Life Study by Annie Leibovitz
In the coupleâs Copenhagen studio, the artist Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) poses for his wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander). The actress describes the film as âa love story about learning to love yourself.â
Eddie Redmayne on Transforming into The Danish GirlÂ
The transformation starts with changes in the skin tone, soft pink on the upper cheeks, lipstick. The nose is a small challenge, but the peachy coloring is helpful, and the freckles are, too. Casual observers might see overpainting, or illusionism, or embellishment. To both the artist and the subject, though, the work is more akin to sculpture by relief: a technique of wearing away the well-known features of the male face to reveal the contours of a female countenance beneath.
Itâs early Tuesday afternoon at Londonâs Elstree Studios, and, in a little dressing room just off the soundstage, Jan Sewell, a makeup artist with a chic white bob, is putting the final touches on Eddie Redmayneâs face. Redmayne and Sewell have worked together closely over the past few yearsâshe exacted the slow, progressive changes that advanced Stephen Hawkingâs ALS in The Theory of Everything, which earned Redmayne his first Academy, BAFTA, SAG, and Golden Globe awards this yearâand theyâve developed what she calls âa complete shorthand.â Is the person who emerges from that wig too self-aware? Does this color distract from a delicate expression? The goal is to create a body that, working between the actual and the imagined, joins the actorâs form to a physique the character would know to be her own.
A few days earlier, in London, Redmayne finished shooting his last scenes for The Danish Girl, based on the 2000 historical novel by David Ebershoff. The movie was directed by Tom Hooper (Les MisĂ©rables, The Kingâs Speech), and it follows the real-life transition of Lili Elbe, born as Einar Wegener in lateânineteenth century Denmark, as she undergoes some of the very first sex-reassignment surgeries. The stages of Liliâs transformation, though, were more than a performance alone could convey, so Sewell helped define them, with a light touch. âIf I put a lot of makeup on, he would look like a man with makeup,â she says. âI reshaped his mouth by taking away the corners and giving him more of a feminine pout.â
Now, in the makeup room, Sewell is brushing out a bold red wig. Many transgender women have said they experienced a period of hyperfeminization when they first appeared publicly as femaleââItâs your first moment to express yourself,â Redmayne saysâand Sewell decided that Lili would wear the loud wig at first. (Later, as the character settles into womanhood, Redmayneâs wigs grow more naturalistic.) Now he wears a tomato-red lip, though that, too, will be subdued as Lili finds herself.
âCan I drink, Jan? Can I have a coffee?â Redmayne asks, staring at his reflection. He looks vacant and empty: This body-between-bodies is not his, and he has not yet entered into character.
âYes, Iâll redo the lips, donât worryâwe canât have you fainting.â She smiles wryly, then steps back for a moment, as if scrutinizing a canvas. Fussily, she works over the edges of the wig. âJust a little powder, and then youâre good.â
Ebershoffâs novel concerns art as much as gender: Both Einar and his wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), were accomplished painters. He had found early success with his haunting, refined landscapes, and she, a portraitist, had studied under him at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Near the start of the movie, we see them working in their studio, she on her big, vivacious canvases and he on his small, controlled ones. Hurrying to finish a portrait of a young woman, Gerda asks Einar to pose as her female subject.
âWill you try on the stockings and shoes?â
âYou will not tell anyone about this.â
The experience is, for Einar, more than a bizarre artistic task. He begins dressing as a woman often: first apparently in the spirit of creative support (Gerdaâs portraits of Lili are her first great commercial success, allowing the couple to move to Paris) and later for self-realization. âWhat I read was an incredibly passionate love story about two artists,â Redmayne says; Vikander describes the film as âa love story about learning to love yourself.â
In France, Gerda is celebrated as a fashionable Art Nouveau painter. (In real life, she contributed work to early issues of Vogue.) Lili, now living as herself, abandons painting. In the film, she begins chastely courting a young man (played by Ben Whishaw); Gerda, for her part, grows close to one of Einarâs friends (Matthias Schoenaerts). Trying to realize her female body, Lili undergoes risky constructive surgeries without antibiotics. âShe talks about her transition in terms of these two versions of herselfâshe needed to find a language at the time to say what it felt like,â Hooper says. In real life, Lili died, in her late 40s, of complications from her final operation.
Ebershoff, the author of two other acclaimed historical novels, is vice president and executive editor at Random House; he stumbled on Liliâs story while paging through a book on gender theory. âI remember thinking, Wait a minuteâLili Elbe is a pioneer, but Iâve never heard of her,â he says. âShe was a woman who did something profoundly courageous and important, and yet when I first encountered her name, history had mostly forgotten her.â
The movie arrives in theaters this November, and the timing couldnât be better. At a moment when the trans experience has its own powerful voicesâCaitlyn Jenner,Laverne Cox, Transparent, Tangerine, About Rayâthe movie begins the long project of historicizing trans life, tracing the roots of its cultural heritage and celebrating its complexities. âI think itâs wonderful that, through her, thereâs been a spotlight on a civil rights movement,â Redmayne says of Jenner. âBut her story is a very specific one, and there are many trans women, particularly women of color, who have seen other extremes.â
Rising from the makeup chair now, Redmayne heads into the studio, where he is to be photographed as Lili. The hardest moment in the course of shooting The Danish Girl, he says, was stepping onto the set in female form and sensing the eyes of gaffers and electricians gauging the persuasiveness of his appearance. âIt was a feeling that, apparently, women are substantially more used to,â he says. âThat was incredibly nerve-racking, and yet it must be nothing like what itâs like for a trans woman the first time she goes out.â
On the soundstage, someone has put on a recording of Chopin to set the haute bohĂšme mood. Big, umbrellaed photography lamps are sounding their two-tone reportâbang-squeak! bang-squeak!âand the soundstage flashes with each crack. Hooper is standing by, an observer in jeans and a tidy oxford shirt; Redmayne is costumed in a lush green-velvet dress.
âFor the character of Einar, we had to make an Edwardian, very austere and severe, person trapped in his body,â Paco Delgado, the filmâs costume designer, explains. âThen, when Lili was coming to life, we had to start opening up the paletteâit became warmer. We were very lucky because the twenties offered a very good shape if you had an androgynous body.â Using period fabrics, Delgado, the designer for Pedro AlmodĂłvarâs The Skin I Live In, created some loose, questingly epicene suits to help define the phases of Liliâs transition.
Redmayne is tall, but as a woman in heels, he is even taller. For a moment, with the lights on him and the lens gaping, he looks uncertain. Sewell rushes forward and makes a small adjustment: She lets loose a couple of curls of the wig, so they descend onto his face. As she darts back out of view, Redmayne alights on the edge of the couch, brings a hand up to his ear, and gazes searchingly toward the camera. He is no longer recognizable as a 33-year-old man; suddenly, the flash strikes his face and the transformation is complete.
Three weeks into shooting for The Danish Girl, Redmayne flew to L.A. from London. The next evening, around 5:00 a.m. British time, he clambered onto the stage of the Dolby Theater in a midnight-blue Alexander McQueen tuxedo to accept the Oscar for Best Actor from Cate Blanchett. âI will promise you I will look after him!â he said of the trophy in a breathless baritone, half Alec Guinness, half Bob Cratchit. On Monday, he touched down back in London and went directly from the airport to the studio. âWe had some decorations on his trailer,â Vikander says. âHe went straight to the set and just did this killer scene. I was so amazed about how he was able to close everything off and get tunnel vision and go right back to his part in the way he did. Heâs all about the work, that guy.â
Given the accolades that flowed from Redmayneâs metamorphosis as Stephen Hawking, itâs tempting to see Lili as a role seeking to follow on that success. And yet his involvement in The Danish Girl long predated his Hawking performance. Hooper had thought of Redmayne from the startââThereâs a certain gender fluidity about Eddie,â he says; âhe has this extraordinary translucency, this way his emotion can come throughââand passed him the screenplay when they worked together on Les MisĂ©rables.
âI read it while I was busy singing Marius, trying to get a note out of my poky vocal cords,â Redmayne explains over coffee one morning. We are sitting at a table by the window in Terryâs Cafe, a small, old-style luncheonetteâred-checkered oilcloth, Cumberland sausage and eggsâin Londonâs Southwark district, where Redmayne has lived for nine years. Heâs a loyal customer, friendly with Terryâs son, Austin, who has quietly upscaled his fatherâs menu to keep pace with the areaâs development. Even in person, Redmayne is boyish. His chestnut hair is tousled upward, and heâs dressed in a black denim jacket, ecru T-shirt, slip-on sneakers. He speaks not in a stream of thought but in braids, dropping one idea mid-sentence to begin another, twisting that around a third, then taking up the first strand once more.
Lili is not the first woman Redmayne has played. He went from female roles at Eton to his big break on the professional London stage, as Viola in Twelfth Night, in 2002: âa cisÂgender male playing a cisÂgender female playing a cisÂgender male!â But he found playing a trans woman in transition âcompletely differentâ than the cross-dressing of a Shakespeare comedy. âI was sort of astounded by my own ignorance,â he says. He undertook, along with the rest of the cast, a careful course of reading, starting from Man into Woman, a 1933 account of Liliâs life drawn from her papers (though itâs thought that Niels Hoyer, the editor, touched up the material). They read Jan Morrisâs landmark memoir of transitioning, Conundrum(âa brilliant piece of writingâto my mind, it should be part of the established canon of great literature,â Hooper says), and works on gender theory. Redmayne made a special point of seeking the experiences of living trans people, too. âAcross the board, all of the people from the trans community Iâve met have been so open with the idea that any question is a good one,â he says. âThat sense of education is also whatâs going on in the world at this moment.â
The research filtered up onto the screen. The changing chemistry between Lili and Gerda is the main delight of Hooperâs film, as Redmayne manages to go from an awkward, goose-necked man to a swanlike woman who is, at last, comfortable in her skin: âTom allowed me freedom, so I could work out what angles worked, what angles didnât. Youâre not shooting chronologically. Itâs a delicate thing.â Vikander, in perhaps her most astonishingly frank and intimate performance, makes Gerda as arresting a figure as Lili, and as brave a character, too. âI was sort of worried about finding someone who could match Eddie,â Hooper says. âAlicia was that person.â
After ordering our second coffees in paper cups (âAustin, can I borrow a spoon, mate?â), Redmayne and I set out along the gentle bend of Great Suffolk Street. âWhat I like about this neighborhood is that itâs so centralâI can cycle into the West End when Iâm doing theaterâwhile at the same time itâs this extraordinary Dickensian part of London that had a lot of serious hits in the Blitz,â Redmayne says. âIt has this strange mixture of old and new.â
Up Toulmin Street, he pauses to point out a brick primary school thatâs in fact named after Charles Dickens. Nearby is the apartment where Redmayne was based throughout the early years of his careerâa precocious stage ascent that carried him from The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, in 2004, to Richard II, even as he earned attention on the international screen for My Week with Marilyn. Today, Redmayne is near the front of a bevy of young British leading men (Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Tom Sturridge, Ben Whishaw, and on) captivating Hollywood and shining onstage. Redmayne is currently preparing to play âa magic zoologistâ in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a screenplay by J. K. Rowling set in New York in the twentiesââI canât really say anything about it,â he says archly as we round a cornerâbut heâs had a welcome respite since The Danish Girl wrapped, and time to spend with his wife, Hannah Bagshawe. Itâs his first real experience of married home life since their wedding last December. âSheâs amazing, Hannah, and has this wonderful mind,â he says. âShe reads a lot of the work Iâm doing and has a lot of insight into it.â
When heâs not savoring nuptial bliss, he paints, a hobby that recalls his time at Cambridge, where he read the history of art, writing his thesis on Yves Klein. âAs you get older, you assume you get better, even though you donât do it anymore,â he says. âSo maybe twice a year, when Iâm on holiday, Iâll sit and paint, and I think, Iâve definitely got better! When, in fact, no, Iâve got substantially worse.â
Yet visual art has never drifted far from his actorâs work. One of his favorite stage experiences, he says, was playing Mark Rothkoâs assistant in Red, the 2009 play by John Logan for which Redmayne won a Tony. Lili and Gerdaâs artistic relationship, in turn, accounted for a large part of his interest in The Danish Girl; the work of one of Redmayneâs favorite painters, the Danish artist Vilhelm HammershĂži, was hugely influential on Ebershoff as he was writing and, later, on Hooper and his production designer, Eve Stewart, as they worked out the austere blue-gray aesthetic of Einar and Gerdaâs Danish apartment. But it was a photographic clue that unlocked the character. âThe work of Lili when she was living as Einar was not particularly groundbreaking,â Redmayne says. âThereâs this amazing photo of Einar wearing this really high starched collar. That was a sort of key for me. It was this exoskeleton.â
Weâre wandering now through the Southwark streets, lined with brick flats and sleek office buildings. âEverything is under construction and looking so shit!â he says, sounding not entirely displeased. âWhat I love about this area is that itâs not an area that presents itself. It doesnât thrust out of a facade. You sort of find it, slowly.â
Liliâs efforts to find herself carried her to consultations with the health professionals of the day, who diagnosed her as, variously, homosexual, schizophrenic, and confused. Today, as trans has become its own proud identity, we like to think that we were always so enlightened, but progress is new. When Ebershoffâs novel appeared, fifteen years ago, it was shelved, in one place, in the âeroticaâ section: A carefully researched account of one womanâs transition by an esteemed editor was thought too deviant for the literary-fiction shelves. âOne of the things thatâs helping change the culture are stories. Caitlyn Jennerâs story, Jennifer Finney Boylanâs story, Laverne Coxâs story, RenĂ©e Richardsâs story, Chaz Bonoâs story ⊠the list grows almost every day,â Ebershoff says. âWe cannot fully comprehend the positive influence of these stories. They land in the minds of people we will never know and touch them in ways we can never be made aware of.â
âPeople talk as if The Danish Girl is now an obvious film to make, which makes me laugh,â Hooper says. The screenplay, by Lucinda Coxon, circulated for years. (At various points, the adaptation was to star Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman,Gwyneth Paltrow, and Charlize Theron.) In the early stages of Hooperâs involvement, studios were so squeamish about the movie that it was hard to secure any funding. âIt began as a small passion project,â he says.For him, though, as for his cast, the changing climate hasnât meant the end of a cause. In the U.S., you can be fired in 31 states for being trans, Redmayne points out. âThrough this filmâthrough one life learned, and through this position of privilege in being able to talk to all these peopleâI hope I can be an advocate for trans issues, and an ally, in some way.â The Danish Girl is not a work of activism. But he hopes that it will offer a window onto the complex trans experience.
âIn acting you have very little control or capacity for choice,â Redmayne says. âThe only choice that I have had in this past couple of yearsâand really, itâs just happenedâis âIs this a story that youâd like to be a part of?â â He pauses for a moment and then smiles. âYeah.â
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