Golden Globes 2015: Eddie Redmayne wins lead actor drama for ‘Theory’

Eddie Redmayne has won the Golden Globe for lead actor in a motion picture, drama, for playing cosmologist Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything.”

“It is a great privilege for me to be in this room,” Redmayne said during his acceptance speech Sunday. “Getting to spend time with Stephen Hawking … was one of the great, great honors of my life.”

Redmayne emerged victorious in a competitive category that also included Steve Carell as the unstable chemical-fortune heir John du Pont in “Foxcatcher,” Benedict Cumberbatch as the British codebreaker Alan Turing in “The Imitation Game,” Jake Gyllenhaal as an unscrupulous freelance videographer in “Nightcrawler” and David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma.”

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It was the first Globes nomination for the 33-year-old British actor, who moviegoers may also recall played Marius in Tom Hooper’s big-screen adaptation of “Les Miserables” two years ago.

In “Theory,” Redmayne and costar Felicity Jones play Hawking and his first wife, Jane Wilde, over 25 years — from their courtship at Cambridge through Hawking’s diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and the birth of their three children.

During a post-screening Q&A in October, Redmayne talked to The Times about his approach to portraying one of the greatest scientific minds on the planet, a man who also lives with a debilitating motor neuron disease.

“I had this instinct to go back to a kind of more old-school way that certainly they used to do in Hollywood, of surrounding yourself with a team,” Redmayne said. “My instinct was that everything would affect everything. So anything you were doing physically, if it was veiled by the wrong costuming, then it wouldn’t work, and that in turn would have to work with whatever you were doing makeup-wise.”

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