How was Ralph Fiennes as a playmate?
Ralph is so divine to work with. Like Sean [Penn], he’s consummate in his dedication to the specifics of the part. When someone’s there for you, and you’re that dependent on them, whether it’s Natalie Portman or Sean Penn, when you have that kind of a story, you completely fall in love with someone who’s there for you like that, because it makes you better. It’s seeing how much we trusted each other and how much we were able to kind of dare the other person to be better. [Director] Bob Balaban gave us an atmosphere where that could happen, in the way Tim did for “Dead Man Walking.” I always see every story that I tell as a love story. And this is a particularly eccentric one. I think a very telling scene is the one where she asks him, ‘What do you want from me, you don’t want to go to bed with me, what is it?’ And he says, ‘I want to take care of you.’ I don’t think anyone had not asked her for something. I found myself unexpectedly shocked by that scene. That’s one of the moments that
