Eddie Redmayne says his big Les Miserables number was 'appallingly sung'
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
There's a grief that can't be spoken, there's a pain that goes on and on... at least when Eddie Redmayne thinks about his vocals in Les Miserables.
While appearing at the Toronto International Film Festival for a conversation reflecting on his career, the British actor turned self-effacing about a clip of him singing "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" as Marius in 2012's Les Miserables.
As some might recall, director Tom Hooper shot the musical numbers live-to-film, wanting to recreate the emotional experience of doing a musical on-stage. This won Anne Hathaway her Oscar, but for Redmayne, it was a daunting proposition requiring a huge amount of takes to ground the raw emotion above all else.
"I love the frailty," he said. "Technically, it's appallingly sung, but it's got like a fragility that helps sell the song."
Everett Collection
Redmayne said he took his approach of focusing on emotion over vocal precision from working with director Robert De Niro on The Good Shepherd. "De Niro has this process where he's filming, and you'd do a take, an emotional take, and then he would stop you and get you to go back and start again, and take the accumulation of that emotion and repress that and fire that back into the start of a scene, and that's what we did here on this piece eventually."
The actor said Hooper was happy after only five or six takes, but Redmayne was determined to push himself to the brink in his performances. "I'm going to go until I can't go anymore," he recalled. "Because at least when you're not happy with what you end up seeing, you know that you went for it. We did that there. We did push it pretty far."
Redmayne can be seen this fall (not singing) in The Good Nurse, which made its premiere at TIFF and stars the actor as Charlie Cullen, a nurse turned serial killer.
Related content:
