When Eddie Redmayne began dating Hannah Bagshawe in 2012, he felt the need to warn her about embarking on a relationship with an international movie star. At the time he had a series of roles lined up that looked, on paper at least, like they’d take him all over the world.
‘I said to her, “You know, with my life there could be a lot of travel, we could be nomads” – but she was all up for that,’ he recalls. ‘I then made Les Misérables, which was set in Paris, The Danish Girl, which was set in Copenhagen, and Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, which was set in New York…’ And? ‘And all of them were shot in Watford.’ Or Ealing. Or Slough, even.
Bagshawe and Redmayne can’t have been too disappointed. The pair married in 2014, the same year the thoroughly Cambridge-set The Theory of Everything, for which Redmayne would win an Academy Award, was released.
In a couple of weeks he will return to the big screen with the follow-up to Fantastic Beasts – the Harry Potter spin-off written by JK Rowling and produced by the same team as the Potter films, in which he starred as Newt Scamander, an eccentric English wizard zoologist who ends up fighting for good against evil with a motley band of acquaintances.
When he read Rowling’s script for that film’s sequel, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, he noticed that much of the action takes place in Paris during the années folles (‘crazy years’) of the 1920s. Bagshawe was thrilled. Redmayne was suspicious. ‘Nope, Watford again.’ Continue reading »