Comment on Redmayne, Hooper reunite for transgender tale 'Danish Girl'

TORONTO (AP) — In a pivotal scene early in Tom Hooper's "The Danish Girl," the 1920s Copenhagen painter Einar Wegener, as played by Eddie Redmayne, sits in for a portrait his wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander) is painting of a ballerina. Redmayne, the best-actor Oscar winner earlier this year for his Stephen Hawking in "The Theory of Everything," has proven to be an immaculately technical actor and an expert of metamorphosis. A year after charting Hawking's physical degeneration, his conversion from Einar to Lili in "The Danish Girl" again has the 33-year-old British actor being hailed as a likely Academy Award nominee. There's something in Ed that's drawn to the feminine, maybe, says Hooper of Redmayne, who also played Viola in a stage production of Twelfth Night. Earlier this year, the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism studied the 100 top-grossing films of 2014 and found zero transgender characters. "There is a serious problem not only in our industry but within many industries of trans men and trans women and discrimination in the workplace," Redmayne says. [...] people see it as an obvious film to have done, and I think that's indicative of a wonderful shift that's begun to happen in the culture where trans stories have become more acceptable. "The key balancing act of directing the film was balancing shame and joy, balancing this idea that the transition was both a release into anxiety and a release from anxiety," Hooper says.