Breaking Baz: Edward Berger Says Ralph Fiennes Puts British “Inscrutability” At The Heart Of ‘Conclave’, And The Role Couldn’t Have Been Played By An Italian Actor
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Edward Berger says that Ralph Fiennes’ sublime performance as the cardinal charged with overseeing the election of a new pope in awards-season contender Conclave has a “whisper” of the inscrutability Anthony Hopkins displayed in his portrait of a veteran butler in James Ivory’s 1993 film The Remains of the Day.
Prefacing his comments by jokingly suggesting that “Ralph will crucify me for saying this“ and “I don’t know if this is a bad comparison,” Berger thought that the way Fiennes plays the impenetrable Cardinal Lawrence “has something of, a whisper of, Anthony Hopkins” in the Merchant and Ivory movie “that has that sort of just keeping everything inside and keeping quiet and doing it just with his eyes.” Even though Cardinal Lawrence, the Dean of Cardinals, is undergoing a crisis of doubt, he nonetheless “projects absolute competency before a word is uttered.” That’s a peculiarly English trait, insists Berger, and points to the reason why he, along with screenwriter Peter Straughan and House Productions’ Tessa Ross, decided to make the Vatican power-broker a Brit instead of the Italian cardinal depicted in Robert Harris’ 2016 novel, upon which the movie is based.
In the first draft of the script, the Italian-born character was called Cardinal Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, and Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia, as he is in the source material. “There was an openness in my head,” Berger relates, “that I thought this person could be from anywhere, or Italian as he is in the book and in the first draft.” For a while, Berger was convinced that Cardinal Lomeli “has to be played by an Italian,” though “which Italian” exactly was the problem.
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