Eddie Redmayne said he finds the lack of progress on transgender rights in the past century ‘shocking’ after playing 1920s transsexual pioneer Lili Elbe in his new film The Danish Girl.
“Some of the things that ... Lili specifically has to go through of violence, discrimination, almost 100 years on from that story, those things haven’t necessarily changed,” Redmayne said.
“There is a huge amount of job discrimination and discrimination generally against trans people and a huge amount of violence particularly for trans women of colour.
“And so it’s kind of shocking that there hasn’t been as much progress in that amount of time,” he said in an interview to launch the film about one of the first known recipients of sex reassignment surgery, born as Einar Wegener in 1882.
Wegener, an artist, began living as a woman after his marriage and had the first of several gender-reassignment operations in 1930. She died in 1931, but left diaries and her life was fictionalised in the book The Danish Girl.
Redmayne explained that he had met several transgender people to help him prepare for the role, but it made playing the part no less daunting once the cameras started rolling.
“The first time I walked on set [as Lili] I felt scrutinised, I felt the gaze of other people and I felt nervous ... It was interesting because it was something that a lot of the [trans] women I’d met had spoken about ...
“What I learned from this experience is that gender is fluid in the way that sexuality is fluid, and we have bits of everything in us,” Redmayne said.
Meanwhile, Redmayne said he is taking winning the Oscar earlier this year for best actor for his portrayal of physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything in stride.
“I have been working quite intensively so it’s been a frenzied wonderful time and I haven’t really had respite to get perspective on it,” he said.
“I am just sort of putting one foot in front of the other and knowing that I am incredibly lucky and that it’ll all come to a crushing end soon.” he laughed. “So I am trying to just keep my head afloat really.”
The Danish Girl is slated for release in the US on November 27 and in Britain on January 1.
