Rafe Spall interview by Eddie for Interview Magazine

Eddie Redmayne interviewed British actor Rafe Spall for the October issue of the Interview Magazine.

RAFE SPALL 

By EDDIE REDMAYNE
Photography NORBERT SCHOERNER
(I added a few photos to the article as eye candy)
Full interview here

PEOPLE DEVELOP THESE EXTRAORDINARY BONDS IN THEATER. YOU MIGHT NOT BE GOING OVER TO EACH OTHER'S HOUSES EVERY NIGHT, BUT YOU KNOW YOU'VE BEEN THROUGH SOMETHING SPECIAL.

—RAFE SPALL

During a brief visit back to London, Spall, 30, took time out during rehearsals to sit down with actor Eddie Redmayne at the Royal Court Theatre Bar & Kitchen in London, where they discussed his long road to Betrayal, the challenges and benefits of having actors in the family, and the feverish anticipation—and intense scrutiny—surrounding his Broadway breakout.

The most interesting - Eddie related - parts of the interview:

REDMAYNE: That's one of the big differences between film and theater. With theater, you're ultimately going to be performing live in front of an audience every night, so you, as actors, really are relying on one another, and as a result, there has to be a kind of trust that develops. Whereas with film, you can sometimes be a bit more selfish because you just have to get through the moment when the camera is on you.
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REDMAYNE about shockers onstage: It's a weird moment when something like that happens in the theater, isn't it? You've had nightmares about it your whole life, and when it happens, it's almost like it happens in slow motion. You forget a line or something onstage and you look out at the audience in front of you and you're like, "This is the moment I've dreaded all my life and it's happened." But it's also kind of weirdly chill...........
SPALL: .... near the end of the play, during a very quiet moment between Sally and me, a man went [makes groaning sound]. I didn't know if he was dying or what. But we carried on—which is what you do. You have to stop, though, when you hear the immortal call, "Is there a doctor in the house?"..........

REDMAYNE: I had one of those moments when I was doing Richard II at the Donmar [Warehouse], when I heard somebody make the exact same noise that you're describing. I was doing a scene with Ron Cook, and staring at him very intently, trying to stay in the scene, but eventually I was like, "Is there a doctor in the house?"
SPALL: Did you say it?
REDMAYNE: Yeah. The hilarious thing about the Donmar audience was that about 50 hands went up. Everyone was like, "I'm an osteopath!" "I'm an acupuncturist!" I was like, "Why haven't we a heart surgeon?"
SPALL: So you just stopped and went off and carried on?
REDMAYNE: We went off stage, and then the extraordinary thing was that when we came back, we went back a wee bit, and you could see the audience react to watching us do the same thing again ... It took us a while to win back the audience.
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REDMAYNE: I don't know that I ever told you, but I saw your dad play Bottom once.
SPALL: Really?
REDMAYNE: Yeah. As a kid, I saw A Midsummer Night's Dream, and your dad was playing Bottom and the woman playing Puck was a contortionist. My mum and I went on a tour behind the scenes afterwards—you could pay for a little tour. But that was one of the experiences that made me want to become an actor.

SPALL: That's amazing! I remember that play.

REDMAYNE: It's interesting, though, because my family isn't involved in this world, so when I do a play, they will come in and be very supportive and say, "It's wonderful." And then I can sort of time my mum to when, like, 23 and a half minutes afterwards, she'll go, "Do you think you had your hands in your pockets too much?" [Spall laughs] I can't imagine what it's like having a dad who is an actor, though. ......

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REDMAYNE: You know, when I started out, getting an episode of Doctors or The Bill was a massive deal for me. But one of the things I've noticed from my pals who have actor or director parents is that they tended to look more at the quality of the scripts and things like that—probably because that's how they were used to thinking about things. ....
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REDMAYNE: [laughs] I'm going to play a physicist, which is vicious irony given that I studied art history. How's your math?
SPALL: Terrible. I had to do a thing where I had write out a massive formula on the board ...
REDMAYNE: I have to do that as well.
SPALL: You just have to parrot it. I had to write out a thing called ... I don't know what it was called. I had no idea what it meant either.
REDMAYNE: Just do it with conviction.
SPALL: Yeah, just do it with absolute conviction.
REDMAYNE: With Stephen Hawking, I'm just worried about people asking me physics questions during the press tour.
SPALL: Constellations was about physics—quantum physics, the multiverse, string theory, and stuff like that.
REDMAYNE: Wormholes.
SPALL: Wormholes, yeah. I could never get near understanding that, but we pretend that we can. That's one of the great things about what we do. We get to learn little bits about what other people do.
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They met earlier this year (in May) in New York,

when Eddie went to the theatre for "Orphans" with Andrew Garfield to watch his mutual friend Tom Sturridge.
Below photos - Eddie at the theater, along with Garfield and Edgar Wright and Rafe Spall.