Eddie Redmayne, who sings, leads a revolution, and breaks hearts in the movie version of Les Misérables, was staring at an abstract landscape by Gustav Klimt at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan on a freezing afternoon in early February. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to a small bright blue patch in the upper left corner of the canvas. Redmayne, who is 31 but has the boyish exuberance of the perpetually curious, majored in art history at Cambridge and wrote his dissertation on the artist Yves Klein and his signature color: a pure electric blue that nearly matches the shade in the Klimt. “I’m color-blind, but I can pick out that blue anywhere,” Redmayne said and walked toward the painting in a sort of trance. “I wrote 30,000 words on this color, and I never grew tired of it. The pigment is staggering. It’s amazing that a color can be so emotional. One can only hope to achieve that intensity in acting.”
Redmayne stared at the blue. He is tall and lanky and was dressed in shades of fall: tan corduroy pants, brown sweater, khaki jacket, with a dark green muffler looped around his neck. He began visiting the Neue seven years ago, when he was in New York to audition for the film The Good Shepherd, in which he played Angelina Jolie’s son. “I doubt it was my acting—I have my big lips to thank for getting cast,” Redmayne said. He turned his attention to an Egon Schiele cityscape. “I am fascinated by Schiele,” he continued, peeking behind a black curtain blocking the closed gallery next door. Before the guard could stop him from entering the room where the more autobiographical Schieles are displayed, Redmayne backed up. “The sexuality of Schiele’s drawings is still shocking,” he said, disappointed that he couldn’t see them that day. “We all think we’ve seen everything, and then you look at Schiele’s work and are stunned by how evocative and raw it is.”
Like his taste in art, which encompasses the refined and the rough, Redmayne seems to be split between worlds when it comes to his career: He recently portrayed Shakespeare’s Richard II onstage in London, but in his second film, Savage Grace, he was cast as a repressed gay man who has sex with his mother and kills her. “My trajectory has always been a little bipolar—I’m caught between the Elizabethans and the crazies,” Redmayne said. We headed downstairs to Café Sabarsky, the Viennese restaurant in the museum. “I heard about the auditions for Les Mis while I was in a field in North Carolina shooting a movie called Hick, in which I play a pedophile meth addict from Texas with a limp,” he said. “I was in my Winnebago dressed in a cowboy costume, and I took my iPhone and filmed myself singing my character Marius’s big song.”
