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
It's the weird thing Eton does - you're at school next to lords and earls and, in my case, Prince William, so you end up being used to dealing with those sorts of people.
A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what's true.
On so many levels, acting in film and TV is so much the sum of its parts, and somewhere in there, there's an alchemical thing that makes something happen or not - that makes something connect or not. Now, of course you want to make work that people see, but the enjoyment I get out of acting is playing characters.
In England we have this saying about Marmite: people either love it or hate it. That's like a lot of the movie work I've done. People either find it repulsive or find it really interesting and get engaged in it.
I always try to describe making movies like summer camp, or some holiday where you spend all day, every day with a new group of people whom you kind of love and then never see again.
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.
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 walk around talking to myself in accents. Usually people look at me like I'm a complete fruit loop.
Making a film or doing a play are completely different experiences and entirely fulfilling, but completely unique. I also think one complements the other. People often say that theater is about flexing your muscles, and is actually real acting, whereas I sort of disagree.
If you're an English actor and turn up in America, they don't have an opinion about where you sit. They have no idea what auditions to send you to, so they send you to everything.
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.
My first film, 'Like Minds,' was with Toni Colette, who was extraordinary. I mean it was basically a mini-masterclass for acting on film at a time when all you could probably see were my eyebrows bouncing up and down on screen.
Ladies and babies, and mortgages, for that matter, can all wait. Acting has done a strange thing to me, though. I often sit there, thinking, 'I love this, but I wouldn't put my daughter on the stage.'