For Frecknall, the challenge is to make sure its revolutionary quality comes through. “I am always interested in how you can tell this fresh,” she says. “There are a lot of things bubbling up: politics, gender, hierarchies, stereotyping, the human fear of otherness and difference and how that can be weaponized. Eddie brings an angle to it that’s unexpected.”
Redmayne’s casting has, in fact, caused disquiet in some quarters, Scutt explains. “The history of that role is one of queer portrayal.” This began with Joel Grey’s white-faced
take; it has been emphasized by other interpretations, including Alan Cumming’s mesmeric and menacing incarnation. (Grey and Cumming are both gay, while Redmayne is not.) Redmayne pauses for a moment when I bring this up. “I hope when people see the performance, the interpretation will justify the casting,” he says. “The way I see the character is as shape-shifting and a survivor.”
“Shape-shifting is a word we have been using a lot,” says Scutt. “And not just about Eddie. It feels like a metaphor for the period—a party at the end of the world.” In this, Buckley sees some parallels with the present: “They must have known that life was short,” she says. “What we are coming out of now is not a world war, but the fear of death is present.”
Despite the strictures of COVID, both Buckley and Redmayne have had busy years. Buckley spent some time at her new home in rural Norfolk before filming Alex Garland’s Men and then Women Talking. (She also appears in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter this fall.) In Redmayne’s case, COVID closed the set of J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts just as he was about to film the third installment. He spent lockdown in Staffordshire with his wife, Hannah, and his children, Iris, who is five, and Luke, three. “My wife is gently converting me to someone who knows his way around a veg patch,” he says, with obvious affection for the woman he married in 2014. “I loved it.
Iris was just learning to read, and Luke was just learning to talk. I felt very lucky to be around.”
Redmayne is clearly nervous about his return to the stage, yet his excitement keeps breaking through: “In theater, I had such luck with new plays, such fun, and I have not always had that on film. I have done some catastrophically bad films and had some great experiences. In theater, I’ve always found a wonderful alchemy.” Finding those moments of truth, when a chink of utter honesty is revealed, is Redmayne’s goal. “It’s the reason I love what I do, that rare moment when something becomes real. That’s the drug.” He smiles again, perhaps imagining the moment his Emcee steps out onstage, peels back the layers of artifice, and reveals something true.
In this story: makeup, Andrew Denton; hair, Kei Terada.
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