Stephen and Jane Hawking's wedding scene, set in 1965, before ALS confined Stephen to a wheelchair. "There was so much heart in [Jane's] book," says Felicity Jones, who stars as Hawking's ex-wife. "I felt like I wanted to protect that person, to defend her in some ways. But what was important to her was to convey the truth of what it was like to care for another person. She didn't want anything to be glib."
Eddie Redmayne had seen Hawking in person — from afar — long before making the movie when he studied art history at Cambridge before becoming an actor. But actually meeting the scientist shortly before filming was "an epiphany."
Bike riding with his schoolmate Brian (played by Harry Lloyd) on the Cambridge campus. "It's such a timeless place," says Marsh. "To put a motorized wheelchair in these old settings — I found that kind of interesting."
"It was seconds of great excitement followed by a sucker punch of fear," says Redmayne of his reaction to landing the part of Stephen Hawking. He worked with a dance instructor to learn how to contort his body and replicate Hawking's disease-ravaged body. "It helped train me to inhabit those physicalities continually over long periods of time," he says.
This scene, with Hawking's young son Robert (played by Oliver Payne) cavorting on his dad's wheelchair, was added late in the production, after the real Robert told the filmmakers that it was a vivid memory from his childhood. "Talking with Robert, he would bring up so many little bits, moments with his father, and we put them in the film," says Jones.
Jones as Jane, teaching her husband how to communicate by blinking at letters on a board. This was before Hawking got his computer synthesizer, which he jokingly refers to as his "American voice."
Hawking's classmates put him in the lap of a statue of Queen Victoria, which was fabricated by the production's art department. No such statue actually exists at Cambridge.
Director James Marsh (left) with Redmayne and Jones. "He allowed us the freedom to mess up," says Redmayne. "That's where interesting work happens — on the bridge of failure and success."