The movie Ralph Fiennes was completely “lost” in: “I felt a little bit at sea”

Posted On February 4, 2026February 4, 2026

Put quite simply, you can’t have a conversation about the best British actors of the past 50 years without mentioning Ralph Fiennes.

It was more than 30 years ago that he picked up an Academy Award nomination for his performance as the vicious Nazi concentration camp guard Amon Göth in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, in what was just his third film after a decade spent on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

And that nomination sparked one of the most impressive film careers of anyone working today, one that has continued all the way up to his movie-stealing performance in last year’s Danny Boyle-directed zombie sequel 28 Years Later.

In between, he has genre-hopped with the best of them, appearing in Wes Anderson fare The Grand Budapest Hotel, Bond movies, sci-fi (again under Boyle in Sunshine), gentle drama in archaeology tale The Dig and of course his iconic turn as Harry Potter’s nemesis Voldemort across four films in the 2000s.

But even an actor as talented as Fiennes has to have a bit of an Achilles heel, and that comes in the form of romantic comedy. Or more specifically, very American romantic comedies. One thing that’s undeniable about Fiennes is that he is about as archetypally English as they come, descendent of a 16th-century Baron and with a full name of Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, the guy is as British as a poor-quality bacon sandwich or apologising for walking into someone.

So perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that he felt like a fish out of water when he found himself agreeing to play Jennifer Lopez’s love interest in the 2002 film Maid in Manhattan, one of those very turn of the millennium comedies in which someone poor pretends to be rich and then gets found out but then gets to be allowed to be rich again and therefore happy.

Fiennes recalled the experience to People magazine, saying, “It was rom-com writing. It was light. But I think I felt a little bit at sea sometimes. I wondered ‘Now, who is this Republican senator?’ My antennae for things American – I think – got better since. But then I think I was kind of sometimes a little bit lost.”

Despite the calming presence of fellow Brit, the late Natasha Richardson, a watch of the trailer for the film reveals why Fiennes might have struggled. The lines are corny, the setting is very upmarket New York, Fiennes’ accent… isn’t great, there’s that ‘plinkety-plinkety-plink-plink’ song by Vanessa Carlton that was in almost every movie at the time and Fiennes himself looks incredibly uncomfortable sporting a kind of marketing executive Ivan Drago haircut.

The whole thing is woefully superficial, uber-American, and Fiennes can’t seem to find anything good to say about filming with Jennifer Lopez, which is possibly not that surprising given she was about to go into full ‘I’m just Jenny from the Block’ mode on yachts with Ben Affleck.

Not that it did dear Ralph’s career any harm. Pretty quickly, he was back on these fair shores and back in award-winning style, thanks to The Constant Gardner, soon after which he started his stint in the Harry Potter films. He’s now going to be seen later on this year in the latest Hunger Games movie, Sunrise on the Reaping, in which he’ll play the despotic President Snow, taking over from the late Donald Sutherland.

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