Top 44 Eddie Redmayne Quotes

I’ve never been someone that was sort of blessed with an innate talent of just being able to do things. I had to work at it and learn from mistakes.

A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what’s true.

My dad works in finance, so he kept giving me the stats: only one in a hundred actors makes it. He’d ask, ‘Have you thought about producing?’

For a year after I left Cambridge, I had an agent, and I was working in a pub and doing waitering. But I could stay at home rent-free.

My favorite film is probably the finale – ‘Deathly Hallows: Part 2’.

Actors who perhaps are super-confident and have absolute belief in themselves I always admire, because I can’t really be like that. Because you never know what’s right: what you feel inside versus what is portrayed.

A movie star is someone who has to open a film to gazillions of dollars. I’m just trying to pay my mortgage.

There is a certain amount of commerce in the film industry in as much as you have value, and for a moment, your value goes up, then it all disappears again.

What’s really interesting about actors, is that we all have opinions on how people’s careers look, but I think you never have any idea of your own, or what other people think of you.

‘Animal Ark’, was when I was fourteen years old, and it was an ITV children’s program, and I did an episode called, ‘Bunnies in the Bathroom.’ And I’m not sure if it was my finest hour.

If gender is on a spectrum, where one finds oneself is completely unique.

What an extraordinary thing it can be, love, how it will not defined by gender, by sexuality, by race, by religion, by anything. It’s something else. It’s something other.

If you are playing someone living, it is a different type of judgment. However much work you do, it is not a documentary. There will be things you can’t get right, and ultimately, you have to take a leap because – you weren’t there.

I’m by nature someone that quite likes to understand how things are working, likes some sense of structure, and I’ve fallen into the worst possible trade for that.

As a runner on a film, you are the lowest of the low, and yet you have incredible access to everyone. I can totally imagine that for actors in the middle of a Hollywood bubble, all they really want is a sense of normality, and that gopher can be a tap for that.

On so many levels, acting in film and TV is so much the sum of its parts, and somewhere in there, there’s an alchemical thing that makes something happen or not – that makes something connect or not. Now, of course you want to make work that people see, but the enjoyment I get out of acting is playing characters.

There’s something scary about acting always, because basically you do all this work in a vacuum, and then suddenly there’s a lot of money spent making a film, and there’s suddenly a camera here, going, ‘Right? What are you gonna do?’

I always try to describe making movies like summer camp, or some holiday where you spend all day, every day with a new group of people whom you kind of love and then never see again.

Listen, acting is not surgery, it’s entertainment. You’re doing something to hopefully move people, to make them laugh, to transport them. But actors are vulnerable, and the reason we’re vulnerable is that we’re always trying to recreate human behaviour.

Everything about filmmaking is incredibly weird, and there’s nothing natural about watching yourself on the big screen or hearing your voice. It’s that same thing that you feel when you watch yourself on a video camera and you hate the sound of your voice – it’s that times 800.

If your dream is to tell stories, interesting stories, play interesting people, that’s the bottom line. The people that I play have to be extraordinary.

I walk around talking to myself in accents. Usually people look at me like I’m a complete fruit loop.

As an actor there’s a lot of scrutiny and, even when you’ve had success, it becomes about sustaining that success. A friend of mine described it as a peakless mountain. Even for De Niro there’s Pacino and for Pacino there’s De Niro.

It’s the weird thing Eton does – you’re at school next to lords and earls and, in my case, Prince William, so you end up being used to dealing with those sorts of people.

Velvet is great. It’s warm as well. And it’s snug.

The percentage of actors employed is pretty small, and if you’re lucky enough to have a good run at it, you do have a sense of responsibility.

When you’re doing a film that has so many effects, you do a lot of it on green screen, and you can’t see what that world is.

Ladies and babies, and mortgages, for that matter, can all wait. Acting has done a strange thing to me, though. I often sit there, thinking, ‘I love this, but I wouldn’t put my daughter on the stage.’

I’ve played women since I was a kid and I’ve always enjoyed it.

There’s always been a relationship between the film world and fashion.

I draw and play the piano badly. But when I’m doing those things, I’m concentrating so hard there’s no room for worry. I find that onstage, too.

What I love about acting is trying things and screwing up, then trying again, all in this protected little bubble. That’s living the dream.

I try genuinely, when I’m playing a character, to not judge them and just to inhabit someone as how one sees them. That being said, you also want to make sure that you don’t blur the edges of people too much because humans are naughty and complicated beings.

I’ve been a closet lover of faux-reality TV since ‘The Hills’. It’s bad.

I hope, then, that every one who sees ‘The Danish Girl’ might be galvanized themselves to lead more authentic lives. How much lovelier would the world be then?

That’s the reality of my life – I do normal things and then get to go to film festivals and wear borrowed clothes and turn up at premieres and talk about things I am passionate about. But then you click back to normality and your family and friends.

In England, we have this saying about Marmite: people either love it or hate it. That’s like a lot of the movie work I’ve done. People either find it repulsive or find it really interesting and get engaged in it.

I suffer from a more complex, persistent fear. It manifests itself in nerves, and on film the camera sees even the tiniest evidence of this. So you have to learn that when the director calls ‘Action,’ you don’t go to this place of tension, but somehow you become free.

It can be a miserable profession, acting, because you always want what you can’t have.

And you can’t complain about kissing Emma Watson. Isn’t that what everyone in the world wants to do? I’ve known Emma for a few years. She’s this amazing capacity of young and vibrant and brilliant, but also a bright, intelligent old soul.

My first film, ‘Like Minds,’ was with Toni Colette, who was extraordinary. I mean it was basically a mini-masterclass for acting on film at a time when all you could probably see were my eyebrows bouncing up and down on screen.

I am fascinated by Omega’s history. Particularly the First World War stuff, when they made watches for the flying corps, and the NASA side of it.

Actors are actors, and there should be a complete fluidity for anyone to play anything.

I did an interview once where I was asked who I found attractive and I went on about cartoons and Nala from ‘The Lion King’ – and it’s a bit weird but various of my ex-girlfriends actually did look like Nala.