TBT - Video: Charlie Rose interview January 2015

  

“... When I met him that first time and I was so nervous. I'll never forget the moment that he first 

smiled... it's this overwhelming sense of warmth - and it's a very specific smile... when I finally 

met him, this mischief this, this kind of humor. The fact that he's been on "The Simpsons", he's 

been on "Big Bang Theory", his capacity to play with his own image in some ways is wonderful.”

- Eddie Redmayne on Stephen Hawking

In the interesting interview Eddie Redmayne talks about his role as world-renowned
physicist Stephen Hawking in "The Theory of Everything."
Full interview on charlierose.com with transcript here

"...What I find amazing researching Stephen was that he was lazy. When he was at Oxford,
he did his undergraduate degree at Oxford, and he got called in for a (inaudible). So to get
the top degree he had to sort of persuade the examiners, and he ended up saying, look, if
you give me a 2-1, I'll stay and do my research at Oxford. If you give me the first, I'll go to
Cambridge and you'll never have to see me again. And even when he arrived at Cambridge
he was lazy and I loved that knowing that one of the great minds of our lifetime was a bit
complacent. But it took -- it was the sentence of those two years that made him value time."

 

"...what I took away from the film was this idea of ... the theory of everything is sort of that perfect 

thing. But actually it's about aspiring to find that thing with the knowledge that you won't necessarily 

find it. And it was interesting because the other day I was reading -- when we met when I was doing 

"Red" tthe play about Mark Rothko. Dan Rice who had been Rothko's assistant at the time wrote 

something beautiful about art. He was an artist and he would describe, that being an artist is about 

aspiring for perfection with the acknowledgment that you will never get there. It's learning to enjoy -- 

I mean it's interesting hearing him talk about things in kind of similar terms, albeit it's very different." 

Charlie Rose: "And whatever went into the performance, it is so clear, anyone who has been even
close to Stephen Hawking -- but even if you haven't, you know that you're watching in some sense
that it's not just walking in front of a camera, you know and performing. That you had to have thought
clearly and long and deep about how you were going to in a sense capture this man who is such a
fascinating human being. So I thank you for that and thank you for coming."

(my screenshots)