Say it ain’t so: Eddie Redmayne is reportedly going over to the dark side, as he looks set to play a real-life serial killer.
Deadline reports the clean-cut star of The Theory of Everything and Fantastic Beasts is currently in talks to star in The Good Nurse alongside Jessica Chastain.
The killer in question is Charles Cullen, the New Jersey nurse dubbed the “Angel of Death” after he was implicated in the deaths of roughly 300 patients over 16 years. Cullen was eventually caught by two former Newark homicide detectives, with the help of his co-worker and fellow nurse Amy Loughren (Chastain, assuming she signs on), who risked her job and family’s safety to stop him.
The ingredients are all there for a tense serial killer thriller, with an Oscar-nominated director at the helm (Tobias Lindholm) and a Penny Dreadful writer (Krysty Wilson-Cairns) penning the script.
But what about Redmayne? Serial killers tend to be portrayed on film as cold, emotion-free and sinister, and we can’t quite picture Eddie in that kind of role.
In fact, his track record of playing a villain isn’t exactly glowing. In 2016 he told Empire magazine he once auditioned to play a 16-year-old Tom Riddle (a.k.a Voldemort) in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. “I properly failed and didn’t get a call back,” he admitted. And, more recently, Redmayne revealed he fluffed a chance to play Kylo Ren in Star Wars: A Force Awakens, a role that ended up going to Adam Driver.
And then there was Balem Abrasax, the evil interplanetary supervillain he played in 2015’s Jupiter Ascending, a character that divided critics of the film.
We’ll have to wait and see how Eddie approaches this role — and if it’ll be enough to bag him his third Oscar nomination after The Theory of Everything (2015) and The Danish Girl (2016).
Can you imagine Eddie as a serial killer?