Shanti Fiennes grew up in a large bohemian family. She’s the daughter of Magnus Fiennes, an English composer, record producer, and songwriter, and the niece of Oscar-nominated actor Ralph Fiennes. Her aunt Martha is a film director, and her uncle Joseph is also an actor. (He’s perhaps best known for appearing in Shakespeare in Love.) Fiennes’s grandmother, a novelist and painter, used to say, “Get your guts into it,” a rallying cry to make her children and grandchildren push themselves and go deep into whatever they were doing.
The 24-year-old spent her early years in sprawling English country homes surrounded by artists and performers. At family gatherings, “we’d get together and play our own really elaborate version of charades,” says Fiennes. “We would just perform skits and act out scenes.”
