I’ll admit, when Eddie Redmayne first made it onto my radar, I wasn’t a fan. He always seemed a bit too actory, trying too hard to stand out by being weird or overplaying his role. I’d heard what a young phenom he was on the British stage, but in supporting roles in such films as THE GOOD SHEPHERD, ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE, THE YELLOW HANDKERCHIEF, THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL, SAVAGE GRACE, and POWDER BLUE, he stood out in my mind only because he was a total distraction.
But then I saw MY WEEK WITH MARILYN and LES MISÉRABLES about a year apart, and while neither was a great film, Redmayne was one of the better aspects of both. And while he appears to be reaching for the rafters once again in the long-delayed Wachowski siblings’ JUPITER ASCENDING, if there’s a place you’re going to pull that off, it may well be in the film directed by the Wachowskis.
With JUPITER delayed until February 2015, Redmayne’s sole release this year is THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, in which he takes on the role of arguably one of the most famous human beings on the planet currently, Prof. Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist and cosmologist who was diagnosed with ALS while still at Oxford. The film covers his younger years quite faithfully, including his early symptoms of the motor neuron disease (he was given about two years to live by his original doctor) and, perhaps most importantly, the relationship with his first wife, Jane, played by Felicity Jones. But watching Redmayne capture the slow, painful degeneration of Hawking’s movement and speech, while still maintaining a sharp mind and even sharper wit, is something truly something to behold.
I haven’t forgotten that strange kid that haunted the periphery of a handful of films in the last 10 years of so, but Redmayne in THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING finally gives him the platform to show audiences what he’s truly capable of accomplishing. And it just so happens, he’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever had the pleasure of interviewing. With that, please enjoy my talk with Eddie Redmayne…
Capone: How are you? Good to meet you.
Eddie Redmayne: Nice to see you. How are you doing?
Capone: Good. From a purely physical standpoint, it looks exhausting to play someone who has to have their body contorted in a certain way, speak a certain way, and walk in a way that’s not natural for you to walk. Was playing this part a taxing thing for you?
ER: When I got cast, it was the most obvious thing that was going to involve a dressing as far as what the process was, and James Marsh, the director, was really generous in giving me time. He gave me like four months. What’s interesting is there’s no documentary footage of Stephen before the ’80s.
Capone: I was going to ask you if you had any reference points for that time in his life.
ER: There’s a load of documentaries from the ’80s, but before then it’s only photographs. So basically what I did is I went to an ALS clinic in London, and went to a doctor there, who explained to me that you have upper neurons and lower neurons. When the upper neurons go, there’s a spasticity, like a rigidity; and when the lower ones go there’s like a wilting. And ALS is a mixture of those two. And what part of your body is wilting and which part is ridged varies from patient to patient. So by taking these photographs of Stephen when he was younger to the specialist, she helped me work out what his specific decline might have been. And then I worked with a choreographer, a dancer—I don’t know if you saw WORLD WAR Z.
Capone: Sure. Oh yeah, of course.
ER: She choreographed the zombies in that, and she helped find a way of putting that physicality into my body, because the problem was we weren’t shooting chronological.
Capone: Right, which I definitely want to talk about. I can’t even wrap my head around how you managed that. If I understand the disease correctly, once you’ve committed to “Well this part of my body has stopped working or is going in this direction,” you can’t change it. It’s not like it reverses itself or goes back to normal.
ER: Which of course is the antithesis of how films are made [laughs]. James and I had a big discussion early on about how normally in the edit, you can switch stuff around. And I was like, “We need to make sure the script is so solid in its structure before we start filming.” Because quite often on films, you’ll shift it as you’re moving, because we can’t have a scene where one minute where his hand’s moving, and then the next it’s stopped moving, and then it starts moving again. So what was interesting though is that circumstance forced various ways in which we approached the film. It was a bit like how in LES MIS, the live singing thing forced how the film was shot with multi-cameras, because you had to get in one take an entire scene.
Capone: A vocal performance.
ER: Exactly. Similarly here, James created this environment which was a proper collaboration, so with Benoît [Delhomme], the DP, the costume, the makeup department, everyone was working in concert with each other. It was a really unique experience in that sense.
Capone: You called it dressing, the physical part of it of your performance. Yet, at the same time, if you don’t present that accurately, the audience might not be able to see past that. Does having to spend so much time just working on that interfere with the acting part of it at all?
ER: Well, no. My instinct was meeting Stephen, he was diagnosed with this disease at age 21, and he has no interest in it. His physical decline is entirely secondary to living forward and living passionately, and for me, the film was an incredibly human story. My instinct was, “I need to do all the work on the physicality first, so that when it comes to playing with Felicity or Charlie Cox or Maxine Peake, that you’re just playing the human story.” I don’t want to be thinking about what my hand’s doing. Do you see? Weirdly, it was like approaching it a bit like theater. It was those months beforehand of trying to make the physicality and the voice embedded.
Capone: Like it’s just instinctual.
ER: Right. Everything you’re taught about film acting is to go small. To pull back. And yet the weird thing, the irony was that as his physicality declined, the muscles, when you’re performing it, they’re up here [me makes a brief, uncanny transformation into his Stephen Hawking face]. You’re doing much bigger facial movements. I would sit with the iPad footage in front of the mirror, me trying to replicate it, and I was like, “Is this going to be too much?” Do you know what I mean? It plays against everything that you’ve learned over a few years of making films, I suppose.
Capone: You just made his the face, and it gave me a chill. That was crazy. I’ve talked about this with actors who have to work with like a mask on, that there are certain tools that you’re used to relying on as an actor—having control of your face, control of your body language—and here, you’re playing a character that doesn’t have either to a certain degree. When your tools are essentially ripped form you, what do you rely on?
ER: That’s a really good question. What’s amazing about it is it focuses those things in the same way that all Stephen has now is his limited expression. The extraordinary thing is even though he can move very little, he has one of the most charismatic and expressive faces that you’ve ever seen. So it becomes about the words he chooses when he chooses to press Play and where he’s looking and what he’s doing. So what it does is, as the physicality becomes more focused, all that energy goes into those muscles that you still can move. And the great thing is, we were making a film, and film is at its best when it’s scrutinizing the minutiae. So yeah, it was interesting for me.
Capone: Do you have to physically map out where you are in Hawking’s physicality each day with James? Your first day: how many different versions of Stephen did you have to do?
ER: To answer the first part of your question, the complicated things were like weight loss. Because of the disease, you see him getting substantially thinner. And James did try for a moment to shoot chronologically, but it’s like economically impossible.
Capone: I could see the temptation.
ER: Exactly, I’ll tell you. We ended up, and this is what I was saying about the collaboration, I lost about 15 pounds before we started, and then things like collars were made tighter to begin with, and I was made up to look ever-so-slightly tan and healthy, and then gradually it was all about scaling. So as I got thinner, the clothes would look bigger on me, and proportion and where you were shot from became crucial. So there was that element. The first day of filming was the greatest trial by fire, because the first scene was actually the scene in the poster, it was the first scene we shot. And then at lunch time, he was on two walking sticks, and then in the afternoon he was in the second wheelchair. And I didn’t sleep the night before [laughs]. I was so nervous that by the time I arrived on set I was filled with caffeine, so it was quite nerve wracking.
Capone: On that first day, as you’re going through those iterations of him, what were the directions? What were you getting wrong, and then what had to be corrected?
ER: Well, I’d hoped by that point I had done enough in the prep, but again, James has a wonderful eye, and he had seen all the documentary material as well and had a complete sense of what was authentic. But also this dancer, Alex, was there to look specifically at all the work that I had done and check. At this point, I had to structure mapped-out pages of the scenes and literally which muscles were going when. I’ve never used a process like it before, but it was so... You had to be intricate it, because also I had met all these people suffering from the disease, and you need it to be authentic to that. You needed to be authentic to the science, but also knowing that they were going to see the film was the ultimate judgment. So more than any normal film for me, it felt like there was that. You knew you couldn’t just wing it.
Capone: Hearing you talk about it, it sounds like you’re playing an instrument. You have to hit all the right notes at the right moments, or it’s going to sound off.
ER: Yeah, that’s actually pretty beautiful. It did feel like that, but again, hopefully playing, having learnt all the notes, so that when you can play with someone then you can just do it without thinking. Because James is also a documentary maker, so at the end of each day he would have 10 minutes of just improvising with the kids jumping up all over or playing around, and we wanted to be in a place where we could play, we could freestyle.
Capone: I’m actually a great admirer of his documentary work, and I was wondering there are aspects to the way he directs a film, where you recognize that during the course of a day?
ER: What was interesting, when I read the script was that, it was a really extraordinary story, but it was the fact that James was directing it. I’d seen MAN ON WIRE, which I fucking love, and that film for me feels like on the surface this film about a genius tightrope walker. But I found it ended up being a film about the betrayal of friendship to me. And similarly, this seems cosmetically to be on the surface a biopic of Stephen Hawking, but actually it was an analysis of love and all its failings and excitements and guises.
So I suppose the thing is he was absolutely all for people putting things in front of him. Does that make sense? So Felicity and I would try things. He allowed us a great freedom to make mistakes. To go, “I’ve got an idea, it’s probably awful, but can I give it a shot?” He would always say yes, and if it didn’t work, he’d say, “Have another go.” He was incredibly encouraging, and I realize that’s where I work best, with that sort of freedom.
Capone: I read that you had met Stephen before you started shooting. Did you approach that first meeting as “I have questions about how to play you.” Or did you just say, “Hi. Nice to meet you.”
ER: The problem was, because of his schedule, I could only meet him… basically at that time his documentary [HAWKING] was coming out, so he was out promoting that. So I could only meet him a week before we started filming, and by this point, I had done months of work, and had to work out at least the structure of what the performance was. So I went in with great trepidation, because my fear was, what if meeting him ends up being nothing like this kit that I’ve prepared?
But the weird thing is, when I met him, I knew what I wanted to ask him, but I literally just vomited forth information about him to him. I spent 40 minutes telling Stephen Hawking about Stephen Hawking [laughs]. He was just like looking at me like this and then smiling. I’ve told this story before, but there’s a point where-- And I hate silences, so I was just like filling pauses, and it takes him a while now, because he just uses this [eye] muscle.
He makes a big point about the fact that he was born on Galileo’s birthday. He was born 300 years after Galileo, and I said, “Of course, Stephen, you were born on Galileo’s birthday, the 8th of January, and I was actually born on the 6th of January, so we’re both Capricorns.” And as I said it I was like, “What the fuck did I just say?” He just looked at me and went to his machine. And after like 10 minutes of painful silence, he said in his iconic voice, “I am an astronomer, not an astrologer.” And I was like, Stephen Hawking thinks that the dude playing him thinks that he thinks that he writes horoscopes.
Capone: You enter into something where you’re playing certainly one of the most recognizable thinkers and human beings on the planet, and his legacy will live well beyond him. How do you wrap your brain around that? Do you suffer from anxiety about somehow damaging or misrepresenting his legacy and his life?
ER: No, damaging is exactly what you worry about. Everything. Everything that you’re vocalizing is what, from the second after I got the job—there was a millisecond of euphoria, of privilege, followed by, it really was the crushing weight of the reality of the task. So, until Stephen and Jane saw the film and the children saw the film, and were generous and kind about it, that weight has been there. So yeah, I wish there was a better way of answering that, other than saying, I was just properly scared.
Capone: You mentioned this is a wonderful love story, too. One of the most difficult moments to watch in the film is towards the end where Jane basically says, I thought this was a two-year thing, and we were so lucky to get so much longer, in that scene where they finally agree to separate.
ER: Yeah, I read it as, “They said we’d have two years. That was the confines they gave to us, but we’ve superseded that.” By that point, they were such a symbiosis, but I think it was also about the damage of that care. And Stephen is also a strong-willed man, and for a long time refused help, and she had to put a lot of her passions aside to support his career, and also he then met someone who found him attractive and loved him in that moment for who he was there and then.
Capone: There’s an interesting take on that moment, where she had wanted to give him some comfort in the last couple years of his life, and it had gone 20 years beyond that.
ER: Yeah, that’s interesting. I didn’t see it that way, but maybe that’s because I’m in Stephen’s mindset [laughs].
Capone: The other really interesting thing about the film is how funny it is. There’s really a lot of humor in it. I’d always heard that he had a really sharp wit, and was almost aware that some people might be slightly uncomfortable and would do something to diffuse that.
ER: Totally. I had three images up in my trailer, and one of them was Einstein with his tongue out, because obviously there’s that relationship. The other was James Dean, because when you see photos of Stephen when he was younger with Jane, he’s not trying, but he has this iconic quality to him. And the third was the joker in a pack of cards with a puppeteer, because he controls a room. I describe it as being like the Lord of Misrule. He comes in and he sort of undercuts everything. And he has and amazing, amazing humor and extraordinary wit, and you definitely feel like he’s in control of the situation when you’re there. There’s a formidable power and strength in him. There’s an amazing program we have called “Desert Island Discs.” Do you know that program?
Capone: Sure, yeah.
ER: So he’s interviewed on that, and Sue Lawley questions him quite strongly, and because it takes him so long to reply, all the interviews he’s had pretty much since the tracheotomy, he’s pre-sent the questions, so he just presses play for the answers. And that gives him a power, do you see what I mean? But the reality when you meet him and have a live conversation, it’s this extraordinarily weird rhythm means he’s fully in charge in some way.
Capone: As much as you focused on the physical part of it and the vocal part of it, how important was it to you to even get some inkling of what it was he was writing about?
ER: It was pretty important. I suppose that was the other side of it, the science, but I gave up science when I was like 13, 14. I majored in history of art. So I read everything I could, I spoke to one of his students, who was our advisor, and he’s talking about “Space Time” and he’d be going off into E=…”, and I was like, “No, no, no. Imagine I’m seven. Talk to me like the lowest common denominator of someone.” It was massively revelatory to me. I’ve never rated my mind in that way, and I’m not in any way, but it was a huge education, and just the idea of asking those bigger questions, because I had always failed to comprehend it. It never occurred to me to be interested or passionate about them. Subsequently too, I’ve had met some extraordinary people in that world.
Capone: And it’s fascinating how he never hesitated to completely changed his theories. He went the complete opposite direction.“Hey, that’s not right anymore. This is it.”
ER: I know. I love those moments. That was a huge revelation, the idea of science is like dialogue. It’s like a conversation, and it’s one that keeps changing and shifting. Some of these documentaries about Stephen, you hear he’s having these huge competitions when he was in the UK with great physicists, an astronomer in the U.S., and then with someone in Russia, and they’re all happening through lectures that are being given. It’s like a gigantic chess game, and that’s really, it’s pretty awe inspiring.
Capone: So you’re in Chicago now, the home of the Wachowskis, and we’re sitting here dying to see this JUPITER ASCENDING. Did you shoot any of that here?
ER: They did. Unfortunately, I did not. They shot a lot of it in Chicago. I actually emailed Lana yesterday when I got in seeing if she was here. But they’re in Mexico shooting “Sense8,” I think. But they shot a lot of it here, but my stuff all takes place in outer space. So that was all in Pinewood in London. I begged to come to Chicago. I was like, “Can’t I just do craft service or something?” They were like, “No, Eddie.”
Capone: I just re-watched the latest trailer which has a fair amount of you in it. It’s about as different a role as this one. Just you are projecting evil and destruction throughout the trailer. Can you say anything about the guy you are playing?
ER: Do you want his full job title?
Capone: Yes, please.
ER: He’s called Balem Abrasax the eldest primary son of the house of the Abrasax. And he basically, imagine the Rockefellers out in space. All these families own businesses, and our business is that we take planets and we let them become Darwinian perfect, and then we harvest them and boil human beings down into serum, youth serum. That’s our commodity. That’s what we sell. And I’m in charge of the family, so I’ve inherited it all. I’m competing with my siblings, but I remain in charge unless my mother gets reincarnated, because mom’s gone in slightly dodgy services. And mom gets reincarnated as Mila Kunis, so I’m none too plussed about that.
But it was an amazing experience. It was the antitheses of this in the sense that here you would go in and judge every minutiae of the costume in relation to photographs. And I feared going into JUPITER that I had a bad imagination. What was amazing is, I thought it would be restrictive, but it ended up being so freeing, because it’s all in their mind, and they’re such wonderful people, and they take you there. And it was really special for me. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m really curious to see it.
Capone: I hope the delay means it’s going to be that much better.
ER: So do I, so do I.
Capone: Eddie, thank you so much. It was really great to meet you.
