Tom Hooper’s next film, The Danish Girl, looks like being a significant player at next year’s Oscars. With Academy Award-winning Eddie Redmayne in the lead as transgender pioneer Einar Wegener and Alicia Vikander in close support as his wife Gerda, it’s long on acting pedigree and hardly short on the tough but uplifting themes Oscar delights in. Take a look at first trailer below.
The film, a story of identity, art and sensation in mid-20th century Europe, has been simmering away for a number of years. Nicole Kidman, Tomas Alfredson, Gwyneth Paltrow and Charlize Theron have all been linked and unlinked at various stages but it’s with **Les Misérables **collaborators Hooper and Redmayne on deck that it’s making its way to the screen.
Redmayne's Wegener is a Danish-born artist who was one of the first known people to undergo sex reassignment surgery. Born male, she underwent a series of experimental surgeries in Germany, beginning in 1930 and changed her name to Lili Elbe. Vikander's Gerda is shown as an initially enthusiastic partner to her husband, even capturing him in women’s clothing on canvas, who came to feel marginalised by his dalliances with Ben Whishaw’s suitor Henrik.
If Redmayne’s transformation is the obvious story, Lucinda Coxon’s (The Crimson Petal And The White) script looks like offering plenty of nuance to this true-life story of transformation and identity.
Amber Heard, Sebastian Koch and Matthias Schoenaerts round out The Danish Girl’s cast. It lands in UK cinemas on January 1.