Ralph Fiennes on 'The Choral',''Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping'

When Ralph Fiennes wasn’t on stage seeing a dagger before him, while starring in a Washington, D.C. production of “MacBeth,” he was furiously trying to unlock his inner Leonard Bernstein. The Oscar-nominated actor was a last-minute addition to the cast of “ The Choral ,” a drama set in a small town in the United Kingdom during World War I, and his role as an exacting choir master required him to be fluent with the baton. So with less than six weeks to go before cameras rolled, Fiennes enlisted Natalie Murray Beale, a leading conductor who taught Cate Blanchett how to run herd over an orchestra for “Tár,” to get him into shape.

“I don’t read music, so it was very hard to understand, not just the beats, but how the hand moves,” Fiennes says. “But Nat was terrifically patient. They tell