The Oscar winner on studying from his errors, his newest function as a serial killer nurse – and why he’s not carrying a marriage ring
Drinking espresso within the restaurant of a central London resort as jazz burbles away within the background, Eddie Redmayne is carrying pale blue denims, a white sweatshirt and a shawl. No wedding ceremony band, although. Uh-oh. “‘Noticed with out his ring!’” he says, mock-horrified. He misplaced it whereas taking pictures The Danish Woman eight years in the past, which is barely one of many causes to lament that movie. We’ll get to the others in good time.
He purchased a alternative ring then misplaced that, too, so he gave up. On jewelry, that's, not marriage. “I'm extremely fortunately married so I’m afraid there’s no scoop there,” he says apologetically. The tone suits along with his manner, which is that of a Saturday boy at John Lewis: posh, affable, sincerely regretful that he doesn’t have the merchandise in your measurement. He simply turned 41 however may cross for mid-20s. His tousled hair is rust-coloured, his pores and skin frantic with freckles, his lips so plump they seem like crimson jellies.
A shawl stays knotted round his neck all through our morning collectively; he picked up a nasty chilly on his latest journey to the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, the place he was within the operating for greatest supporting actor for enjoying the serial killer Charles Cullen in The Good Nurse. When the sneezes come immediately, he whips out a comically massive pink handkerchief peppered with white dots, like a magician getting ready to make the crockery vanish.
The truth is, his occasion trick is kind of the other: he makes awards seem. He obtained the large three (Oscar, Bafta, Golden Globe) for enjoying Stephen Hawking in The Concept of Every thing, and an Olivier final 12 months for his lizardly, mercurial Emcee in Cabaret, which additionally starred Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles. A soundtrack recording, taped throughout dwell performances for added wildness, has simply been launched. Redmayne’s strategy to the character, he says, “is that he would shape-shift and emerge as this Aryan conductor who may drop his baton in one of many champagne bottles on the finish, after which stroll off into the night time. No matter else is happening, he’s fucking high quality.”
He took house his first Olivier (in addition to a Tony) in 2010 for enjoying Mark Rothko’s assistant in Crimson. Every night time, he and his co-star Alfred Molina splashed paint round on stage as they mocked up big imitation Rothkos. What a job for an artwork historical past graduate, even when Redmayne’s dissertation at Cambridge was on Yves Klein’s blue. And don’t neglect the Golden Raspberry award he received for worst supporting actor within the Wachowski sisters’ incomprehensible fantasy Jupiter Ascending, the place he was a rasping, pursed-lipped princeling in outfits worthy of a fetish night time: stiff gold collars, stippled rubber vests, naked chest beneath. “I didn’t know what I used to be doing,” he says. “I nonetheless don’t. I actually haven’t watched the entire film. However I cherished making decisions that had been …” He wrinkles his nostril. “Nicely, ‘daring’ might be too sort a phrase.”
Prizes are why we're right here immediately. It’s encouraging that sufficient of Redmayne’s friends observed his creepy however admirably level-headed work in The Good Nurse to vote for him in subsequent month’s Display screen Actors Guild awards. I want him luck. “Ah cheers. By no means gonna occur however it’ll be enjoyable to go.” Just a few days after we meet, he additionally will get a Bafta nomination so as to add to the tally.
He performs Charlie Cullen, a seemingly compassionate, diligent nurse who's now serving 18 consecutive life sentences for the homicide of 29 sufferers in his care at numerous New Jersey hospitals over the course of practically twenty years; the precise loss of life toll could possibly be within the a whole bunch. He contaminated IV baggage with insulin, and injected sufferers with deadly doses of coronary heart treatment. His good friend and colleague Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) was instrumental in bringing him to justice however The Good Nurse is much less a narrative of heroes and villains than an indictment of the profit-centred healthcare system that enabled then hid his actions.
“He’s principally giving his employers each alternative to cease him,” says Redmayne. “It’s like: ‘Fucking do it. Go on.’ That’s what I discovered intriguing in regards to the script. In some methods, sure, it’s a real crime story, however it felt extra like a personality examine mixed with a critique of the system.” With the NHS at its most imperilled, the movie doubles as a warning to audiences within the UK. “Nicely, it’s greater than a critique of US healthcare. It’s about methods usually wherein the facility of the person is misplaced. That’s obtained to ring a huge alarm bell in relation to what we have now right here and what we take with no consideration. The NHS goes by means of an extremely advanced time.”
It’s admirable that the movie resists making an attempt to reply the query of why Cullen killed. However even the least prurient viewer may ponder whether he regarded these in his care as individuals or merely potential kills. “In these scenes with the sufferers, I used to be enjoying the reality of empathy and kindness, with the sense of the killer being a unique particular person,” he says. “I consider he was, for all intents and functions, a superb nurse. However there have been instances when he was like an empty vessel that might develop into full of vanity and truculence. I frolicked with the actual Amy, and he or she described these moments when the Charlie she knew disappeared. That dissociative thought was a revelation for me. In order that’s how I performed him. It was about discovering this vacuum, this totally different particular person.”
He illustrates the demarcation in a pair of chilling confrontation scenes: first in a diner, the place Amy wears a wire as she tries to lure Cullen into making an incriminating assertion; then after his arrest, when he's harangued by the interviewing officer. In each these moments, the actor turns away from the digital camera then swivels again spherical to face us, his options fastened in an impenetrable masks. Someplace inside him, a change has been flicked to “off”.
Nobody must be shocked that Redmayne is able to that iciness. One in all his first movies was Savage Grace, one other factually primarily based psychological drama. He performed a fraught, tormented inheritor concerned in a semi-incestuous relationship along with his socialite mom, performed by Julianne Moore. Redmayne had fought laborious to get the half. Coming in 2007, so near the beginning of his display screen profession, it launched him as a risk-taker, likeability be damned. He made good on that promise in little-seen oddball endeavours reminiscent of Hick, the place he was a limping Texas paedophile pursuing a younger Chloë Grace Moretz.
His path has been unorthodox, even when his background (he was in the identical 12 months as Prince William at Eton) is privilege incarnate. “I knew nothing about movie or TV however I obtained into performing as a result of I cherished it in school,” he says. A former drama trainer advised him for Mark Rylance’s all-male manufacturing of Twelfth Night time on the Globe; Redmayne, 20 on the time, received the a part of Viola. “I’d performed so many ladies in school that it wasn’t a stretch,” he shrugs. Adela Quested from A Passage to India is considered one of his favourites. “‘I need to see the actual India,’” he purrs, slipping briefly into character and gazing demurely throughout the restaurant.
His profession targets had been modest. “I believed if something occurred for me it could be Sunday night time tv, one thing English and Etonian. Perhaps a bit half in Foyle’s Warfare.” That wasn’t the way it panned out. His breakthrough stage function, in 2004, was as a fragile younger American whose father is in a sexual relationship with a farmyard animal, in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who's Sylvia? “US casting administrators got here to see it. In a short time, reasonably than doing English characters, I used to be solid as People.”
In addition to Savage Grace, there was Robert De Niro’s espionage thriller The Good Shepherd, the place these full lips got here in useful enjoying Angelina Jolie’s son. And that Sunday night time prediction was realised ultimately. “Finally I discovered my means again to tweed,” he smiles. He was Angel Clare reverse Gemma Arterton as Tess of the D’Urbervilles, then the lead in Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong. “Plus that complete bizarre interval the place I used to be in something associated even tangentially to Queen Elizabeth.” He’s muddling the chronology barely – a job within the sequence Elizabeth I crops up proper at first of his CV – however it’s true that if there was a doublet and hose hanging round, the younger Redmayne was both carrying it or standing subsequent to somebody who was (see The Different Boleyn Woman; Elizabeth: The Golden Age). He gallops on by means of his IMDb web page: “Then Concept, and The Danish Woman, which I suppose each is and isn’t an English interval drama …”
Ah, The Danish Woman. Redmayne’s publicists had politely requested me to not press him on a difficulty about which he has nothing extra so as to add: the general public assertion in 2020 wherein he diverged from his Unbelievable Beasts creator JK Rowling on the matter of transgender id. “I disagree with Jo’s feedback,” he stated on the time. “Trans girls are girls, trans males are males and non-binary identities are legitimate.” However it's Redmayne who brings up The Danish Woman, a movie he has stated he wouldn't really feel snug making now. He believes the function of the painter Lili Elbe, one of many first identified individuals to bear gender-confirming surgical procedure, ought to have gone to a trans performer. “I made that movie with the very best intentions, however I believe it was a mistake,” he stated in 2021.
I ask how that realisation has colored his emotions towards the film itself. Is it a failure? “Fact be advised, I solely see the failings within the work I do anyway,” he says after an extended pause. Then he stares into house for 10 seconds. “I labored actually … I’m, um, I … I don’t know the best way to reply that query.” He turns to me, his eyes crinkled and unhappy. “I don’t know the best way to reply it. Sorry.” Can he not even say how he feels in regards to the movie? “The factor I discover most advanced is fact …” There follows an evidence of the genesis of the script earlier than he lastly reaches his conclusion: “The movie appears like a fictionalised model. It doesn’t really feel like Lili’s story.”
He received’t take components now that ought to go to trans actors: that a lot is obvious. However what can somebody along with his clout do to assist his trans colleagues? “Just a few years in the past, I did a workshop with trans actors on the Central College of Speech and Drama. Quite a lot of them had been fairly rightly interrogating me about my option to do The Danish Woman, and declaring that many trans actors don’t go to drama college as a result of they don’t see it as a possibility. Except there are components that you simply assume are potential so that you can play, why would you?”
A sigh. “I consider everybody needs to have the ability to play all the things. That’s what we dream of as actors, and may do. Nobody needs to be restricted by their gender or sexuality however, traditionally, these communities haven’t had a seat on the desk. Till there’s a levelling, there are specific components I wouldn’t play.” Earlier on, reflecting on his lack of formal coaching, he had advised me: “I can solely study from my errors.” At the very least nobody can say he hasn’t put his cash the place his mouth is.
Post a Comment