There’s an old saying, the kind you might find in the office of a high school guidance counselor, that goes something like, “Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll end up among the stars.” Eddie Redmayne is an actor already on the rise, but with his performance as a young Stephen Hawking in search of the secrets of the universe in this past fall’s The Theory of Everything, he shot past the moon and may well end up with interstellar stardom. Or at least an Oscar.
Born in London in 1982 and educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied art history, Redmayne came up with some dynamic and swoon-worthy roles in lush period pieces such as Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Robert De Niro’s CIA saga The Good Shepherd, and the epic 2010 miniseries The Pillars of the Earth. But if Redmayne’s early work showed that he could be an engaging performer, his recent work (including Tom Hooper’s starry 2012 production of Les Misérables, in which the actor stormed the barricades as the romantic Marius) showed him to be as ambitious as he is talented. This month, Redmayne will again aim for the heavens, in the Wachowskis’ space opera Jupiter Ascending, donning some serious mascara in the process to play an extra-planetary villain.
Jennifer Lawrence, who knows a bit about sci-fi, met Redmayne years ago through director Oliver Stone. Fresh off her worldwide press tour for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, the Oscar winner called Redmayne, who was in Turin, Italy, to talk about running on fear, Real Housewives addiction, fake falls, and bad salmon.