Watch Eddie Redmayne Transform Into Stephen Hawking in the Exclusive New Trailer for 'The Theory of Everything'

Watch Eddie Redmayne Transform Into Stephen Hawking in the Exclusive New Trailer for ‘The Theory of Everything’

An Oscar contender since its debut at last month’s Toronto FIlm Festival last month, The Theory of Everything is built around one of the most demanding physical roles imaginable, with star Eddie Redmayne (Les Miserables) taking on the part of renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. Set in the early ’60s, when Hawking was a 21-year-old college student, Everything attempts to capture the paradox of Hawking’s free-spirited and brilliant mind being trapped in a body suffering from the early stages of ALS.

Readers can take an advance peek at the film in the trailer above, seen first here on Yahoo Movies.

Based on the memoir Traveling in Infinity: My Life with Stephen by Hawking’s wife Jane, the film tells the story of young Hawking’s romance with his bride-to-be (played by Like Crazy’s Felicity Jones) while a student at Cambridge. The carefree days of vital, brilliant pair are shattered by the ALS diagnosis, accompanied by the prognosis that he will be dead within two years.

Everything traces how Hawking, with Jane by his side, Hawking defied the doctor’s grim predictions, finished his thesis – one that contained an early version of his theory on than the nature of the Universe – and started a family, all while his body steadily gives way.

For Redmayne, taking on the role and finding how to portray that passion and intellectual vitality was the most terrifying challenge of his career. In an interview at the Toronto Festival, he told Yahoo, “There was a moment when I got the part where I felt a wonderful euphoria. It lasted about a second and a half. It’s been fear and trepidation ever since. The night before we started filming was the only night of my life that I did not sleep. It got to four in the morning, and I was being picked up at five, and I was like, ‘I haven’t slept. I can’t start this film without having had a minute’s sleep.’”

Preparing for the role, Redmayne focused on the smallest details of Hawking’s physical experience, trying understand what it was like to inhabit his body. After reading in Jane’s memoir that Stephen had “incredibly expressive eyebrows”, Redmayne studied spent months in front of a mirror, working on his brows.

"I felt that every single aspect of it would affect everything else,” he told Yahoo. "So the physical [aspect] would affect the costume, would affect the makeup, would affect the voice. I worked with a dancer, an amazing woman called Alex Reynolds, and I spent a few months going to the London Motor Neuron Diseases Clinic to see how ALS manifests itself. It’s different in every single patient…. as the muscles stop working, you used other muscles. There are muscles here in our face that we never use. So it was trying to learn to isolate muscles, which meant a lot of time spent in front of a mirror with photos."

Fifty years after receiving that two-year sentence, Hawking lives on. When Redmayne finally met the now 72-year-old while preparing for the part, he was struck by how scientist’s tiniest gestures were filled with meaning — proof that Hawking’s intellectual vitality could still express itself physically: “I noticed how ‘yes’ is sort of a smile and ‘no’ is almost a grimace, yet they only manifest in a couple of the facial muscles for him, so I learned how to isolate those.”

However, throughout the filming, Redmayne was careful to make sure the full experience of Hawking’s life shone through. “The story of Stephen dwarfs the illness,”

Redmayne told Yahoo. “For him, it is of no importance. He didn’t ever want to see a doctor again after he was diagnosed. He is someone that lives forward and lives optimistically. So, for me, what this film was about was an unconventional love story, a film  about loving in all its guises.”

The Theory of Everything opens November 7.