Buzz is a fickle thing. One minute you have it, the next you don't. But when it's good, when it's real, it's a slow steady hum that continues until suddenly all you hear about is this person. Over the past couple of years, this person has been Jennifer Lawrence, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael B. Jordan, Channing Tatum. Now, Eddie Redmayne is about to become one.
In The Theory of Everything, Redmayne plays theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking as an adult---from the time he was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) as a Cambridge student to his time as a wheelchair-bound science (and pop) icon who wrote A Brief History of Time. It's a transformation unlike almost anything else on screen this year—and it's already leading to speculation that the 32-year-old actor could get an Oscar nod for his performance.
But Theory of Everything, out in select cities today, is just the beginning. Next up Redmayne is part of the all-star (Channing Tatum! Mila Kunis!) cast of Andy and Lana Wachowski's Jupiter Ascending, which the actor calls "this absolutely insane, huge mixture of Greek theater mixed with fairy tale mixed with a state-of-the-world story." Here's everything you need to know about the man behind one of the year's best on-screen performances.
Redmayne grew up in London and went to school at Trinity College in Cambridge, but he studied art history—something far less challenging than Hawking's field. "I'd been at Cambridge so I'd seen Stephen at a distance and knew that he studied black holes, but I'd been studying Renaissance paintings," he jokes. He was similarly oblivious to Hawking's life before he read the Theory script, which is based on Hawking's ex-wife Jane's memoir Traveling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen. "I realized I was ignorant enough not to realize it was ALS, not to realize that he'd once been entirely healthy, not to realize this extraordinary story behind this icon," Redmayne says. "I found it deeply riveting. It's not glossed, I actually found it quite real. … I felt like it was a scrutiny of love in all of its guises."
The most fascinating thing about Redmayne's performance in Theory of Everything is his physical transformation as Hawking's ALS progresses, making it harder for him to talk, walk, and eventually perform even simple movements. He spent four months studying videos of Hawking (particularly one of him in zero gravity, below) and working with a specialist---showing her photographs of Hawking so she could explain exactly how Hawking's body was affected by the disease (that his hand is "wilted" in a certain picture, for instance, rather than "rigid.") Redmayne also worked with Alex Reynolds, the choreographer responsible for the zombie movements in World War Z, "to help me put it into my body." And when it came to filming, he had to know exactly what physical state Hawking would've been in at any given point in his life. "We weren't shooting chronologically," he says. "So on the first day of filming in the morning you're healthy, by lunch time you're on two sticks, and then in the afternoon you're in the chair."
The actor met the man he would portray a few weeks before shooting began. Because Hawking's ALS now requires him to spell out sentences one letter at a time via a sensor on his face, they didn't get to talk much. But his mere presence was riveting. And a little funny. "Above and beyond anything, what you take away from the experience is---and this is the first time I've talked about it, really---that tension," Redmayne says. "It makes the room ripe. It's like everyone is slightly on their toes. You're paying attention. You've always got an eye on what he's observing and 'Is he going to say something?' But then there's what he emanates, which is humor, acerbic wit, killer timing, and a love of life. When Felicity [Jones, who plays Jane Hawking] came in he was just like, 'Hi. I'm a rockstar,' basically. And I very promptly got shoved aside."
Redmayne worked harder on his portrayal of Hawking than he had on anything else before it—impressive considering that while filming Les Misérables (as Marius) he had to sing for hours each day. But surprisingly, Redmayne found the emotional scenes more challenging than harnessing the bravado of a genius. "Everyone was like, 'How are you going to play that extraordinary brain?!' I just didn't sleep for months thinking about that," he says. "Then I had this epiphany: When I was at Cambridge I met some pretty bright people, and the one thing that I took from it was that people who are seriously fucking bright don't show it. They have no need to. They're so confident in their intellect that they don't tell you."
During one particularly brutal scene in Theory Hawking has to have a, um, hard conversation with his wife. (We don’t want to spoil it too much, but you can probably guess the topic.) The moment hangs on the fact that the speech synthesizer he uses doesn't offer much emotion—and there's little Hawking can do physically to convey any. Redmayne found an interesting way to practice getting it right. "He can't go, 'You know what, baby … I'm so sorry,'" Redmayne says. "All he can do is literally press 'play.' I was like, 'This could sound bonkers, but I should record saying it on my iPhone and I should sit in the chair and just press play.' The tension comes from when you're looking at each other and when you choose [to do that]."
"Lana is a huge Hawking fan---I was busy meeting on, the Hawking film while making Jupiter and she was very encouraging," Redmayne says.
In Jupiter Ascending Redmayne plays Balem Abrasax, the eldest son of the House of Abrasax, a dynasty that owns many planets that "sort of become Darwinian-ly perfect and then we harvest them to take all the humans and melt them into serum—like really expensive Crème de la Mer." Making the Wachowskis' movie was a high-wire and green-screen experience unlike anything Redmayne had done before ("I do period dramas!"). "I thought I was going to feel really restricted with Jupiter but I actually found it pretty liberating, because you have nothing to go on," Redmayne says. "You literally have Lana screaming, 'Play it like an accountant!' It was so fun. … When I went to do ADR I saw some of the effects and it was like, 'Oh, the dragon is that big.' You put a lot of your performance on the edit and the special effects guys. If they make something uber-terrifying and you're acting really blasé, it's off."
Redmayne is clearly excited about Jupiter---maybe a little too excited. "What else do you want to hear about Jupiter Ascending?" he asked during his interview with WIRED. "Do you want to know that Channing Tatum learned to rollerblade from scratch? His character blades through space. My first day I'm arriving on set to rehearse … imagine a huge studio covered in green and suspended in the air are huge treadmills. Then hanging was Channing on rollerblades and Mila hanging on another string on his back. I just walked in going, 'Um, hi!'"
As someone used to period dramas, Redmayne also found the futuristic costumes of the Wachowskis' world much different than anything he'd ever worn before. "When you go to play Hawking, at the costume fittings there were pages of photographs, really specific," he says. "On [Jupiter] I walked in and Kym Barrett, who did the costumes for The Matrix was like, 'Maybe sequins?' And I was like, 'How about that?!'"
