Eddie Redmayne, the Oscar-winning actor who learned to disappear by playing Cabaret’s Emcee

Eddie Redmayne

Photo: Montclair Film / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 6, 1982 Westminster, London, England
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Theory of Everything, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, The Danish Girl
Awards	Academy Award · BAFTA · Tony Award · Golden Globe · 2 SAG Award · 2 Laurence Olivier

The man who plays the Jackal has made a career of arriving at work as somebody else. For most of his time on screen that meant labour you could see from the back row: a body folding in on itself as a disease advanced, a voice handed over to a synthesiser. Then Eddie Redmayne took the title role in The Day of the Jackal, the Sky Atlantic and Peacock thriller in which the assassin he plays offers almost nothing to read — few words, borrowed faces, a calm that never cracks on cue. Critics noticed that the actor known for showing his work had found a way to hide it. The road to that discovery ran through a London nightclub set built inside a West End theatre, not through Hollywood.

Redmayne is a product of the most polished machinery British education has to offer, which is partly why his choices read as deliberate rather than lucky. There was a stage school in childhood, then choral scholarships that took him to Colet Court and on to Eton, where he was in the same year as Prince William, and finally a degree in History of Art at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is colour blind, and he wrote his final thesis on International Klein Blue, the pigment Yves Klein turned into a signature — a colour he has described as intensely emotional and one he says he can always tell apart. It is a revealing detail about how he works: he attaches himself to things he has to perceive by other means.

Westminster is where he was born, on 6 January 1982, into a family rooted in the City rather than the arts. His father, Richard, works in corporate finance; his mother, Patricia, runs a relocation business; his half-brother Charlie went on to run the British arm of the publisher HarperCollins. The stage came first and stayed first. His professional debut, in 2002, was as Viola in Twelfth Night for Shakespeare’s Globe at Middle Temple Hall — a young man cast as a woman disguised as a man, which in hindsight looks like a thesis statement. Two years later Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? at the Almeida won him the Evening Standard award for outstanding newcomer, and the Critics’ Circle gave him its newcomer prize the following year.

Red was where the theatre world decided he was serious. In John Logan’s two-hander about Mark Rothko, first at the Donmar Warehouse in 2009 and then on Broadway in 2010, he played Ken, the assistant who spends the evening absorbing the painter’s contempt and then turning it back on him. He won the Olivier Award for best supporting actor in London and the Tony Award for best featured actor in a play in New York, and Ben Brantley of The New York Times called him a star in the making. The part is mostly listening. That skill, more than any later physical feat, is the through-line of his best work. At the end of 2011 he went back to the Donmar to play Richard II for Michael Grandage, a king who talks himself out of a crown, and collected the Critics’ Circle prize for best Shakespearean performance.

Screen work ran in parallel, slowly. A teenage debut in an episode of Animal Ark led to supporting roles in The Good Shepherd and The Other Boleyn Girl, and to the lead in the BBC’s First World War drama Birdsong. My Week with Marilyn, in 2011, made him the centre of a feature film for the first time, as Colin Clark, the young assistant who watched Marilyn Monroe struggle through a British film shoot. A year later Tom Hooper cast him as Marius in Les Misérables, and the choral training that had paid for his schooling finally had somewhere to go on camera.

Then came The Theory of Everything. James Marsh’s film asked him to play Stephen Hawking from his Cambridge student years through decades of motor neurone disease, and Redmayne built the performance out of physical increments — fingers curling first, then a head that could no longer stay level — while keeping the physicist’s wit visible above the damage. Hawking’s verdict was the one that mattered to him: “At times I thought he was me.” The role won him the Academy Award for best actor, with the BAFTA, the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award arriving in the same season, and at thirty-three he joined the short list of the category’s youngest winners. He has been a patron of the Motor Neurone Disease Association ever since.

The Oscar also fixed a template that served him less well. In The Danish Girl, again for Hooper, he played Lili Elbe, one of the first known recipients of gender-affirming surgery, and earned a second best-actor nomination in consecutive years. The casting of a cisgender man drew sustained criticism from transgender performers and critics, and six years later Redmayne conceded the point in an interview with The Sunday Times: he said he made the film with the best intentions, that he would not take the role now, and that he thought it had been a mistake. The same period produced his strangest swerve, Balem Abrasax, the whispering, tantrum-prone villain of the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending. It earned him a Golden Raspberry a year after his Oscar, and it has since been reclaimed by a number of critics as the most uninhibited thing he has done on screen.

The bigger problem was scale. Warner Bros.’ Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them cast him as the magizoologist Newt Scamander, and he carried the role through three films between 2016 and 2022. Newt is defined by gentle eccentricity rather than transformation, and as the series’ plotting tangled and its mythology buckled under its own weight, Redmayne was left likable but underused at the centre of a machine built for other characters. The films made money; the later two divided critics. They did not damage his reputation, but they absorbed six years of his career without telling audiences anything new about what he could do.

Away from the franchise the work got sharper. He played the activist Tom Hayden in Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7, whose cast shared the Screen Actors Guild ensemble award, and in The Good Nurse he played Charles Cullen, the hospital nurse who admitted to killing patients in his care, opposite Jessica Chastain. The part reversed his usual method. Instead of constructing a body, he hid a killer inside a pleasant, ordinary one, and the performance brought nominations at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

The real reset happened on stage. Redmayne had first played the Emcee in Cabaret at Eton when he was seventeen, and again at the Edinburgh Fringe. In November 2021 he played him in the West End, at the Playhouse Theatre remodelled as the Kit Kat Club, in a revival he helped put together by approaching Rebecca Frecknall to direct and Jessie Buckley to play Sally Bowles. The production won seven Olivier Awards, the most ever for a revival, and his own was for best actor in a musical. When it transferred to Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre in April 2024, with Gayle Rankin as Sally, he was nominated for the Tony Award for best actor in a musical. The Emcee is all surface, a host who watches a country slide toward catastrophe and keeps smiling. Playing him night after night trained exactly the muscle the Jackal would need.

The Day of the Jackal, which arrived on Sky Atlantic and Peacock in November 2024, put that training on camera. Redmayne is also an executive producer of the series, a modern reworking of Frederick Forsyth’s novel in which his assassin is hunted by an MI6 officer played by Lashana Lynch. He gives the Jackal very little dialogue and almost no visible interior, and the restraint is the point. Joel Golby wrote in The Guardian that it was as if he had secretly uncovered a new way of acting. The series brought him nominations at the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Critics Choice Awards, and Peacock renewed it before the first season had finished airing.

The second season was shot through 2026, with Budapest standing in for the Moldovan capital, Chișinău, and further locations in Romania, Moldova and Spain; Peacock has dated it only to 2027. Úrsula Corberó, Charles Dance and Eleanor Matsuura return, while Matt Bomer, Pablo Schreiber, Weruche Opia and the Norwegian actress Pia Tjelta join the cast. The playwright David Harrower has taken over as lead writer from the show’s creator, Ronan Bennett, who stays on as an executive producer. Redmayne’s own teaser for the new episodes doubled as a character note: “If there’s one thing the Jackal can’t stand, it’s a loose end.”

In cinemas, the next release is Panic Carefully, a thriller written and directed by Sam Esmail, the creator of Mr. Robot, which puts him alongside Julia Roberts, Elizabeth Olsen and Brian Tyree Henry. It was filmed in London, with Canary Wharf dressed up as Manhattan, and Warner Bros. has moved its release from February to 9 April 2027, now with an IMAX launch. Further out sits his first collaboration with Hirokazu Kore-eda, the Palme d’Or-winning director of Shoplifters: an English-language film for Searchlight Pictures, announced in February 2026, on which Redmayne is both star and producer. Speaking at the Busan International Film Festival in October, Kore-eda said he was still writing the script and expected to present the project formally next year at the earliest. Redmayne is also in talks to join Miles Teller in Star One, a Doug Liman spy thriller about two mismatched CIA officers on a covert mission to deliver arms across enemy territory, with Redmayne as the strait-laced strategist.

Off screen he keeps a narrow public life. He married Hannah Bagshawe, whom he first met as a teenager at a charity fashion event while he was at Eton, in December 2014; they have a daughter, Iris Mary, and a son, Luke Richard. He was appointed OBE for services to drama in 2015, and he works as an ambassador for the film-education charity Into Film and for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

At forty-four, Redmayne has reversed the bargain that made him famous. The early career asked audiences to watch him change. The work now on his calendar — a second season inside a man with no name, a Kore-eda script still being written — asks them to watch what he holds back. The next confirmed date is April 2027, when Panic Carefully opens in cinemas.

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Tags: actors, British actors, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Eddie Redmayne, Elizabeth Olsen, The Theory of Everything

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