Eddie Redmayne
Eddie Redmayne
Edward John David "Eddie" Redmayne, OBEis an English actor, model and singer. Born and raised in the City of Westminster, Redmayne studied history of art at the Trinity College, Cambridge, after which he briefly dabbled with a modelling career. Redmayne began his professional acting career as a youth in London theatre before making his screen debut in 1998 with guest appearances on television. His first film roles came in 2006 with Like Minds and The Good Shepherd, and he went...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth6 January 1982
CityLondon, England
If I do a film and have to get naked, that tends to dictate how often I go to the gym. Acting in 'Richard II' on stage was a huge physical workout, so I ended up more toned than I normally am.
I do get stopped a bit now and then, but I can go to the supermarket and on the Tube without being noticed. It's usually me that gets starstruck, especially by TV stars.
Tequila is my salmon.
I have this horrific thing where I'm really bad with names and faces. I have an appalling memory. Someone will come up to me in the street and go, 'Eddie!', and I'll try and give myself time by going into overdrive, 'Hey, hi! Nice to see you!' and start a whole conversation because I can't distinguish between who I know and who I don't.
Everything about filmmaking is incredibly weird, and there's nothing natural about watching yourself on the big screen or hearing your voice. It's that same thing that you feel when you watch yourself on a video camera and you hate the sound of your voice - it's that times 800.
Up there on the screen, we can all fly. But down here on earth, we need to be each others wings.
As an actor there's a lot of scrutiny and, even when you've had success, it becomes about sustaining that success. A friend of mine described it as a peakless mountain. Even for De Niro there's Pacino and for Pacino there's De Niro.
I'm just one gigantic ball of rancid fear and self-consciousness. I'm entirely fueled by fear, so the fact that I knew it could be a catastrophic disaster made me unable to sleep, and made me work quite hard.
I walk around talking to myself in accents. Usually people look at me like I'm a complete fruit loop.
It can be a miserable profession, acting, because you always want what you can't have.
This is the great luxury of not working: the moment you read a book that has nothing to do with work, you know you're really relaxed. And I have a sh*t attention span. I can't concentrate for more than five minutes.
Listen, acting is not surgery, it's entertainment. You're doing something to hopefully move people, to make them laugh, to transport them. But actors are vulnerable, and the reason we're vulnerable is that we're always trying to recreate human behaviour.
I'm trying to buy a house and set some sense of roots because otherwise you're constantly chasing one job after another, and you look back and you've had all these very extraordinary experiences with extraordinary people, but there's not a line of continuity to it.
Learning lines is hard for me because I have the attention span of a six year old. That's why being on planes all the time is so useful - I'm forced to learn out of boredom.