"And so I went in to meet him, and he now just uses this [single] muscle beneath his cheek, and when he moves this muscle, [his computerized voice program] stops on one letter," Redmayne says of meeting Stephen Hawking. "So when you spend time with him, there are these long, long pauses. I was horrifically nervous, and I hate silence. And so basically I spent 45 minutes spewing out information about him, to him. It was really chronically disastrous."
"I never turned my back on it, really," he says of a time when he left Hollywood for Montana. "I just went through a phase of getting tired of hearing myself do the same old thing. I'd hear the same rhythms and tricks. And frankly, it's not like someone was knocking on my door with a tremendous amount of quality work — [though] if they had, I'm not sure I would have been particularly interested."
"I did a movie, I was about 29 years old. And I was feeling really confident at the time," Hawke recalls of his biggest mistake in the business. "And I remember being very frustrated with the director because I felt that he was an idiot and he was really holding me back from doing the work that I wanted to do. I felt this real need to tell everybody that I knew more than they did, you know? And when I think back on it now, I feel so embarrassed."
"I think one of the biggest mistakes you could make is, you think that you know enough — because you can't, otherwise you'd stop and you'd just keep repeating yourself," says Spall.
"If you mean being scrutinized in your public life, which isn't your work; if you mean requirements of your time which distract your focus and your energy from what actually brought you to that point where you're being distracted, that's a complete Catch-22: The more work you do, the more attention there is," says Cumberbatch of fame.
"Wrestling is very similar in a metaphorical way to acting: You're wrestling; you're literally in a fight with [a role]," says Tatum. "Because in wrestling you're not just fighting someone else, you're fighting what's going on with you. You're in a suffocating situation, and there's no resting. You can't take a minute; you're constantly in this uncomfortable state of being attacked. You're dealing with a lot of emotions, a lot of fear — not that I see acting as exactly that, but there are some parallels."
From left: Timothy Spall, 57 (Mr. Turner); and Channing Tatum, 34 (Foxcatcher); Eddie Redmayne, 32 (The Theory of Everything); Ethan Hawke, 44 (Boyhood); Michael Keaton, 63 (Birdman); Benedict Cumberbatch, 38 (The Imitation Game)
Accents, training and education apart, the six awards contenders found a surprising amount in common.