The many faces of Eddie Redmayne 

On the phone calling from Los Angeles, the English actor Eddie Redmayne is expounding the importance of preparation to his craft. “Prep is important to me, because I have to get rid of all the technical elements of playing someone, particularly if it’s a real person, long before I arrive on set to rehearse with the director or the other actors, in order that it’s second nature by that point,” he said. This way of working Redmayne can trace back to portraying Stephen Hawking in a 2014 film directed by James Marsh. The 40-year-old’s turn as the theoretical physicist then gained a number of industry accolades, including his Academy Award for best actor. “When I did The Theory of Everything was the time when I realised that I need a long runway,” he added. 

Redmayne, who made his acting debut in London’s theatres and has since been cast to star in stage plays, on television and in films produced for the cinema, has to date read, studied and then brought to life a range of characters. His parts have encompassed both fictional personae and profiles drawn from real life and set against real life events. How, once in front of audiences or a camera’s lens, does Redmayne embody a character that has been scripted on paper? 

First, there is the matter of how much time Redmayne and fellow members of the cast are given to fine-tune their individual parts and to then work out how they might interact with each other. It’s a process, in a way a type of conceptualising, that Redmayne begins early on. “I am someone who, the second I commit to something, I start thinking about it,” he said. 

Production times, and the time it takes for a production to eventually kick off, vary depending on individual projects; most recently, Redmayne enjoyed the in-depth and inclusive approach of Tobias Lindholm. The Danish director formed part of the team behind The Good Nurse, a drama with screenplay by Krysty Wilson-Cairns retelling the crimes of nurse and serial killer Charles Cullen and his relationship to fellow nurse Amy Loughren, his friend. Six years before filming commenced, Redmayne had signed on to play Cullen, starring opposite Jessica Chastain in the role of Loughren. 

When The Good Nurse began production, the film’s director asked his cast to first rehearse together, as an ensemble, for four weeks. “It was a month of Jessica, Tobias and I going to nurse school, working through the intricacies of the script, rehearsing elements of the film,” Redmayne detailed. And even before Lindholm’s preparations commenced, Redmayne had worked on his part for a couple of months. “I’d done maybe two or three months with my dialect coach and a wonderful dancer called Alexandra Reynolds, who I work with on movements.” 

‘Clothing always tells so many stories’

To play Cullen, Redmayne also studied Charles Graeber’s 2013 true-crime book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder, which combines an account of Cullen’s crimes with biographical notes and psychoanalytic reports. “Everything that you could possibly want as an actor was there,” Redmayne said of the publication. He also watched and re-watched footage of Cullen on trial. “She was the greatest insight into the film,” Redmayne said of Loughren, with whom he spent time to speak through her experiences and first-hand impressions of Cullen. 

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/arts-life/culture/film/958789/the-many-faces-of-eddie-redmayne-interview