Eddie in the US VOGUE November 2014 Issue

Eddie Redmayne Takes on a Transformative Role as Stephen Hawking

photo source

Excerpts from the interesting new VOGUE interview:

...The great thing about actors is that when they tell you a story, they act it out in front of you, so it feels like you were there. When Eddie met Hawking to watch the movie’s May Ball scene at Cambridge (coincidentally, also Redmayne’s alma mater), where Hawking’s younger self had danced with Jane Wilde, the woman who was to be his wife of 30 years, “It was like stepping back in time,” says Redmayne. “Everyone was dressed, and we were waiting for the fireworks display. As if on cue, Stephen came in in his wheelchair with his caregivers—it was nighttime, and his face was uplit by his computer screen—and just as he arrived, the fireworks went off. It was the most rock-star entrance I’ve ever seen.”...

...The film’s director, James Marsh (who made Man on Wire), thought Redmayne had “a nice physical resemblance to Stephen.” Calling from Copenhagen, where he has a home, Marsh said, “Then it became a question of how he pulls this off. What he does in the film is inhabit a very progressive degeneration of muscular activity—he goes from able-bodied Stephen Hawking to the Stephen Hawking of the public imagination.”...

...Hugh Jackman, who played the role of Jean Valjean (in Les Mis), remarks on Redmayne’s endurance. “A man who can pretend to be unconscious as I accidentally dipped his head in a sewer many times can truly do anything!”

“Anything” includes pushing out expectations by taking on a virtual action movie as “an evil tyrant from outer space” in Jupiter Ascending, for which he swung about on wires 100 feet in the air and was “flung around like a trapeze artist,”
as well as the physically transformative role of Hawking. “He’s a very bright man, but he wears his intelligence and his talent very, very lightly,” observes Alfred Molina, who played Rothko opposite Redmayne in Red in both London and New York... 

You can read the full interview here (photo source)

Magazine shoots - Eddie Redmayne Interview - Vogue US ( November 2014) (big size)

For full size click on the pictures!

Daily Mail: Eddie Redmayne cuts a dashing figure for Vogue as he delves into the challenges of playing Stephen Hawking in upcoming biopic

...'As I got smaller, it was all about proportion,' Mr Redmayne says of shooting the film. 'Things like collars getting bigger, working with the propmakers to make the chairs bigger, so proportionally I’d look smaller in them.'...
...The film's director, James Marsh, told Vogue: 'We were putting enormous burdens on him. We stuck him in a wheelchair, got that to work, and next thing he was up and running about.'...