Ralph Fiennes shares strict regime that made him drastically reduce body fat at 60
Ralph Fiennes has shared the strict regime he underwent for five months to reduce his body fat for a new role.
The 62-year-old played Odysseus in Uberto Pasolini’s forthcoming The Odyssey adaptation, The Return, for which he endured intense physical training to get the muscular frame of the Greek war hero.
In a new interview with The Guardian, Feinnes revealed he worked with a personal trainer called Dan Avasilcai across five months, and in the two-and-a-half-months before shooting the film, he embarked on a rigorous exercise transformation regime of running and weight-training to reduce body fat.
As for his diet, the Conclave star ate protein-rich meals with measured out allowances of complex carbohydrates and vegetables. He wasn’t allowed to consume bread, desserts or alcohol.
Fiennes, who was 60 during filming, said: “Uberto was very clear. He didn’t want me to have a sort of bulked-up gym body,” adding that he told his personal trainer he wanted to look “like a bit of old rope.”
The film’s director, Pasoloni, added that he was sceptical whether the regime would achieve their desired look for Fiennes’s character.
“At the beginning, I have to confess, I was slightly suspicious that there was so much protein going in and so much exercise that we would have a body that looked exercised instead of a body that was consumed, a lived body,” he said. “There is no gym in ancient Greece.”
He added: “The physicality that Ralph was able to bring to the film is the physicality of somebody who has suffered and travelled and is scarred and is dried by the sun and consumed by living”.
The film follows Odysseus (Fiennes), who is washed up on the shores of Ithaca, haggard and unrecognisable, after 20 years away fighting in the Trojan War.
However, his Kingdom isn’t the same as he left it. His wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche), who has been waiting for Odysseus since he left to fight in the war, is a prisoner in her own home and hounded by suitors vying to be king. She must make a decision about who she has to marry next.
This is the third time Harry Potter star Fiennes and Binoche will be working together, more than 30 years after their appearances in the 1992 Wuthering Heights adaptation and 1996 film The English Patient.
Charlie Plummer, Marwan Kenzari, Claudio Santamaria, and Angela Molina are also in the cast.
Speaking to IndieWire about the film, Feinnes said that the script doesn’t include some elements of the classic tale of Odysseus.
“The script did away with monsters,” Fiennes said. “It was the end of The Odyssey, and there’s no goddess Athena to help Odysseus look pretty and give him a fuller head of hair or make him more useful.
“So we embrace the idea that he is a man after 20 years of travel, 10 years at war, 20 years lost. He’s washed up naked, with nothing. He’s given a blanket. All I wear is one red piece of cloth I wrapped around me in different ways, and a loincloth.”
