'I WANTED TO LOOK GOOD FOR JULIETTE'

They've been friends for30 years now Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes are reprising their on-screen romance in aretelling of the greatest epic of them all: the Odyssey. Nick Curtis meets them

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I'm in the Union Club in Soho with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche discussing The Return, Uberto Pasolini's film about Odysseus's troubled reunion with his wife Penelope after 20 years' absence. It marks the two actors' third cinematic collaboration following a best-forgotten Wuthering Heights in 1992 (Fiennes's feature debut) and the career-making, multiple Oscar-winning romance The English Patient in 1996, in which Binoche's vivacious Quebecois nurse tended Fiennes's burnt Hungarian adventurer in a bombed Italian monastery.

Today, Binoche is chic and playful in a black jacket and pointy boots, Fiennes ruminative in a baggy suit and trainers, and there's an easy rapport born of their 33-year friendship, even though they conform almost comically to the stereotypes of the passionate Frenchwoman and the reserved Englishman. This emerges most strongly when we discuss the physical transformation that Fiennes, now 62, underwent to play Odysseus, honing a body that is lean, gnarled and muscular - and on display for much of the story's two-hour running time.

"It was important to me," he says. "I mean, I knew I was going to be not wearing much in the way of clothes, just a blanket and a sort of loincloth thing. So I wanted to look plausible as someone who's a fighter, a soldier, a sailor..."

"Come on, Ralph. COME ON," says Binoche, 61, with a grin, poking his bicep with a finger. "You also wanted to look gooood."

"I wanted to look good for Juliette," he concedes with a pained smile.

"And eventually for other women," she smirks.

"She teases me a lot," he says glumly.

"I love teasing him," Binoche says. "And he is SO easy to tease."