![]() He has this kind of shambolic confidence to him. I had these three images in my trailer-one was Einstein with his tongue out, another was James Dean, because Stephen is just effortlessly cool. You could still see the mischief in him, the glint in his eye. He can still move, but it was a very specific physicality. The illness has really taken hold of his physicality. It’s the only footage I could find of Stephen speaking, and he’s almost incomprehensible. There was one documentary of Stephen and Jane from the 1980s. LAWRENCE: I know! And I just came up with it, too. What was your most helpful tool? Was it the Stephen documentaries? Every time I’m at a premiere, all I’m doing is thinking, “Oh, you shouldn’t have said it like that!” Actually, it would probably just make me neurotic. ![]() LAWRENCE: Maybe watching dailies would make me better. I kept hoping that the two things were going to meet, but obviously they never did. I had an iPad with all the documentary footage of Stephen and then we had the dailies. REDMAYNE: We sort of had to, because we were jumping in and out of all these different time periods and trying to track the illness and the physical decline. But, oh my God, did you watch rushes of this? Unless I keep getting the same note and I’m obviously not getting it, then I’ll watch it again on the monitor. Our extraordinary makeup artist, Jan, and costume designer, Steven, did clever things like making the collars tight and my makeup look healthy in the morning, and then, if in the afternoon I was playing him older, they would mess with proportions-the collars would become bigger or they would use slightly oversized wheelchairs. But we couldn’t shoot chronologically, so we were having to jump between different time periods within the same day. With the disease, Stephen did lose a lot of weight. REDMAYNE: I lost, like, 15 pounds at the beginning of the film. LAWRENCE: It looked like you lost a lot of weight. I’m entirely fueled by fear, so the fact that I knew it could be a catastrophic disaster made me unable to sleep, and made me work quite hard. REDMAYNE: Are you kidding me? I’m just one gigantic ball of rancid fear and self-consciousness. LAWRENCE: I don’t know if you get this, but I get embarrassed really easily when I have to have big meltdown scenes. And then you get offered the job, and you have a moment of euphoria, and then you basically want to be sick for the first year. REDMAYNE: You do that thing of trying to chase down the job, sounding incredibly confident because you never think you’ll get it. LAWRENCE: That would scare the shit out of me. When I was cast, my mate Charlie Cox, who plays Jonathan in the film, said, “If you get the opportunity to play Stephen Hawking, you have no option but to give it your everything. You were so fantastic! I didn’t even know some of that was possible.ĮDDIE REDMAYNE: Well, thank you. JENNIFER LAWRENCE: I watched The Theory of Everything with my jaw dropped the entire time. Fresh off her worldwide press tour for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, the Oscar winner called Redmayne, who was in Turin, Italy, to talk about running on fear, Real Housewives addiction, fake falls, and bad salmon. Jennifer Lawrence, who knows a bit about sci-fi, met Redmayne years ago through director Oliver Stone. This month, Redmayne will again aim for the heavens, in the Wachowskis’ space opera Jupiter Ascending, donning some serious mascara in the process to play an extra-planetary villain. But if Redmayne’s early work showed that he could be an engaging performer, his recent work (including Tom Hooper’s starry 2012 production of Les Misérables, in which the actor stormed the barricades as the romantic Marius) showed him to be as ambitious as he is talented. Or at least an Oscar.īorn in London in 1982 and educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied art history, Redmayne came up with some dynamic and swoon-worthy roles in lush period pieces such as Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Robert De Niro’s CIA saga The Good Shepherd, and the epic 2010 miniseries The Pillars of the Earth. There’s an old saying, the kind you might find in the office of a high school guidance counselor, that goes something like, “Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll end up among the stars.” Eddie Redmayne is an actor already on the rise, but with his performance as a young Stephen Hawking in search of the secrets of the universe in this past fall’s The Theory of Everything, he shot past the moon and may well end up with interstellar stardom. I’m just one gigantic ball of rancid fear and self-consciousness.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |