You Won't See Everything About Stephen Hawking in 'The Theory of Everything'
James Marsh with The Theory of Everything stars Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones
In the acclaimed new biopic The Theory of Everything, audiences will discover many details about the life of famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne), including more about his rapid physical deterioration from a motor neuron disease and the stress his condition placed on his relationship with his wife Jane (Felicity Jones). What they won’t see, however, is Jane and Stephen being intimate.
That was one of the early conditions set by the real-life Jane Hawking, whose 2011 memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen Hawking, was the basis for movie’s screenplay by Anthony McCarten.
“Anthony spent a lot of time talking with Jane about what she was comfortable with and what she wasn’t, and the sexuality was something that she wasn’t comfortable with,” director James Marsh told Yahoo Movies, explaining why the film depicts the couple’s three children, but never how they were conceived despite Stephen’s near-total physical disability.
Tracing a period that stretched over a quarter century, Marsh and McCarten highlight the struggle that Jane endured as both Hawking’s wife and caretaker. While both stars Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones give brave, unflinching performances — with Redmayne physically devolving to match Hawking’s crumpled body — there were certain parameters of privacy that the production had to respect.
“Eddie and I talked about that quite often, ‘Wouldn’t that be great to actually explore this,’ but the script didn’t ask for it, and we didn’t do it,” Marsh said. “We talked about it quite a lot, about the sexuality, but that was something Jane wasn’t comfortable with, so we respected that and showed it in different ways. I think there’s enough on offer in the film that you can put it together if you wanted.”
The filmmakers were also challenged with deciding which version of Jane Hawking’s two stories to tell. Travelling to Infinity was her second memoir, a follow-up to a 1999 tell-all called Music to Move the Stars. That first book was written in the wake of the couple’s relatively unpleasant divorce, which followed Stephen’s decision to leave her for his nurse.
“The first book was definitely, you could feel more of the frustration and even the anger of the character,” Marsh said, “and the second one was more measured, and probably more hindsight involved, too, more perspective away from the marriage, away from the divorce.”
Marsh read both books, but was satisfied with the script that had emerged from the second memoir. The dramatic arc they portrayed, he said, was fair and truthful, both because Stephen and Jane have reconciled in recent years (and consulted on the film), and because he never saw the story as one of “willful sadism” or even right and wrong.
“It’s quite a hard line to find between respecting people and their lives and the fact that they have to deal with each other, and being dramatically truthful,” the filmmaker said. “The script is quite respectful of the characters, and it has a right to be, because people are trying to do the right thing, the decent thing, and people get hurt that way as well as any other way.”
The Theory of Everything hits select theaters on Friday.
Watch a clip of Redmayne and Jones in The Theory of Everything:
