The Catholic-raised star of the Easter film, Risen, talks to Peter Stanford about struggling with faith

Some actors are typecast by the way they look or sound, others by their physicality. Glancing back over Joseph Fiennes’ CV since he first made his name as the eponymous hero in 1998’s Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, you could be forgiven for thinking his particular pigeonhole is religion.

On the big screen he has starred in a 2003 biopic about the Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, and is soon to appear in a new film about Eric Liddell, the devout Scottish missionary and Olympic athlete. On stage he has played a doubting, angry Christ in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Dennis Potter’s controversial Son of Man, and on TV he was the ambitious cleric Mgr Timothy Howard in the much-garlanded US series American Horror Story.

And now, this Easter, he is in our cinemas in Risen, as Clavius, a battle-hardened Roman soldier, ordered by Pontius Pilate to find the crucified body of Jesus amid fears that its disappearance will be used to spark a Jewish uprising. As he interrogates the Apostles, Clavius experiences an unexpected moment of religious epiphany.