The Theory of Everything

Smart is sexy: Eddie Redmayne makes an example of himself

A lithe, red-haired Eddie Redmayne slips into the banquette in a restaurant in Toronto, takes one look at the table’s snack mix and pushes away the bowl. Shaking hands, he remembers that the last time we saw each other was in New York at a lunch for Les Misérables. We had discussed how he lied about his equestrian skills to get a role in Tom Hooper’s TV mini-series Elizabeth I, and his matriculation at Cambridge alongside Tom Hiddleston.

That elite university was also where Redmayne first spied Stephen Hawking, the genius cosmologist and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) sufferer who Redmayne portrays in The Theory of Everything. The biopic delves into Hawking’s first marriage to wife Jane (Felicity Jones), as he suffers the effects of the neurodegenerative disorder that gradually robs him of muscle control. Redmayne and I spoke about meeting the real-life scientist, Redmayne’s terror at playing him onscreen, and the raves he’s earning at the Toronto International Film Festival for his immersive performance.

Had you known much about Hawking before you took the role?

I’d seen Stephen in his wheelchair from a distance at Cambridge. I’d studied history of art, and I just knew what I suppose most people know: the icon and the voice and something about black holes. Then I read this script and was embarrassed by how little I knew.

Did the role come easily to you?

There was a moment when I got the part where I felt a wonderful euphoria. It lasted about a second and a half. It’s been fear and trepidation ever since. The night before we started filming was the only night of my life that I did not sleep. It got to four in the morning, and I was being picked up at five, and I was like, ‘I haven’t slept. I can’t start this film without having had a minute’s sleep.’

Did it surprise you that Hawking was physically fit until he was an adult?

I didn’t know that much about him or ALS. I thought it was something that came on quite quickly. And in many cases, it does. But I found the love story aspect of it, this idea that there was this extraordinary woman named Jane, played by Felicity Jones, behind him completely riveting. I chased the role pretty hard, and I had a long conversation with [director] James Marsh. And I did that thing that actors do of pretending to sound really confident. I somehow managed to blag him into it.

Gentleman Ginger

What does ‘blag’ mean?

Blag means con him.

Well, maybe it wasn’t just blagging. You did an incredible job.

Thank you. My instinct had been that to approach a part like this, you needed to go back to an old school way of working. I felt that every single aspect of it would affect everything else. So the physical would affect the costume, would affect the makeup, would affect the voice. I worked with a dancer, an amazing woman called Alex Reynolds, and I spent a few months going to the London Motor Neuron Diseases Clinic to see how ALS manifests itself. It’s different in every single patient…. As the muscles stop working, you used other muscles. There are muscles here in our face that we never use, and [Hawking’s] mom and his wife Jane describe how he had incredibly expressive eyebrows. So it was trying to learn to isolate muscles, which meant a lot of time spent in front of a mirror with photos.

The movie frankly shows that Hawking remained sexually active post-diagnosis and fathered three children.

Completely. When you look at photos or hear about Stephen as a younger man, he was incredibly charismatic and flirtatious. The ladies loved him and still do…. It was absolutely apparent meeting him that he is a really strong, potent man in every sense of the word.

While a lot is made of the role’s physicality, the genius is that the illness never overcomes Hawking’s intellect or spirit.

The story of Stephen dwarfs the illness. For him, it is of no importance. He didn’t ever want to see a doctor again after he was diagnosed. He is someone that lives forward and lives optimistically. So, for me, what this film was about was an unconventional love story, a film about loving in all its guises. So, young love, passionate love, love of a subject, the tribulations of love, and the love of family.

With the current celebrity frenzy around the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, it seems like a perfect storm for ALS awareness now.

For me, it’s a wonderful thing because as part of my research, I met 30 or 40 people suffering and their families. It’s a brutal, horrific disease. But because there is very little money invested in finding a cure, it’s been around for a long, long time, and they’re not much closer to finding one. I’m now a patron of the Motor Neuron Disease Association in London, and for them [the Ice Bucket Challenge] has been game changing.

Tell me about meeting Hawking.

It was five days before we started filming, which was not ideal. I’d spent all these months prepping, and I was a little worried: What if everything I had prepped was wrong? Our first half hour together was pretty hilarious in a kind of awful way. I basically just vomited forth information about Stephen Hawking to Stephen Hawking. But he was very generous…. Above and beyond the specifics I gleaned about how he slurred his words and such, was that he emanates this humor and wit. And that is what ended up being the most wonderful thing because it meant that I could start each scene — whatever obstacle’s been put in his way, he still finds humor and he still finds joy.

What’s your biggest takeaway from the whole experience?

The film quotes Hawking’s line: “Where there’s life, there’s hope.” I’m a massive culprit of all the foibles in your life taking all of that joy away. But, actually, when Stephen was given a death sentence at age 21, he committed to living each one of those moments fully.

Cumberbatch as Alan Turing

It’s the British invasion of the Oscar race. It’s only October and three British actors – Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne and Timothy Spall – are already dominating the Best Actor race. And each of them comes carrying a biopic on his shoulders: The Imitation Game about mathematician Alan Turing for Cumberbatch, The Theory of Everything about cosmologist Stephen Hawking for Redmayne and Mr. Turner, a drama about the master landscape painter aka J.M.W. Turner stars Spall.

Biopics have always been one of Oscar’s favorite genres: Consider A Beautiful Mind, Lincoln, 12 Years a Slave, Dallas Buyers Club, Walk the Line, The Last King of Scotland and Milk. It may have been The King’s Speech that inspired this outpouring of veddy veddy English movie, but while the current crop is similar in genre, they are not the birds of one feather. The actors may play real-life public figures, but their approaches to their characters couldn’t be more different.

Redmayne, 32, fresh off awards buzz for his singing romantic hero in Les Miserables, takes on the brilliant yet physically challenged Hawking. He told Yahoo Movies that he believes biopics appeal to actors and audiences because of “the cult of celebrity…We see images of people like Hawking, or Turing, or Turner, and yet, because we are all human, we’re aware that it can’t be as simple as it looks on the surface. Biopics reveal what grounds these stellar individuals as human beings rather than just as achievers.”

In The Theory of Everything, Redmayne’s portrayal of Hawking begins at Cambridge – also the actor’s alma mater — before illness sets in. On campus, Hawking romances the pretty scholar (Felicity Jones) who will become his wife. But very shortly, Hawking’s fingers have trouble grasping a pencil, he trips over his own feet – and it is one long spiral from cane to wheelchair as ALS changes the course of his life. Despite this, he still authors the bestseller The Brief History of Time. This performance could easily be compared to the one that won Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar for My Left Foot in 1990.

[RELATED: Eddie Redmayne Talks About Meeting Stephen Hawking and Why the Role Terrified Him]

Cumberbatch, 38, gives a complex emotional performance, where the intellectual’s scars are largely internal. The actor expresses every glimmer of feeling in his blue-green eyes, delivering brilliant line readings from a sharp script. He slayed me. The Emmy-winner best known for playing the TV’s sociopathic Sherlock Holmes takes on a figure less known in America than Hawkings, in a story with a less traditional arc.

Alan Turing, a brilliant and difficult puzzle-solver and Cambridge academic cracked the German Enigma code, playing a major part in defeating the Nazis in WWII. A homosexual, his greatest personal tragedy occurred in 1952 when Her Majesty’s government arrested him for the crime of gross indecency. Turing accepted chemical castration to avoid prison, only to commit suicide one year later. The bitter irony here is that his genius preserved democracy, but his own society failed him less than a decade later.

And then along comes Spall, 57, the classically trained character actor best known for playing Wormtail in the Harry Potter saga. (He also played Winston Churchill in The King’s Speech.) He brilliantly carries this Mike Leigh directed biopic of the Victorian landscape painter J.M.W.Turner. Spall has already won a Best Actor award at Cannes for his portrayal, an almost comic conglomeration of grunts, mutters, and grumbles roughly translated into English. While his Turner is far from eloquent or emotionally accessible – much less likeable – he is deeply human. Spall shows us a brilliant artist who creates transcendent work, even if his life is a patchwork of bullying and carnal urges and, now and then, genuine affection. Working in Leigh’s signature style, there is a feeling of improvisation to Spall’s performance, a looseness and spontaneity, as if the paint has hardly dried before they move on to the next scene.

God save her, the English monarch plays a role in all three features: Queen Victoria turns up at one of Turner’s art exhibitions only to fling insults at his canvases, Queen Elizabeth bestows an OBE on Hawking at the end of The Theory of Everything and, in 2013, she posthumously pardoned Turing from all charges of indecency.

Cumberbatch who, following rapturous reviews, will now be launched by The Weinstein Company on a Best Actor campaign, confided to Yahoo Movies: “The thing I’m interested in is that the buzz creates and generates an audience…I want a lot of people to understand Turing. Any attention that encourages people to get to know, understand and marvel and thank Alan Turing — at that whole strand of his all-too-brief life — is justification enough.”

Eddie Redmayne Explains His ‘Theory of Everything’ and Fear of Stephen Hawking

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