“For any actor, playing Stephen Hawking was going to be intimidating,” admits The Theory of Everything screenwriter and producer Anthony McCarten. “My script called for an actor who could show the audience a man evolving over 25 years, going from being fully functional to having the use of only a few muscles — mainly one hand and some limited facial movement — and having his voice be superseded by a machine’s.”
The challenge of the physical demands required to play Stephen Hawking loomed large for Eddie Redmayne, who was cast in the role. 
Accordingly, Redmayne parsed even the smallest details on the man he would be portraying. He notes, “Jane [Hawking’s wife; her memoir is the basis from which the film is made] discusses in her book how Stephen had incredibly expressive eyebrows. That was something I spent months in front of a mirror working on. When I met Stephen, I noticed how ‘yes’ is sort of a smile and ‘no’ is almost a grimace, yet they only manifest in a couple of the facial muscles for him, so I learned how to isolate those.”
Since there is no existing documentation of Stephen in the early stages of deterioration, Redmayne and movement director Alex Reynolds consulted with a doctor who specialized in motor neuron disease (MND) to more precisely chart the progression.
To carry the findings over for the 48-day shoot, Redmayne created a climbing-numbers chart that would gauge how advanced the MND was in a particular scene — a method which proved invaluable since, like most feature films, The Theory of Everything was not shot in sequence.
“Eddie prepared for months, to be ready to give multiple levels of performance,” marvels McCarten. “He had to be aware on any given day for a scene, ‘Is this stage four of my voice?’ ‘Does this mean stage three of my body?’ He would go from ‘a 4.3 day’ for one day’s work to, for a scene set 10 years earlier and filming the next day, ‘a 2.7 day.’ Each day required all of his talent, discipline, and intelligence.”
Director James Marsh availed himself of the chart as “a sacred text, because it demonstrated what was possible and not possible for Stephen at a moment in time. This had a big impact on how [director of photography] Benoît Delhomme shot a scene, and on how we framed it.” He adds, “We were sensitive to Eddie’s ability to engage the audience with no more than just a cast of his eyes and a small shift of the body. This is not easy for an actor to pull off, and it came at a physical cost to him. Every day he was in some sort of stress position that he had to maintain for hours at a stretch, while still projecting and making the character emerge out of the disability.”
The Theory of Everything is available beginning Feb. 17 on Video on Demand. Check your cable system for availability.
© 2014 Universal Pictures International Credit: Liam Daniel
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