The Academy Award-winning actor Eddie Redmayne says he’s “really sorry” for playing an emotionally repressed cisgender male on screen.
In an interview with Marie Claire in Britain, Redmayne talks about the “mistake” of committing to playing Lili Elbe, the first person in the world to undergo full gender reassignment surgery. “There was a liberty taken,” Redmayne says. “Just playing Lili — because she exists, she’s real, she’s not a subject to be negotiated — there was an emotional freedom in knowing that. I don’t think I’ve had an instinct to try to be trans. I found it incredibly flattering but boring.”
Elbe died in 1927. Redmayne says he was “ultimately sure that I was playing someone very different to what I felt I was, and I’m incredibly proud of that,” but now he feels differently. “When I sit back and reflect on what’s going on now, I feel very saddened,” he adds. “I think there are some terrible consequences in trying to erase what lives are actually lived by people who live outside of binary categories.”
“I’m really sorry about that,” he says. “And I promise I’ll try harder to do my bit.”
Read the rest of the interview on Marie Claire: