The actor on playing a high-achieving, under-recognised archeologist, and English society
It seems scarcely possible that an Australian directed The Dig. Simon Stoneâs mist-wreathed drama hangs around precise class gradations that once formed the skeleton of English society. It celebrates a quiet, undervalued hero who, as the second World War loomed, (literally) dug up icons of an indifferently understood past. Nobody says much about their feelings. The Dig could hardly be more English.
Ralph Fiennes is magnificent as the self-taught archaeologist and astronomer Basil Brown, who, in 1939, discovered and helped excavate a huge Anglo Saxon burial mound at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. An entire ship was found in what may have been King Rædwald of East Angliaâs last resting place. The Sutton Hoo helmet, now on display at the British Museum, has become a defining image of Englandâs Anglo Saxon past.