"It didn't feel like we had worked many many years ago. It felt like (the present)," the French actress said about working with Fiennes.

Ralph Fiennes is enjoying quite a cinematic year, first thanks to Conclave and now courtesy of The Return, an intense adaptation of The Odyssey in which he plays Homer’s mythic hero, who washes ashore on his native Ithaca a broken and traumatized lost soul.

The very real relationship between Fiennes and Binoche adds depth to their characters’ rejoining. “The fact that we have this friendship brings a background and you feel it in the film,” she says. “We didn’t have to work too much [at it].”

In director Uberto Pasolini’s take on Homer’s ‘Odyssey,’ the drama is an intimate human story stripped of gods and monsters.

Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche became friends while playing lovers in “Wuthering Heights.” A few years later, they would share the screen again in Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient,” that historical epic that would take them all the way to the Oscars.