Conclave Author Robert Harris on the Origin of His Best-Selling Vatican Thriller and Its Stunning Twist

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Conclave.

"We are mortal men; we serve an ideal. We cannot always be ideal."

At the center of Robert Harris' 2016 novel Conclave is this admission, a musing on the tension between the pernicious influence of power and the capacity to maintain moral integrity. The best-selling papal thriller, with a buzzy movie version now in theaters, chronicles how the election of a new pope turns into a politically-charged fight for the soul of the modern-day Catholic Church. To Harris, the "inevitable corruption" of those who, like the Catholic cardinals, hold positions of immense authority is one of the great themes of human history.

"With temporal power, or indeed spiritual power, it is very difficult to avoid factions, scheming, the lesser of two evils—all the compromises that go into running any huge organization and trying to keep, not just hundreds, but thousands of people onside," he says in an interview with TIME. "[As a writer], I have a lot of time for politicians, just as I have a lot of time for these cardinals, because they are grappling with almost insoluble problems. But someone has to do it. Someone has to run a society. And I've tried to write about them with a degree of sympathy."

The Conclave movie is directed by Edward Berger, whose 2022 German-language adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front took home four Oscars, and features a tour-de-force performance from Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence. As the dean of the College of Cardinals, Lawrence is tasked with convening and running the secret ritual that will result in the naming of a new pontiff following the death of the previous Holy Father (an apparent reformist who seems to have steered Catholicism in a similar direction as the real-world Pope Francis). Little does Lawrence know that he will also be faced with a series of revelations that could shake the foundation of the Church—all while dealing with his own personal crisis of faith.

"The ultimate political story"

Heading into the conclave, during which the cardinals are sequestered inside the Sistine Chapel and living quarters of the Domus Sanctae Marthae to avoid any outside influence, the race has a few frontrunners, including the Vatican's progressive Secretary of State Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), the reactionary Patriarch of Venice Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), centrist Canadian Joseph Tremblay (John Lithgow), and conservative Nigerian Cardinal Joshua Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), who stands to make history as the first Black pope. To throw an additional wrench into the mix, the heretofore unknown Cardinal Vincent Benitez (Carlos Diehz) arrives at the last-minute, claiming the late pope appointed him Archbishop of Kabul in pectore (i.e., in secret) prior to his passing.

"This is the ultimate election, the ultimate political story," Harris says of the divisions and shifting allegiances we see take hold amid the proceedings, which require the cardinals to vote by secret ballot—once on the first day and four times on each additional day—until a candidate achieves a two-thirds majority.

With the exception of some minor character tweaks—Lawrence is British rather than Italian as in the book—the film is adapted quite faithfully from Harris’ novel. This results in a twisting thrill ride of a religious drama that, according to Harris, has some roots in real history despite being largely "an act of imagination."

"There's an alleged diary by a cardinal from the conclave that elected [Cardinal Joseph] Ratzinger as Pope Benedict that describes the ballot process and an attempt to try and stop Ratzinger," he says. "There was also a great liberal cardinal from Milan who was expected year after year to become the pope. He was always the favorite, but he only came third after the first ballot. That's the Stanley Tucci character in the movie and sets up the human drama, the man who's waited all his life only for it to slip away from him."

However, the twist in which both the book and movie culminates, is all Harris.

"Dare I do this?"

In the wake of the fallout from several scandals that eliminate certain candidates from the running, and cause others to rise and fall in the rankings, Cardinal Benitez delivers a rousing speech condemning hate and extolling the necessity of progress that unexpectedly earns him the support needed to win the election. But, as the cardinals prepare to announce Benitez as the new pope, Lawrence receives a report that alerts him to the fact that Benitez was born intersex. Lawrence privately asks for an explanation from Benitez, who says he was raised as a boy by his parents and wasn't aware for much of his adult life that he was physically different from any other man. The former pope had known the truth and chose to elevate his position within the Church anyway. After hearing this story, Lawrence allows the ceremony to go on without any interference.

"I approached this not as a Catholic and not as an expert in the Church. So my preparation began by reading the gospels, which are revolutionary. And the contrast between that and this great edifice of ritual and pomp and power and wealth of the Church is striking," Harris says, explaining how the idea for the big reveal was born. "There's also this question of can you freeze anything at a point nearly 2000 years ago? Haven't the world and humanity evolved?"

Ultimately, Harris came to the conclusion that there was no more fitting ending for his triumphant tale than to have Lawrence discover Benitez' truth and decide to take no action. "It all began to push me towards this denouement," he says. "I thought, dare I do this? And then I thought, well, yes, because any other outcome is just tame, really. I wanted to write something that was dramatic, that was on a scale of the huge dimensions of this election."

Now, with the movie arriving in theaters amid the current rise anti-LGBTQI hate and violence, Harris' twist feels even more significant than it did when the novel was published eight years ago. "I have four children and this is the first time I've seemed like a hero to them," he says. "The book is more relevant in 2024 than it was in 2016 because the world has moved on a lot and this whole issue is more alive now than it was back then. It feels less out of the blue because this is obviously very much part of the [discourse]."