“Conclave”'s Ralph Fiennes avoids getting existential about his career: 'You can disappear up your own a--hole'

When the actor, 62, thinks about slowing down his workload, he tells himself, "Just shut the f--- up, Ralph, get on with it."

What really happens behind closed doors at the Vatican after the Pope dies and the Cardinals convene to select a new one?

That private gathering is at the center of Conclave (available now on digital), directed by Edward Berger and starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto, Carlos Diehz, and Isabella Rossellini. What could otherwise be a boring glimpse into the centuries-old traditions and processes is a compelling fictionalized thriller, following Fiennes' Cardinal Lawrence — Dean of the College of Cardinals — as he leads the 200-plus men from around the world in selecting the new leader of the church.

The only problem is that Cardinal Lawrence is having a crisis of faith and was thinking of leaving his position just before the death of the Pope, with whom he was very close.

"I love the sense of internal conflict at the beginning.... He's a man who's questioning his life, and he's high-ranking — he's a dean of the Vatican, so he is really up there," Fiennes explains to Entertainment Weekly. "But perhaps he yearns to live away from the logistics of running the bureaucracy of the Vatican and everything that entails by nature" — meetings with visitors, ambassadors, dignitaries, etc. — "and I think he longs for a quieter life."

Related: Ralph Fiennes leads a riveting religious thriller in Conclave

Things are about to be anything but quiet as the cardinals descend on Rome — some of them vying for the open job, others campaigning on behalf of those who they think would be best to lead the church into its next era, especially regarding social issues. In the process, gossip comes to light, and indiscretions ruin the hopes of some. The ones who outwardly seek it the most are perhaps the most dangerous ones to be in the position, it's noted. But Cardinal Lawrence, who was seriously considering leaving his post, doesn't want the job...right?

"His own ambition catches up with him at a moment," Fiennes says of his character, who is unexpectedly nominated during the first round of votes in the Sistine Chapel, creating a rift between him and Tucci's Cardinal Bellini. "He's a man of spiritual integrity, and I thought that the screenplay portrayed that really well. It wasn't sentimental. It showed fallibility; it showed doubt; it showed the humanness. It was neither a cynical takedown or satire on the Vatican, nor was it preaching and overly religious.... The big question is: Who is worthy? Who is the right person to become Pope? Who will have the spiritual foundation and integrity to hold that position?"

Berger was already thinking about who'd play these characters while Peter Straughan was working on the screenplay (based on Robert Harris' book of the same name). One morning, it came to him.

"[Cardinal Lawrence is] interior. He doesn't say most of the lines. He's satisfied with the second row. He's not the loudest. He wants to be the reluctant manager in the background, and all the other ones can have the limelight. He thinks more than he says," Berger explains. "Who is better at that than Ralph? [He is] someone who invites us into his inner life, into his soul. I can see what he's thinking. You can see it in his eyes. I thought that would be interesting to watch in this case."

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Admittedly, Berger — whose previous movie was the war epic All Quiet on the Western Front, which earned nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, winning four (Best International Feature, Score, Production Design, and Cinematography) — says he "absolutely" had doubts about whether the story would work as a film.

"I've always loved the challenge of making something that I don't know how to do and that I'm afraid of, and I seriously didn't know how to make this movie," the German filmmaker says. "I wanted to tackle that challenge and figure out how to do it, and how to make it interesting and engaging.... I didn't want to succumb to the seduction of using fancy camera moves or something to make it more exciting for the audience."

Instead, Berger let the words speak for themselves, focusing the camera on the arguments, heated debates, and private conversations among the characters to build intrigue and suspense. Rossellini's Sister Agnes, head caterer and housekeeper for the cardinals, acts as a surrogate member of the audience.

Like Fiennes, the legendary actress — whose first part was a non-speaking role as a nun in A Matter of Time (1976), starring her mother, Ingrid Bergman — has been applauded for her performance (quite literally in many showings of the film, during one particular mic-drop moment), albeit a small but mighty role.

"You have to be very precise when you have a small part," Rossellini says. "You have more opportunity to create a whole character when you basically have scenes where you're listening very carefully, you're breathing. When I see the Pope's room has been opened, it's all about breathing — I didn't have any words. I didn't even have a gasp, but [Edward] didn't want anything."

As for that rousing scene where she calls out the cardinals on their behavior and reveals what she knows about certain goings-on, "It's like having to have an arrow just go right in the center of the bullseye," the Italian actress says. "I love particularly [in that] scene that he made me the close-up. They made me listen so attentively; I'm listening so that when I say my role is to be invisible, nevertheless, God gave us eyes and ears — and yes, Sister Agnes has used completely her eyes and ears, and now she's capable of telling the truth. When she speaks is very impactful."

While all of the action goes down in the Vatican, none of it was filmed there (the city-state doesn't allow film and TV productions inside). So Berger and his team recreated the real thing, including the Sistine Chapel and the Casa Santa Marta — a hotel of sorts where cardinals stay during the conclave.

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It was designed "to almost feel like an opposing pole to the ecclesiastical, old-fashioned ancient building when it's something quite monastic, quite cold, quite hermetically sealed to symbolize what Ralph feels inside, being hermetically sealed off from the world," Berger explains. "And then the windows open in the end. I wanted it to feel like a liberation; life comes back in, female laughter comes back in, air, winds, noise, sun."

As Cardinal Lawrence closes himself off from the world, forced to face his crisis of faith, Fiennes says he could relate to that feeling of wondering if there's something else he should be doing with his life.

"I have a tendency to go from one job to the next to the next because there's stuff I get asked to do and I want to say yes. And then I find there's not much juice left in the engine and a mental tiredness mostly. And you think, well, why am I striving? Film shoots are demanding, I don't have to, and I guess it's the old ambition thing. I don't want to lose that," the Harry Potter alum and two-time Oscar nominee reflects. "Going into this business, you are hungry at the outset for opportunities. And when they come, you grab them, and you want to run with them. But I'm about to be 62, and you have the questions: What are you contributing? What's the value here? What does it mean? And sometimes you can disappear up your own a--hole with these questions — 'Just shut the f--- up, Ralph, get on with it. You're lucky you got a job. Shut up, sleep at the weekend, and go to work.'"

Admitting he'd like to take a page out of Lawrence's book and "be quiet... sit quietly in the country and watch the sun go through the course of the day and be happy with that," he recalls a trip to Russia several years ago where he was chatting with "some filmmakers, people in the business, and some intellectuals and writers" who wondered what he was going to do next. "I said, "I think I'm going to take some time off and recharge my batteries,'" he recalls. Their reaction still sticks with him. "'What? You're going to take a break. You can do that when you are dead.'"