{"id":7131,"date":"2015-11-25T09:05:09","date_gmt":"2015-11-25T17:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/redmayne-hooper-reunite-for-transgender-tale-danish-girl\/"},"modified":"2015-11-25T09:05:09","modified_gmt":"2015-11-25T17:05:09","slug":"redmayne-hooper-reunite-for-transgender-tale-danish-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/redmayne-hooper-reunite-for-transgender-tale-danish-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"Redmayne, Hooper reunite for transgender tale ‘Danish Girl’"},"content":{"rendered":"

TORONTO<\/strong> \u2014 In a pivotal scene early in Tom Hooper\u2019s \u201cThe Danish Girl,\u201d the 1920s Copenhagen painter Einar Wegener, as played by Eddie Redmayne, sits in for a portrait his wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander) is painting of a ballerina. Breathlessly caressing the stockings and slippers, something stirs in Einar.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a moment that cues a coming transformation: Einar will gradually become a woman, finally undergoing one of the earliest known sex reassignment surgeries. Einar becomes Lili Elbe, a celebrated trans pioneer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t want it to be an epiphany,\u201d says Redmayne of the scene. \u201cIt felt like she had been born, and society and herself had encased herself in this masculine exoskeleton. The important thing for me was the film should see that unraveling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Redmayne, the best-actor Oscar winner earlier this year for his Stephen Hawking in \u201cThe Theory of Everything,\u201d has proven to be an immaculately technical actor and an expert of metamorphosis. A year after charting Hawking\u2019s physical degeneration, his conversion from Einar to Lili in \u201cThe Danish Girl\u201d again has the 33-year-old British actor being hailed as a likely Academy Award nominee.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the third film together for Hooper (\u201cThe King\u2019s Speech\u201d) and Redmayne, who had a small part in the director\u2019s \u201cElizabeth: The Golden Age.\u201d (2007) where the queen sentences him to death. \u201cI remember in that moment thinking: I need to find a leading role for Eddie,\u201d Hooper says.<\/p>\n

It was while filming 2012\u2019s \u201cLes Miserables,\u201d in which Redmayne played the tender revolutionary Marius, that the two began plotting \u201cThe Danish Girl,\u201d based on David Ebershoff\u2019s novel of the true-life events. On the film\u2019s Paris barracks, Hooper slipped Redmayne Lucinda Coxon\u2019s script.<\/p>\n

\u201cTom just said: Will you have a read of this?\u201d Redmayne says.<\/p>\n

It was the first role Redmayne was offered without an audition. When Redmayne and Hooper convened for an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, it was also their first time sitting together for an interview. At times, their combined Britishness made for extreme humility.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe dream to get to play interesting and in both those cases extraordinary people, it does not come along,\u201d says Redmayne of Hawking and Elbe. \u201cAnd I also have no question: I don\u2019t think it will come along again. I realize that I\u2019ve been very lucky in a couple years to play two formidable people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reviews for \u201cThe Danish Girl,\u201d painterly and stately, have singled out Redmayne\u2019s performance, which caps what the actor calls a \u201chead-spinning\u201d period in his life. He wed Hanna Bagshawe last December, and, two days after winning the Oscar, was back on set making \u201cThe Danish Girl,\u201d still groggy from the partying.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy instinct was Eddie from the beginning,\u201d Hooper says. \u201cI was truly open to any route. I know in a previous incarnation there had been talk of a woman playing the role, which is also equally valid because you\u2019re saying Lili is a woman underneath.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some, though, have questioned casting a man as a transgender woman. Sean Baker\u2019s \u201cTangerine,\u201d released earlier this year, by contrast, has drawn raves for its transgender actresses, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s something in Ed that\u2019s drawn to the feminine, maybe,\u201d says Hooper of Redmayne, who also played Viola in a stage production of \u201cTwelfth Night.\u201d \u2018\u2019In the movie, Lili presents as Einar for two-thirds of it and the transition is quite late, so that also fed into my thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Danish Girl\u201d is nevertheless an outlier. Earlier this year, the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism studied the 100 top-grossing films of 2014 and found zero transgender characters.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a serious problem not only in our industry but within many industries of trans men and trans women and discrimination in the workplace,\u201d Redmayne says. \u201cIn the United States, you can be fired in 32 states for being trans.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I first thought of doing the movie, it was considered a hard film to finance,\u201d Hooper says. \u201cI must admit there were people around me who were happy to tell me I shouldn\u2019t do the film. And now people see it as an obvious film to have done, and I think that\u2019s indicative of a wonderful shift that\u2019s begun to happen in the culture where trans stories have become more acceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Redmayne did extensive research and met with many generations of transgender people to understand Lili better.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was incredibly ignorant at the time. It was several years of meeting people from the trans community and educating myself on Lili,\u201d Redmayne says. \u201cTo be comfortable in your own skin is a term that\u2019s thrown around, but it\u2019s actually incredibly complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

As played by Redmayne, Lili\u2019s gradual revelation is a knotty mix of emotions \u2014 an increasingly confident awakening where a swelling rapture overpowers apprehension.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe key balancing act of directing the film was balancing shame and joy, balancing this idea that the transition was both a release into anxiety and a release from anxiety,\u201d Hooper says. \u201cIt was terribly important to me that we could always feel through Eddie\u2019s performance of Lili the promise of the happiness that lay in committing to the journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http:\/\/twitter.com\/jakecoyleAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TORONTO \u2014 In a pivotal scene early in Tom Hooper\u2019s \u201cThe Danish Girl,\u201d the 1920s Copenhagen painter Einar Wegener, as played by Eddie Redmayne, sits in for a portrait his wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander) is painting of a ballerina. Breathlessly caressing the stockings and slippers, something stirs in Einar. It\u2019s a moment that cues a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-7131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7131"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=7131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}