Put another way: it's an Oscar-winning actor acting as someone acting, first badly, all the time becoming better, until they nail the part. Watching it, though, you realise the task is even harder than that: it's not Einar's transformation into Lili, but Einar learning how to act as Lili, and sometimes getting it wrong. Something more subtle, and therefore difficult: charting the creeping moments of discovery of what it felt like as a woman trapped as a man at a time when there weren't the words for it the notion you're an awkward fit in your own body. And it's not true - just, if you're lucky enough in your lifetime to get two parts that are interesting and challenging to play, then it's a privilege really."īut not pre-op to post-op - that only happens at the end of the film. "I think people look at it and go, urgh, you want to try and do something transformational. Hence: the compulsion to instantly follow The Theory Of Everything with The Danish Girl, during which he'd take the Oscars off only as a Bank Holiday minibreak. But you want to keep doing good work, to see how long you can extend it." I'm having a year like this year, which is unquestionably the most extraordinary year, and I'm already accepting it's the best it'll ever get. Does that make sense? The stakes get higher each time if you've been lucky enough to be successful. We each order pints - lager for him, IPA for me, disapproving look for the waiter because we've booked a dinner table (Eddie: "He hates us") - and I ask if the Oscar win has eased his rampant nerves. In the hour and a half we spend together, he'll pick one spot for them - a lean forward, say, maybe the left elbow slightly in front of the right - only to decide after a while, no, that isn't it, and then off they go again, like chopsticks.Įverything else is as you'd imagine: a Walnut Whip of light-brown hair, the spreading smile of a manga character, a pebbledash of freckles, and the kind of plum, posh voice that sounds like he's forever balancing a gobstopper on his tongue he doesn't so much talk as gulp his words out. As in, really doesn't know what to do with them, like he's just been given them, free. Sitting down for a pint with Eddie Redmayne, nestled in the back of his Bermondsey local in south London, nine months after said Oscar win, the first thing you notice is that he doesn't know what to do with his elbows. "If I hadn't known he'd won the Oscar," Hooper tells me later, "all I would have noticed is that he'd had a Monday off." They chased him down the motorway, back towards The Danish Girl base camp in the Tesco carpark on Cromwell Road, where Redmayne got out, talked to the director Tom Hooper for five minutes, dropped his suitcase (with an Oscar now inside) in a trailer which the art department had decorated with golden Oscar-themed balloons, got into costume, went on set, and straight into a scene where he had to be stripped naked and medically examined. Then, Madonna's party with every celebrity on the planet ("There's Beyoncé, and Beyoncé's music is playing, and she's with Jay Z"), but he mostly huddled with his good friend Benedict Cumberbatch and various other Brits.Īt which point he got straight back on a plane, was chased by a pack of 30 waiting paps when he landed in Heathrow, all of whom followed him, jostling and shoving, to the carpark lift, only to stand, weirdly respectfully, outside the doors, taking pictures as they closed, like vampires not invited in, and even more weirdly, were somehow right there again when the doors opened on the floor above ("Yeah, that was strange"). The speech itself was a blur ("I had such a spike of adrenaline I can't remember anything"), and then straight off stage to a press conference, where an Australian journalist asked if it was true that Karl and Susan Kennedy from Neighbours were his acting inspirations (they were). He remembers that after the second Oscar, seemingly every single award received a standing ovation, and so, as his wife Hannah was all but sewn into her dress and immobile, he had to hoist her up, Weekend At Bernie's-style, each time. That night, he had a dinner at his agent's - CAA's Josh Lieberman, at his house in Coldwater Canyon, high in the Hollywood Hills - at which there were many drinks, but not much food, and at which he attempted not to get too drunk, despite the strong urge to do exactly that ("I was so nervous").įinally, in a daze, the Oscars the next day. But not today instead, sitting in business, he got out his script and learnt his Danish Girl lines. The result means he loves flights because they are the only place he can sit down long enough to watch an entire film ("It forces me to calm down"). Redmayne is a nervous kind of guy, forever worried about what he should be doing, then guilty that he's able to do it - think Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) crossed with Guilt Of Fitting In (GOFI) - and, for good measure, has a "shoddy attention span".
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