How Eddie Redmayne did it

By Clemency Burton-Hill

September 2013. A young man lies in a Cambridge hotel room, wide awake. Dawn slips through the curtains as the clock ticks on. All through the night he has been watching that clock. As it reaches 4am, he is tempted to turn to the packet of sleeping pills in his washbag. In an hour’s time, a car will take him to a day’s work that will involve inhabiting one of the world’s most famous minds—and bodies. Over the next 12 hours, this man, who has never had a day’s acting training, will play the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. First, in the morning, as a healthy young man in 1963, before his diagnosis of Motor Neurone Disease (MND); then, after lunch, walking with two sticks in the late 1960s; and finally, probably by late afternoon, in a wheelchair, in the late 1980s. The scenes all share the same location, St John’s College. Shooting them on the same day will save money, so never mind the chronology, or the leading man’s sanity.

Eddie Redmayne is all too aware of those concerns. His “currency”, he feels, is low, and the film-makers have taken a risk in hiring him. He decides against the sleeping pill.