Eddie Redmayne's Transformation - futurette and articles

Amazing new futurette about Eddie Redmayne's transformation to Stephen Hawking
Article with this video on YAHOO

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Stephen Hawking: “I thought Eddie Redmayne portrayed me very well” and that “at times, 

I thought he was me.”...”I think Eddie’s commitment will have a big emotional impact,”

  

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BuzzFeed:

The Transformation of Eddie Redmayne
In The Theory of Everything, the 32-year-old actor went through a rigorous, painful process to take on the physicality and emotional life of famed scientist Stephen Hawking. It’s a performance that could catapult Redmayne to an Oscar.

...“I had to absolutely map what his physical decline was going to be,” he says. “I wanted to do that with a dancer. … Quite particularly on film, people are a bit scared to ask actors to do [a scene] again. But with dancers, they’re extraordinary artists, and it’s like” — he began clapping his hands — “do it again, do it again, do it again until you get it right. That was the rigor in which I wanted to work — not to compromise. … For Stephen, the disease couldn’t be less important. Like, he has no interest in it,” he continues. “I wanted to make sure that this is not a story of a disease. It’s an unconventional love story. I wanted to be totally free of thinking about what my little finger’s doing to play whatever the emotion was.”...

Photograph by David J. Bertozzi for BuzzFeed News (x)

...Before filming, Jones and Redmayne knew each other from their earlier work during Michael Grandage’s tenure overseeing the Donmar Warehouse Theatre in London, but they only really became “great friends,” as Redmayne puts it, while making the film. That friendship was sealed very early in the production during a scene in which, after learning of his diagnosis, Jane pushes a deeply depressed Stephen to play croquet with her — only to be quietly devastated when she sees just how physically debilitated he’d already become. “He’s setting up a challenge, isn’t he?” says Jones. “He’s saying, ‘This isn’t going to be easy.’ It’s totally a test. And he’s saying if you can get through this, then maybe we can spend our lives together.”
It became a kind of test for Jones and Redmayne, as well, after Redmayne asked Jones to tease him off camera when it was time for him to shoot Stephen struggling to play croquet. “That takes great trust, because she basically sort of started in,” he says, laughing. “And she knew where to hit me. I think the crew were all going, ‘This is day two, and they hate each other!’”
Marsh, for his part, was delighted. “Stephen is really angry at this point,” he says. “He’s angry at himself, he’s angry at the illness, he’s angry at Jane. He’s angry at this totally fucked up situation he’s in. He has to show that. Felicity began to taunt him, and he began to respond to it, and it just got very interesting. It was one those important moments in the film where you knew the actors were going to work for each other and off of each other and help each other, even though it felt like it was kind of cruel to be mocking someone as she was doing. But it was very helpful to the performance...Full article here

Related quote from an other Eddie Redmayne interview: "I had this way of working with a director called Derick Martini. I did a film with him and Chloe Moretz called Hick. He had this way of working that, once it is on the close-up, he’d have the other actor mess with you in character from behind the camera. It was the second day of shooting, that croquet scene. Basically, Felicity is someone I trust so much that while I was playing that game of croquet, she was just shouting abuse at me. Trying to get me riled." (x)

#theoryofeverything #eddieredmayne wow. Remarkable transformative performance. Blown away.
— Derick Martini (@DerickMartini) November 12, 2014