Tony Nominee Eddie Redmayne on Playing Cabaret's Emcee: 'It's Beyond Imagination'

Eddie Redmayne’s current workout regimen involves having a man beat the bejeezus out of him once a week. “In one way it’s emotional therapy,” he told The Broadway Show of his massage therapy sessions, “but it’s also complete physical torture.”

Redmayne is putting himself through this exquisite punishment in order to perform the role of the Emcee in Broadway’s latest revival of Cabaret at the August Wilson Theatre. Redmayne’s Emcee is an unsettling presence—part Pierrot, part David Lynch demon—at the center of director Rebecca Frecknall’s phantasmagoric take on the material. On April 30 he was nominated for a Tony for his performance; he won his first Tony in 2010 for the Broadway transfer of Red.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Tamsen Fadal, Redmayne talked about his early love of the musical, the transformative vision for the new production, meeting former Emcees, Tony nominations day and more.

Edited excerpts from the conversation follow. Check out the full video of the interview below.

ON CREATING A NEW VISION FOR A BELOVED SHOW

“Cabaret is so beloved. By me more than anyone else. As a kid, Cabaret was one of those pieces that got me into acting. It was the thing that persuaded my parents, who don't come from a theatrical background at all, that maybe it was something that I could pursue.

One of the ideas we had was, how do you create an evening for people? How do you immerse people in an experiential thing that means that you leave everything, all your memories of the day, out on Broadway on 52nd Street, and get pulled and intoxicated into a different world?

Our designer, a wonderful man called Tom Scutt, has completely converted the August Wilson, so you enter via a back alley and you get taken into these bars, these clandestine spaces, past musicians and dancers. And hopefully by the time you arrive into the theater proper, you've forgotten about your life, you've left those troubles outside, and you're ready to be drawn into this dark and beautiful world.

One of the things about Cabaret as a piece, written by Kander and Ebb and Masteroff, is it presents as this joyful celebration, and then gradually, through these pieces of wonderful music, you don't realize that you're being skewered and that the story is going to quite a dark place.

Performance-wise, it's joyful. The other character in the scenes with the Emcee is the audience. Having that intimacy, having the shift in that every night, having different audience members with different attitudes, with different histories, with different clothes.

One of the glorious things about this production is people come dressed to the nines. People come in fetish gear, people come in black tie, people come in jeans. It's a wonderful mix. And the color of that and the diversity of that makes my job wonderful because it shifts every night.”

ON MEETING THE EMCEES

“What's been extraordinary for me is I got to meet Joel. [The original Emcee] Joel Grey came to see the show last night. Alan Cumming [who played the Emcee in the Sam Mendes production in 1998 and again in 2014] came to see the show, which was incredible.

These two actors are icons of mine. I grew up watching their interpretations of this part. One of the things I've spoken to both of them about was that the Emcee was not in the book by Christopher Isherwood—he was a creation of [the original Cabaret director] Hal Prince and Joel Grey's. And he exists in abstract terms. No one talks about what his character is. He only has these songs. He doesn't interact specifically with other cast members.

What I was curious about was this idea of him as the Greek chorus. That in some ways he starts as the puppeteer—the marionette artist—and then gradually through the piece becomes the conductor. Without sounding too pretentious, he's the soul of the deteriorating Berlin. As fascism comes in, he's going to be absolutely fine because he can shape-shift and appear in different guises. Whereas the people in the club, this extraordinary group of individuals, don't have that privilege.”

ON GAYLE RANKIN'S SALLY BOWLES

"It’s been like working with a volcano of talent. She's so free, and she brings this comedienne-like quality to Sally. You believe this person plays through capricious playfulness as a distraction and a tool. And yet when she breaks your heart, it's overwhelming."

ON TONY NOMINATIONS DAY

“I'm not a musical theater person born and bred. For me, the technical and physical elements of this show, doing it eight times a week, are not something that I can sit in that easily. So my first thing in the morning is getting in a very hot shower and doing a load of vocal warm-ups, sirens, lip trills, to see—with slight fear—where the voice is at and whether we're going to be okay or not.

So I was in the shower. I got out of the shower and there were some phone calls. And it was wonderful. I was lucky enough, last time I was here, about a decade ago, to go to the Tonys, and there's no evening like it. It is so extraordinary. And I'm so thrilled I get to go.

To my 15-year-old self, the idea that I would be getting to do this piece on Broadway is beyond imagination. I suppose my aspiration is to keep finding things that challenge me, that push me to places that I feel uncomfortable with—to fail quite a lot and occasionally succeed.”