Even so, the duke is plenty villainous. His casual disregard turns ruthless and deliberate as Georgiana's pregnancies fail to produce a male heir (the film cuts back significantly on her numerous miscarriages). He commences an affair with Georgiana's best friend, and when his wife has the temerity to suggest she should have a lover of her own, he responds, "I don't make deals. Why should I? I have it all."
In an era when wife-beating was sanctioned by law, the duke's exercise of patriarchal privilege is unapologetic. But Fiennes plays him with a heavy heart, as a man who, in his rare reflective moments, regrets the duties he is bound to enforce.
"On the page," Fiennes said, "he was written with a kind of overt cruelty, which I tried to undermine, with Saul's agreement. I thought, if he's that cruel, the audience are ahead of you. He's got to be a man finding his own way, who believes what he's doing is right."
"Ralph's interpretation was so surprising and wonderful," Knightley said. "In the script, and this is not to do them down, it read as quite a simply villainous character. He's made him weirdly sympathetic, and I think that's very clever."
Although the script affords the duke a few, likely anachronistic, moments of explicit regret, his dilemma is more poignantly conveyed in the shades of Fiennes' performance. While he does not flinch from reminding Georgiana of the limits of her freedom, he does so with bowed head and lowered voice. Even at the point in which he rapes her, he seems to do so as much out of obligation as anger, which, as Knightley points out, only makes the act more terrifying.
"Even the time he takes to answer a question is part of his character," Dibb said. "I think he was very keen to make the details really speak. He says so much in a kind of grunt, or a look, and he probably thought that within those spaces was the place to convey all kinds of unease and complexity, and hint at what's going on."
Although Fiennes is more loquacious in person, he is still careful not to give too much away. "Being an actor means asking people to look at you," he said. "I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself."
