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Eddie Redmayne says he hasn’t made many great films

‘I did beige work,’ he said of one of his movies

Ellie Harrison
Saturday 15 October 2022 12:26 BST
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Eddie Redmayne cradles Oscar

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Eddie Redmayne has admitted he doesn’t think he’s made many “great” films.

The actor can next be seen playing American serial killer Charles Cullen in the Netflix movie The Good Nurse.

Redmayne, 40, has had an award-winning career spanning 20 years. He won an Oscar in 2015 for his performance as the physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, and was nominated for another the following year for his controversial role as pioneering transgender woman Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl.

But he still doesn’t think he’s made many brilliant movies. “The aspiration is always to make a great film and I don’t think I’ve made many of those,” he told The Times’s Saturday Review.

Speaking about his first big Hollywood role, opposite Robert De Niro in The Good Shepherd, he said: “I was paranoid, I was disappointed and I did beige work.”

Looking back on his university days, doing theatre in Cambridge with his fellow students Dan Stevens, Rebecca Hall and Tom Hiddleston, he added: “I remember seeing Tom in Arcadia and he was amazing. Rebecca was always extraordinary, and I remember Dan doing the Scottish play with extraordinary power too. But to be clear, the theatre that I did in Cambridge was utterly appalling.”

Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain in ’The Good Nurse’
Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain in ’The Good Nurse’ (Netflix)

Last month, Redmayne also reflected on a film he starred in that received a five per cent approval rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. “I did a film called Hick, that has five per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, in which I played a Texan meth addict paedophile,” he said.

Based on the novel of the same name, the Chloë Grace Moretz-led movie also starred Blake Lively, Juliette Lewis, and Alec Baldwin.

Last year, the actor said his decision to star as a transgender woman in The Danish Girl “was a mistake” and that he “wouldn’t take it on now”.

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