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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