How Eddie Redmayne Transformed into Stephen Hawking for “The Theory of Everything”

Paul Drinkwater/NBC(LOS ANGELES) — Oscar-nominated actor Eddie Redmayne said it took him four months to prepare for his role as physicist and bestselling author Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.

Redmayne said he reconfigured his body, with a choreographer’s help, to capture Hawking at each specific stage of his decades-long battle with ALS.

“I just needed to train my body, just in order to sustain the positions,” Redmayne told Nightline. “I knew that some of the positions would be specific and contorted and not necessarily comfortable.”

Knowing Hawking’s intimate, complex relationship with his wife, Jane, would form the backbone of the story told in The Theory of Everything. Redmayne said he closely examined key pieces of evidence from Hawking’s life, such as his wedding photo.

“It’s a very beautiful photo, but you see that he’s not only on the stick, his hand was on top of Jane’s and you can see if you look closely that he’s putting a lot of weight into her body weight,” Redmayne said. “It was that sort of investigation that you were starting to analyze the different muscles in his body and work out what his decline was.”

And, Redmayne added, getting Hawking’s facial expressions right required hours of study.

“Weirdly, trying to capture Stephen’s face was perhaps the most difficult,” he said. “I would sort of sit in front of a mirror and there were moments when you’re like, ‘Am I parodying? Is this horrible? Is this verging on, am I going to be offensive?’”

Yet it was only days before shooting for The Theory of Everything was to begin that Redmayne met Hawking for the first time. “Really the fear was, ‘What if I meet him and I realize I’ve got it all wrong?’” Redmayne said.

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