“Pretty well-endowed,” Eddie Redmayne says emphatically, sliding his iPhone across the tabletop. It’s late morning at Colbert, a café-bistro in London’s Chelsea neighborhood, and, latte orders placed, it seems we’ve reached the dick-pic-sharing portion of the conversation. He points down at his screen, and there it is in all its glory: the chiseled, shimmering torso—of his Oscar statuette. And it’s wearing tighty-whities. The mini briefs were a gift from Jimmy Kimmel given to Redmayne in February after he won Best Actor for his portrayal of the ALS-afflicted astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. “The Velcro is coming off,” Redmayne says, laughing. “So, occasionally, he’s buck-naked.”
Redmayne, like his little gold man, prefers modesty—he’s bashful about discussing his well-heeled upbringing in London, his education at Eton (where Prince William was a classmate) and then Cambridge, where, as an undergrad, he landed his first big break in a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, opposite the theater legend Mark Rylance. But nowhere was his almost-pathological humility more apparent than during his Oscar-acceptance speech, when he practically begged the Academy’s forgiveness for his short yet amazingly ascendant career arc: “I’m fully aware that I am a lucky, lucky man.”
He’s also kind of fucked. Redmayne, who turns 34 in January, realizes this too, which is why his typically British stiff upper lip is quivering a bit today. The source of his agita: The Danish Girl, the ripely timed story of Lili Elbe, born Einar Wegener, the first person to undergo sex-reassignment surgery, in Dresden, Germany, in 1931—and a role that brings with it more potential pitfalls than Redmayne can count. “You don’t want to let people down,” he explains, nervously fidgeting with a sugar dispenser. “And you know you will—you can’t please everyone.”
Since the first images of a lithe, ruby-lipped, bewigged Redmayne surfaced online in February, The Danish Girl has produced buzz and scrutiny in equal measure. After all, the difference between a subtle, nuanced portrayal of an iconic transgender pioneer and Mrs. Doubtfire–esque bad drag can be as thin as a pair of panty hose. And Redmayne—unlike Caitlyn Jenner or Orange Is the New Black’s Laverne Cox—is cisgender, leading some to accuse the filmmakers of having wasted the rare opportunity to cast a transgender actor. Redmayne can offer only so much to counter that criticism, but the responsibility he feels to the community weighs heavily on him. As one transgender friend told him during his research, the decision to transition boils down to a willingness to “give anything and everything to live a life authentic.”
