Award-winning actor Ralph Fiennes has described web surveillance of emails and other correspondence as “profoundly frightening” in a passionate defence of privacy and press freedom.

In an interview with the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger at the Cannes Lions advertising festival on Wednesday, the star of Schindler’s List and Harry Potter also attacked homophobia in Russia, where Fiennes said the press has had its “spine snapped” over reporting the government restrictions on homosexual film artists and others.

Asked about the conflicting pressures of fame, Fiennes said the issue of privacy was “a really huge question, not just privacy of a few but the privacy of all of us.

“If all our movements, conversations, emails, if everything can be taken from us and logged and profiled, that’s profoundly frightening. It is Big Brother … Every instinct in me finds that horrifying.”

Fiennes said he recognised that being famous was a “double bind”, as all actors need audiences and want fame and recognition and yet also need privacy.

The actor, who is to return to the National Theatre stage early next year in a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, said he had agreed to talk at the advertising festival because of his admiration for Rusbridger and the Guardian after it broke the Edward Snowden story about state surveillance.

He called privacy a “human need”, but feared it might be “sort of over” because of the unfettered power of technology.

His comments came a day after the true extent of the government’s interception of communications sent via Google, Facebook and Twitter – including private messages between British citizens – was confirmed for the first time by the government’s most senior security official, Charles Farr.

Calling the Guardian “courageous and inspiring”, Fiennes in contrast said there was “something worrying about the way the press has had its spine snapped” in Russia.

On a recent trip to Russia, he was told about a written requirement not to employ a homosexual director nor film any gay subject matter. “I knew there was a disturbing level of homophobia, but this written requirement I found profoundly disturbing,” he said. “I’m afraid I laughed – as you do when you discover something really shocking.”

Asked about his favourite James Bond film, he said “the last one of course”, in which he took over from Judi Dench as M, the fictional head of MI6. He admitted that he was approached by Bond producers about becoming Bond 20 years ago, but was now “too old”.

This article was amended on 25 June 2014 to make clear that Ralph Fiennes was told of a written requirement about not employing a homosexual director nor filming gay subject matter, but he was not asked to sign it



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