Eddie Redmayne: “Until there’s a settlement, there are certain parts I won’t play.” | Eddie Redmayne

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Wearing faded blue jeans, a white jacket and a scarf, Eddie Redmayne sips coffee in a hotel restaurant in central London while jazz music blasts in the background. No wedding ring, though. Excuse me. Spotted without a ring! he says, horrified. He messed it up while filming The Danish Girl eight years ago, which is one reason he laments that movie. We’ll get to the others in time.

He bought a replacement ring and then lost that too, so he gave up. In jewelry, this is not marriage. “I’m incredibly happily married,” he says apologetically, “so I’m afraid there’s no scoop.” The tone matches his demeanor, and is that of a Saturday boy in John Lewis: personable, friendly, and sincerely sorry he doesn’t have the item in your size. He’s 41 but he could pass for his mid-twenties. His disheveled hair is rust-colored, his skin is speckled with freckles, and his lips are so plump they look like scarlet jelly.

a scarf that stays knotted around his neck all morning together; He caught a cold on his final trip to the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, where he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as serial killer Charles Cullen in The Good Nurse. When he sneezes today, he takes out a huge red handkerchief dotted with white dots, like a magician preparing to make crockery disappear.

A character study paired with a critique of the system… Redmayne as Charles Cullen with Jessica Chastain as Amy Loughren in The Good Nurse. Photo: JoJo Whilden/Courtesy of Netflix

In fact, his party trick is just the opposite: He makes the prizes appear. He bagged the big three (Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe) for playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, and Olivier last year for Emcee’s mercurial lizard in Cabaret, which also starred Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles. An audio recording, recorded during live performances of more brutality, was released. Redmayne’s approach to the character, he says, “is that he’ll shapeshift and appear as an Aryan leader who can drop his club in one of the champagne bottles at the end, and then walk off into the night. Whatever happens, he’s fine.”

He took home his first Olivier (plus Tony) in 2010 to play Mark Rothko’s assistant in red. Every night, he and his co-star Alfred Molina would spray paint on stage while mocking giant Rothkos imitations. What a job for an art history graduate, even if Redmayne’s Cambridge dissertation is in Yves Klein blue. And don’t forget his Golden Raspberry Award for worst supporting actor in the Wachowski sisters’ incomprehensible fantasy Jupiter Ascending, in which a curvy, lip-smacking prince wears clothes worthy of a fetish night: solid gold collars and polka-dotted stretch jackets, topless underneath. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “I still haven’t. I honestly haven’t seen the whole movie. But I loved making choices that were…” He wrinkles his nose. “Well, ‘bold’ is probably a very nice word.”

Awards are the reason we are here today. It’s heartening that enough of Redmayne’s peers have taken note of his intimidating but impressive work in The Good Nurse to vote for him in the Screen Actors Guild Awards next month. I wish him success. “Oh cheers. It will never happen but it will be fun to go.” A few days after we met, he also received a BAFTA nomination to add to the tally.

“Lizardly and mercurial”… Redmayne won last year’s Olivier for an Emcee in Cabaret. Photography: Mark Brenner

He plays Charlie Cullen, a hardworking and seemingly compassionate nurse who is now serving 18 consecutive life sentences for killing 29 patients in his care at various hospitals in New Jersey over nearly two decades; The actual death toll could be in the hundreds. He contaminated intravenous bags with insulin, and injected patients with lethal doses of heart medication. His friend and colleague Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) was instrumental in bringing him to justice, but The Good Nurse is less a story of heroes and villains than an indictment of the profit-focused healthcare system that has enabled him to hide his actions.

“It gives employers every opportunity to turn it off,” Redmayne says. It’s like: ‘Fucking do it. Follow.’ This is what I found interesting about the text. In some ways, yes, it’s a true crime story, but it felt more like a character study paired with a critique of the system.” With the NHS at its greatest stakes, the film doubles as a warning to audiences in the UK. “Well, it’s more than just a critique of health care in the US. It is about systems in general in which you lose the power of the individual. It should sound a giant alarm bell as to what we have here and what we take for granted. The NHS is going through an incredibly complicated time.”

Redmayne as Julianne Moore’s son in Savage Grace (2007). Photo: Moviestore/Rex Collection/Shutterstock

It’s admirable that the film resists trying to answer the question of why Colin was killed. But even the least sensitive viewer might wonder if he considers those in his care to be people or just potential killings. “In those scenes with the patients, I was really playing with the empathy and kindness, with the killer’s sense of being a different person,” he says. “I think he was, for all intents and purposes, an excellent nurse. But there were times when he was like an empty vessel overflowing with arrogance and arrogance. I spent time with the real Amy, and she described those moments when the Charlie she knew disappeared. This breakaway notion was a revelation to me. That’s how I played with him. It was about finding that void, that different person.”

The demarcation is illustrated in a pair of chilling confrontation scenes: first in a restaurant, where Amy wears a wire as she tries to entice Colin into making a statement incriminating her; Then after his arrest, when the interview officer attacks him. In both moments, the actor turns away from the camera and then turns back to face us, his features fixed in an impenetrable mask. Somewhere in it, a switch was pushed to “off”.

I thought if anything were to happen to me it would be Sunday night television, an English and Etonian thing

No one should be surprised that Redmayne is capable of this cuteness. One of his first films was Savage Grace, another fact-based psychological drama. He played the tormented, fraught heir in an almost incestuous relationship with his socialite mother, played by Julianne Moore. Redmayne fought hard to get the role. Being very close to the beginning of his on-screen career, he was introduced in 2007 as a risk-taker, likeable possibility. He made good on that promise in off-the-cuff oddball endeavors like Hick, limping Texas pedophile and chasing Chloe Grace Moretz.

His path was unorthodox, even if his background (he was in the same year as Prince William at Eton) was privilege embodied. “I didn’t know about film or television, but I got into acting because I loved them in school,” he says. suggested by a former drama teacher to Mark Rylance’s all-male production of Twelfth Night at the Globe; Redmayne, aged 20 at the time, won the part on viola. He shrugs, “I played so many women in school that it wasn’t long.” Adela Quested from A Passage to India is one of his favourites. “I want to see the real India,” he gurgles, slipping briefly into character and staring blankly across the restaurant.

“I made this movie with the best of intentions, but I think it was a mistake”… Redmayne as Lily Elbe in The Danish Girl (2015). Photo: Universal Pictures/Allstar

His career goals were modest. “I thought if anything were to happen to me it would be Sunday night TV, an English and Etonian thing. Maybe a little part in Foyle’s War.” That was not the case. His breakthrough stage role was, in 2004, a fragile young American whose father is in a sexual relationship with a farm animal, in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who’s Sylvia? American directors came to see it. Very quickly, instead of being written as English characters, I was cast as Americans.”

I’ve played so many women in school that it wasn’t a stretch

In addition to Savage Grace, there was Robert De Niro’s spy thriller The Good Shepherd, where those plump lips came in handy playing Angelina Jolie’s son. And that prediction finally came true on Sunday night. “Finally I found my way back to Tweed,” he smiles. He was Angel Claire opposite Gemma Arterton as Tess of the D’Urbervilles, then was the lead in Sebastian Faulkes’ Birdsong. “Besides that weird period when I was into anything tangentially associated with Queen Elizabeth.” It muddles the chronology a bit – a role in the Elizabeth I series appears right at the beginning of his biography – but it’s true that if there’s a double pipe and hose hanging about it, young Redmayne was wearing it or standing next to someone he was (see The Other Boleyn Girl; Elizabeth: golden age). He runs across his IMDb page: “Then Theory, and The Danish Girl, which I suppose is an English period drama that isn’t…”

Ah, the Danish girl. Redmayne’s publicists politely asked me not to pressure him on an issue he had no more to add: the public statement in 2020 in which he distanced himself from Fantastic Beasts author JK Rowling on the issue of transgender identity. “I don’t agree with Joe’s comments,” he said at the time. “Trans women, trans men, and valid non-binary identities”. But it was Redmayne who brought up The Danish Girl, a movie he said he wouldn’t feel comfortable making right now. He believes the role of painter Lili Elbe, one of the first known people to undergo gender-affirming surgery, should have gone to a trans artist. “I made this movie with the best of intentions, but I think it was a mistake,” he said in 2021.

Redmayne won an Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (2014). Photo: Liam Daniel/AP

I ask how this realization colored his feelings about the movie itself. Is it a failure? “Truth be told, I only see flaws in the work I do anyway,” he says after a long pause. Then stare into space for 10 seconds. “It really worked… I, um, I… I don’t know how to answer that question.” He turned to me, his eyes wrinkled and sad. “I don’t know how to answer it. Sorry.” Can’t he even say how he feels about the movie? “The thing I find most complicated is the truth…” Here is an explanation of the genesis of the script before he finally comes to his conclusion: “The movie feels like a fictional version. It doesn’t feel like Lily’s story.”

He won’t now take parts that should go to trans actors: that’s obvious. But what can someone with influence do to help fellow trans people? “A few years ago, I did a workshop with trans actors at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Many of them were rightly questioning me about my choice to do The Danish Girl, and they pointed out that many trans actors don’t go to drama school because they don’t see it as an opportunity. Unless there are parts you think you could play, why would you?”

sigh. “I think everyone wants to be able to play everything. It’s what we dream about as actors, and we should do it. No one wants to be limited by their gender or sexuality, but historically, these communities haven’t had a seat at the table. Until there’s a compromise, There are certain parts that I will not play.” Earlier, reflecting on his lack of formal training, he had told me, “I can only learn from my mistakes.” At least no one can say he didn’t put his money where his mouth is.

The Good Nurse is on Netflix. Cabaret: London Cast Recording is released by Decca Records

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