After three outings in the Potterverse, the Oscar-winning actor – and one of Hollywood’s nicest guys – is ready for his villain phase

Last summer, after he had wrapped his latest movie, The Good Nurse, and just before he began rehearsals for his Olivier-winning West End revival of Cabaret, Eddie Redmayne went back to school. Not university, or some kind of brush-up-on-the-classics adult education class, but rather, a very specific and very renowned academic institute – the École Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq. Or, as it is more colloquially known, clown school.

For two weeks, in a converted 19th-century gymnasium in Paris, Redmayne took a course in the Theatre of the Absurd, where he spent his time, as he puts it, “improvising and playing.” But clown school is no funny business. The course was demanding, and his instructors, who’d studied with the legendary Lecoq themselves, were brutally honest, even withering. “There was none of this kiddie glove stuff,” Redmayne tells me as he does his impression of them. “Non, je ne marche pas!” he says, menacingly wagging a finger in front of his nose. No, I’m not buying it.

Redmayne’s classmates ranged in age from 18 to 60, all professional performers of some stripe or other. But Redmayne was the only one there who had won an Academy Award for Best Actor. He was the only one who had starred in a billion-dollar-grossing movie franchise. And yet, he felt like a complete amateur. That was the whole point. He wanted to start over, in a way, to expose himself, to really try and shed any of the actorly tics or patterns that had accrued over his 20-year career. “It was everything I needed,” he says of Lecoq. “To remind myself that you need to keep learning.”

We’re sitting in a hotel suite in Toronto, a couple of days after his 4-year-old son, Luke, has just started school himself for the first time back home in London. Redmayne’s an attentive and proud parent – he wouldn’t have missed Luke’s first day for anything – but he nevertheless had to fly out shortly after for the global premiere of The Good Nurse at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Redmayne’s family (which also includes his wife Hannah Bagshawe, a publicist, and their six-year-old daughter, Iris) had in fact lived with him in New York while he shot the film, but there was no way he was taking the kids out of school for the festival. “I didn’t think it was ideal for us all to up and leave on day two,” he says, smiling broadly.
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Eddie Redmayne arrives at the premiere of “The Good Nurse” at 45th Mill Valley Film Festival at Smith Rafael Film Center on October 16, 2022 in San Rafael, California. You can go to the gallery to enjoy the photos!

Acclaimed actor Eddie Redmayne stops by to chat about his role in the new film, “The Good Nurse,” and the many reasons why he is not cut out for medical work. Stick around for more with Eddie and check out the film, streaming now on Netflix.

In the second part of Stephen’s interview with Eddie Redmayne, the actor confesses that he probably shouldn’t have let his kids watch the trailer for his somewhat-dark new film, “The Good Nurse,” which is streaming now on Netflix.

For his latest role the Fantastic Beasts actor relished the chance to ditch the tweed suits and play against type as an American serial killer, he tells Kevin Maher

Six years ago, Eddie Redmayne put the word out. The Oscar-winning star of The Theory of Everything, who was already shooting the first instalment of the Fantastic Beasts franchise, let it be known that he wanted a change. Yes, he had become famous for a certain kind of moral rectitude in lavish period dramas that included Birdsong, The Other Boleyn Girl and Les Misérables (his tearful rendition of Empty Chairs at Empty Tables from that film has been viewed 7.4 million times on YouTube), but enough was enough. “It was me actively saying that I’m looking for something different. Something not British. Something, ideally, where it’s not me wearing a tweed suit.”

It has taken a while, during which time he has bashed out two more Fantastic Beasts and enjoyed a last dip in the period trough (The Aeronauts), but Redmayne’s desires have finally been met. In The Good Nurse all bets are off. The 40-year-old is in full reinvention mode as the prolific American serial killer Charles Cullen, a former nurse who during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s is said to have murdered as many as 400 patients. Redmayne stars opposite Jessica Chastain, playing Amy Loughren, the co-worker who helped to bring Cullen to justice. And although Redmayne insists today that the film tilts towards Loughren’s “hero’s journey”, the sexy marketing sell is clearly “Newt Scamander does Hannibal Lecter”.

And he does it well. His Cullen is top-tier Redmayne, a mass of creepy physical touches (a blinkless smile, an off-kilter stare) and conflicted gestures perfected over three months of deep-diving research. “I found as much footage of Charlie as I could and I learnt the accent, I learnt the movement, and then I even went to nurse school, where I found out that I’m a f***ing useless nurse!” he says, chuckling at his inadequacies. Redmayne does this a lot. Good-natured self-deprecation. He is sipping decaf coffee in a swanky London hotel suite and wearing a crisp red and white “western-style” shirt that suggests a friendly yet slightly fragile cowboy. He peppers his conversation with asides about being not very good.
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