00:02The astounding thing is that Stephen Hawking was given two years to live, age 21, and he's
00:09now 71, 72. I mean, it's against all odds, and it's a staggering thing, and whether it
00:20is to do with his passion, his drive, his outlook on life, his humour, the specific
00:27strain of what the disease is, no one knows, but it's a staggering thing, and he is a great,
00:34great icon of hope.
00:39The process for me started with going, okay, how am I going to go about this? How am I going
00:44to even begin to understand this? Not only in what it is, what the illness is, what the
00:51science is, but also how to take that, the emotion and all the physicality and all that
00:59and place it in me, or find a place for it in me. So I went about it by hiring
01:05a
01:05sensational team, a wonderful makeup artist called Jan Sewell, and extraordinary costumier,
01:14and a vocal coach, and probably most importantly, a movement coach, a choreographer. I worked
01:25with a woman called Alex Reynolds, and about three months before we started filming, she
01:30and I got in touch with a woman called Dr. Kate Seidel, who was a motor neuron specialist,
01:35and with her assistant, her nurse, Jan Clark, we went to motor neuron clinics and we met
01:42maybe 30 or 40 people suffering from motor neuron disease and watched and learned and saw all
01:49the manifestations of it.
01:53His relationship with the voice, I mean the voice itself, it had never occurred to me when
01:58I got this part, why has Stephen Hawking got an American voice? And the answer was, that was
02:02the first technology that came, and because his voice then became so related to, or his icon
02:08became so related to that voice, he's never wanted to change it, because that's what we
02:12know as his new, his new identity and vocal identity, and my God, his identity important.
02:20He comes from a documentary background, he, we, Felicity and I found ways of, you know,
02:28it was very free, very open. Benoit, the extraordinary DP who, who James worked with, James really
02:34encouraged as a quartet, this sort of massive collaboration and us discussing always being
02:40open, and, and it was wonderful. As I said, it's, in our world people talk about collaboration,
02:49but film sets are fundamentally hierarchical, and yet James managed to make it an incredibly
02:55collaborative experience.
02:59I hope that, I feel like, an audience coming to see A Theory of Everything, we all have
03:05a sense of Stephen Hawking the icon, we know what his image is, what his look is. I hope
03:13that this film will surprise people, in the way that when I read it, it surprised me, about
03:18his character, about his life, about his family, about this extraordinary woman that was the fuel
03:25behind a lot of his success. And I hope that you see sides of his personality that, I mean,
03:32his humour, his wit, his complications, his stubbornness, his, you know, all these things that make
03:41someone live a full life. And my God, Stephen Hawking, aged 21, was given two years to live.
03:47My God has he lived a full life, and continues to. So, I hope it will be a story that's
03:54as inspiring
03:56to audiences to watch as it was for me to play.
03:58I hope it will be a story.
03:59I hope it will be a story.
04:03Thank you.
04:03Thank you.
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