“I feel like as old friends, we’ve never actually really talked much about acting, so here goes,” said Eddie Redmayne, who moderated a conversation with Andrew Garfield for SAG members to discuss Garfield’s performance in the musical “Tick, Tick… Boom!” Garfield earned his second Best Actor Oscar nomination for the film, which is something he and Redmayne have in common: Redmayne earned a couple of Best Actor bids for “The Theory of Everything” and “The Danish Girl,” winning for the first. And now they’ve both starred in movie musicals: before Redmayne won his Oscar, he was featured in “Les Miserables.” Watch the exclusive video of their discussion above.
“Tick, Tick… Boom!” is the autobiographical musical Jonathan Larson wrote in 1991 before he composed his iconic “Rent” score, though he died at age 35 of an aortic dissection the day “Rent” was to begin previews Off-Broadway in 1996. Garfield plays him in the film, which is his first musical and Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s first film as a director. “Talking about John never gets old,” Garfield says. “It feels like my heart grows an extra size whenever I get to talk about him.” He and Redmayne both feel a “deep identification” with the composer, and indeed Garfield feels the film “is kind of the story of every SAG card-carrying member in terms of the journey that Jonathan goes on and everything that he symbolizes.”
For Garfield, making the film was “like being reunited with a long lost brother in art, in heart, in ethics, in a revolutionary longing to change things, a kind of understanding of what matters in life … But also, the problem was, I had never sung,” though Redmayne has seen him “karaoke the hell out of a situation.” Nevertheless, Garfield “jumped in the deep end” because “the best moment is when you book the gig … but then you have months, if you’re lucky, to stress about it.” And stress he did, because what the real Larson did was “beyond singing. It’s using singing to change the world.”
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