There was just nothing stopping British actor Eddie Redmayne from winning a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for his depiction of Prof Stephen Hawkins in film The Theory of Everything.
And he’s sure to have a good chance at getting an Oscar next month. But we can reveal that the multi-award winner wasn’t so spot-on at spitting in his debut theatre role.
For his first job out of university, 33-year-old Eddie played Harold in the Master Harold And The Boys at the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse in 2003. Co-star Louis Emerick, who played Sam in the play, told us: “There’s a point in the play where Harold and Sam have a verbal confrontation – it gets a bit serious and at one point Harold spits in Sam’s face, and Eddie, being the polite one – I remember saying, ‘Listen, no green ones.’
“The director even had to say, ‘Come on spit some more’ because at that moment he just wouldn’t want to spit. And I had to say, ‘Come on get the phlegm up, you can dig a bit deeper than that!’ because I’m supposed to react to all this phlegm on my face and there’s a tiny little drop! We said, ‘Listen, we’re opening tomorrow so you best have it down by then’ and we laughed about it and I said, ‘In the context of the play it’s OK’, but it was his first job and he probably didn’t want to offend.”
But Louis says with a little more practice, Eddie had it nailed, adding: “By the end of the run it was, I was beginning to regret my words – I’d say, ‘Enough, enough!’ haha.”
We certainly wouldn’t mind swapping saliva with Eddie…