"The Danish Girl's" Alicia Vikander and Eddie Redmayne prepare for their interview.
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The four-day Variety Studio wrapped Monday, after doing more than 40 video interviews with stars like Sandra Bullock, Michael Caine, Bryan Cranston, Elle Fanning and Eddie Redmayne...
The studio was created in the men’s department of the swanky Holt Renfrew department store. Like much of the Toronto Fest, it’s slightly surreal but ultimately makes sense.
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Watch Variety’s conversation with “
The Danish Girl” stars
Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander and Tom Hooper.
Holt Renfrew Variety Dinner in honor of 'The Danish Girl' - excerpts from the report of
Shinan Govani: Watching TIFF’s kaleidoscope of buzz unfold around Eddie Redmayne
...Having taken the storm again with his aching portrayal in
The Danish Girl this year – hey, did Stephen Hawking’s theory encompass the possibility of back-to-back Oscars, by chance?! – Eddie plopped down with us at a swish sit-down held for his new film inside the upper level of Holt Renfrew on Bloor Street.
One, indubitably, would have to be more than colour-blind to not see the kaleidoscope of buzz unfolding for his transgender turn in the Tom Hooper-directed film. Wouldn’t they? Indeed, as forks clanked on glasses on this night, the die was possibly cast, when Variety magazine editor Claudia Eller – who was co-hosting the one long table, and making a few remarks – said pointedly to both Eddie, and his comely co-star, Alicia Vikander, also seated, “Good luck at the Oscars!”....
To prepare for the role, Eddie read Lili’s autobiography,Man Into Woman, plus sat down with a string of transgender women, but he also drew on an early rabbit-hole experience when he was cast as Viola in an all-male school production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
(my note: Twelfth Night wasn't a school production, but the 'Shakespeare's Globe 400th anniversary
production at the Middle Temple Hall with the excellent Mark Rylance who played Olivia.)
“I was a boy playing a girl playing a boy,” he told me. For this film, though, he insists, its essence is that it’s “a love story … these two souls who meet whose love isn’t limited to gender, to sexuality, to anything.”...
But, in the here and now, the star of the night was Eddie. Unable to resist his charms, among others: billionairess and uber-patroness Hilary Weston, who was seated right beside the actor. As the night was winding down, she couldn’t help but lure him into a selfie with her. After several aborted attempts – stretching one’s arm to get a self-portrait is not for the faint of heart – Mrs. Holt Renfrew managed to snag a pic of herself with Eddie over her shoulder. Fabulous!
