An image posted Friday on Twitter gives a very different view of Oscar-winning British actor Eddie Redmayne.
With bright red lipstick and carefully curled red hair, he is shown in his new role as transgender pioneer Lili Elbe.
The movie “The Danish Girl” is currently in production, and the image is the first of Redmayne in character to be released by the UK production company Working Title.
It comes hot on the heels of Redmayne’s triumph at Sunday’s Academy Awards, where he won best actor for his performance as the ALS-afflicted scientist Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything.”
Directed by Tom Hooper and based on a novel of the same name by David Ebershoff, “The Danish Girl” is inspired by the story of Elbe, who was one of the first known recipients of sex reassignment surgery.
Elbe, born in Denmark as Einar Wegener, was an artist who began to experiment with gender identity while married to a fellow painter. Eventually Elbe made the decision to undergo a sex change, and the surgery was carried out in Germany in 1930.
