The Theory Of Everything: How Accurate Is Eddie Redmayne Biopic?

'The Theory Of Everything' has just won Eddie Redmayne a Best Actor Oscar for his unbelievably uncanny portrayal of Stephen Hawking. But how accurate is the rest of the movie - and how much is fiction?

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We asked screenwriter and producer Anthony McCarten (pictured below), who also won a BAFTA for Adapted Screenplay, to set the record straight.

Suffice to say, don’t read this if you haven’t seen the film yet, because THERE ARE SPOILERS.

Period and personal detail

“On the first day of shooting in Cambridge, Jane appeared on her bicycle,” remembers the writer, who was previously best-known as a novelist and playwright.

“She was just so curious to see what was going on. We saw her and waved her in and said, ‘come in and have a look at Eddie in costume’. She came up to Eddie and started taking control of his hairstyle. [She said] ‘The hair’s much messier, much messier.’

With accurate hairstyles now sorted, the design team made sure the set was as authentic as possible – so much so that the couple’s daughter was astounded by what she saw on-screen.

“When Lucy Hawking saw the movie, she said, ‘that was my childhood.’,” says McCarten. “She said, ‘the tablecloth was the one I grew up with.’ Jane had shared family photos with us.”

Also, Stephen’s computer voice in the movie? That’s really Stephen Hawking.

“When he watched the movie, he cried and immediately started bestowing gifts on the production,” adds McCarten. “I had the incredible honour of my dialogue being typed into his computer. I like to think that Stephen Hawking’s actually appearing in the movie.”

The Other Man (and Woman)

In the film, we see local choirmaster Jonathan Hellyer Jones (Charlie Cox), become a crucial part of the Hawking family, helping Jane with the kids and Stephen. That leads to romantic feelings and a scene in a campsite which suggests Jane has an affair.

In her book, Jane suggests that despite loving each other, their relationship was platonic, partly because their faith didn’t allow them to commit adultery. McCarten is  a bit more disingenuous.

“My answer would be this – I love ambiguity, or do I?” he laughs. “When I first sat down with Jane in 2004, I made it very clear to her that this was not going to be a documentary, it was a work of art and I needed artistic freedom. She granted me that. She never asked me to whitewash anything, tone anything down. She embraced it.”

That still doesn’t exactly explain whether the moment took place, but after separating from her husband, Jane did marry Jonathan and they are still together. What did happen was Stephen’s mother asking Jane whether their son Timothy was actually Stephen’s baby. Jane wrote in her book, “The simple truth was that there was no way that Timothy could have had any other father than Stephen.”

As for Elaine Mason (Maxine Peake), the nurse who became Stephen’s second wife, the writer says he hasn’t had any pushback from her. She and Hawking were married for 11 years before divorcing in 2006 amidst accusations from his children and staff that she was violent towards him.

What was said

“Inspired speculation” – that’s what McCarten calls his method of postulating who said what to whom during the 27 years his film covers.

“I wasn’t in the room, I don’t know what he said to her or she to him, but I’m using my best guess,” says the New Zealander, who has spent ten years working on the movie. “What I think this person may have felt in this moment and how this person based on my research possibly may have said to this person.”

McCarten did have official source material though – ‘Theory’ is based on Jane Hawking’s autobiography ‘Travelling to Infinity’.

“I was doing all this with the knowledge that Stephen and Jane would sit in judgment on the film,” he says. “So that keeps you extremely honest as well. This mission can be reduced simply that you have to remain in the service of the truth. Every writer takes their own line with that and they will judge for themselves how much poetic licence they can apply in pursuit of the truth. What I learned from this project is you can make the mistake of inventing too much, but you can also make the mistake of inventing too little.”

In other words, “95% of the dialogue [was] invented.”

The disease

As all the plaudits have shown, Eddie Redmayne’s lead performance of a man gradually succumbing to motor neurone disease is devastating. And very, very accurate, says McCarten.

“Eddie and his team studied every single stage of the disease,” he says. “We used photographic evidence to find what part of the body was collapsing and what part was still strong and delineated every stage of that. Every effort was made to get it absolutely right. I think that’s why Stephen in the end, when he saw the film said, ‘broadly true’ – [that] was his verdict.”

The Turing Test

One of the criticisms levelled at fellow awards contender ‘The Imitation Game’ is that the filmmakers turned hero Alan Turing into an untouchable genius who broke the Enigma Code entirely by himself.

A peril of based-on-true stories is trying to compress time and the cast of real-life characters who may add realism to the narrative, but play havoc with the dramatic structure.

‘The Theory Of Everything’ does this by making Jane seem like a bit of a loner, changing the order of several of their initial meetings and turning various of Stephen’s colleagues into a single PhD student called Brian played by Harry Lloyd (though we do see David Thewlis as Hawking’s mentor Dennis Sciama and Christian McKay as iconic mathematician Roger Penrose).

Says McCarten, “My theory of biopics is artistic licence is not only permissible but is obliged upon you, but only so long as you remain in the service of the truth and you aren’t distorting the facts. That was something I was very careful about doing. So when I was portraying a composite character, even then they had to exist within the tolerances of history.

“The solution is if you need more sensation in your story you can’t foist characteristics on a real person that they didn’t have. I don’t make [Hawking] the father of quantum mechanics in the movie because he wasn’t.”

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Photos: PA/Rex/Focus Features/Everett/Lynn Hilton/Mail on Sunday/Nils Jorgensen