -- it's not second nature to me." And yet here is Ralph Fiennes (pronounced "rafe fines") playing a guy of sorts in "The Constant Gardener," the big commercial movie for grownups adapted from the John Le Carre novel. In it, Fiennes is an unobtrusive British diplomat stationed in Kenya named Justin Quayle. But this man has depth, and he's Rosetta Stone French going to fool you. Quayle is married to Tessa, a firebrand who secretly investigates rumors of criminal behavior of a pharmaceutical company testing a drug in Africa. Tessa, played by Rachel Weisz, is murdered, and Quayle abandons his job and gardening avocation to pursue the truth of her life and death. In doing so, he reveals a tensile strength absent to the viewer at the beginning of the film. The role of Quayle is not a transformative one -- he doesn't become someone else -- but an emergent one, revealing what had been there all along. "It was latent in him. He doesn't change character," says Fiennes, a classically trained British actor. "It's not in his nature to be confrontational or create any tension. Good gardeners have to have a very quiet tenacity and insistence about them. This constancy, this determination, is in Justin, but it's not high octane. I like that, that people don't get it all in the beginning." Fiennes talked to Le Carre about the character. "He said Quayle's the sort who'd be good at rowing or playing rugby," recalls Fiennes. "I know rugby players. They run hard and they tackle hard but then they go off the field and they can be quite gentle." But Fiennes, 42, would never be credible in a rugby scrum.

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