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“I reshaped Eddie’s mouth by taking away the corners and giving him
more of a feminine pout,”says the film’s makeup artist, Jan Sewell.
“Lili did something profoundly courageous, and yet history had mostly forgotten her,”
says David Ebershoff, on whose novel the movie is based.
...The hardest moment in the course of shooting The Danish Girl, he says, was stepping onto the set in female form and sensing the eyes of gaffers and electricians gauging the persuasiveness of his appearance. “It was a feeling that, apparently, women are substantially more used to,” he says. “That was incredibly nerve-racking, and yet it must be nothing like what it’s like for a trans woman the first time she goes out.”...
In the couple’s Copenhagen studio, the artist Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) poses for his wife, Gerda
(Alicia Vikander). The actress describes the film as “a love story about learning to love yourself.”
The couple moves to Paris, where Gerda’s paintings of Lili bring her further acclaim.
...Redmayne is tall, but as a woman in heels, he is even taller. For a moment, with the lights on him and the lens gaping, he looks uncertain. Sewell rushes forward and makes a small adjustment: She lets loose a couple of curls of the wig, so they descend onto his face. As she darts back out of view, Redmayne alights on the edge of the couch, brings a hand up to his ear, and gazes searchingly toward the camera. He is no longer recognizable as a 33-year-old man; suddenly, the flash strikes his face and the transformation is complete....
...Three weeks into shooting for The Danish Girl, Redmayne flew to L.A. from London. The next evening, around 5:00 a.m. British time, he clambered onto the stage of the Dolby Theater in a midnight-blue Alexander McQueen tuxedo to accept the Oscar for Best Actor from Cate Blanchett. “I will promise you I will look after him!” he said of the trophy in a breathless baritone, half Alec Guinness, half Bob Cratchit. On Monday, he touched down back in London and went directly from the airport to the studio. “We had some decorations on his trailer,” Vikander says. “He went straight to the set and just did this killer scene. I was so amazed about how he was able to close everything off and get tunnel vision and go right back to his part in the way he did. He’s all about the work, that guy.”...
...“Across the board, all of the people from the trans community I’ve met have been so open with the idea that any question is a good one,” he says. “That sense of education is also what’s going on in the world at this moment.”
The research filtered up onto the screen. The changing chemistry between Lili and Gerda is the main delight of Hooper’s film, as Redmayne manages to go from an awkward, goose-necked man to a swanlike woman who is, at last, comfortable in her skin: “Tom allowed me freedom, so I could work out what angles worked, what angles didn’t. You’re not shooting chronologically. It’s a delicate thing.” Vikander, in perhaps her most astonishingly frank and intimate performance, makes Gerda as arresting a figure as Lili, and as brave a character, too. “I was sort of worried about finding someone who could match Eddie,” Hooper says. “Alicia was that person.”...
...“In acting you have very little control or capacity for choice,” Redmayne says. “The only choice that I have had in this past couple of years—and really, it’s just happened—is ‘Is this a story that you’d like to be a part of?’ ” He pauses for a moment and then smiles. “Yeah.”...
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