Eddie Redmayne’s star is certainly on the rise thanks to the likes of Les Miserables. Now he’s signed up for a slightly Oscar-bait role, as Deadline reports he’ll play a young Stephen Hawking in the movie Theory of Everything.
Working Title is backing the movie, with Man On Wire’s James Marsh set to direct. The only info on the exact plot of the movie is that it will ‘focus on the relationship between Hawking and his wife’. However it doesn’t say which wife, as he’s had two. We’re presuming that it’s his first, Jane Wilde, who he met shortly before he was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease while studying at Cambridge at the age of 21, and who stayed with him even when he was told he might not live more than two years longer.
Redmayne is also being sought to star with Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts in Far From The Madding Crowd, which the Thomas Vinterberg is set to direct. However he may end up passing on that project so he can concentrate on the Hawking movie.