Eddie Redmayne regrets playing Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl

Lili Elbe in 1926. She was one of the first known people to have undergone gender alignment surgery. Lili died at the age of 49 after a failed uterus transplant.

 

Eddie Redmayne told the Sunday Times that taking the role of Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl was a "mistake".

In the interview (behind a paywall) he lamented:

“No, I wouldn’t take it on now. I made that film with the best intentions, but I think it was a mistake."

 “The bigger discussion about the frustrations around casting is because many people don’t have a chair at the table. There must be a levelling, otherwise we are going to carry on having these debates.”

Not an apology. A personal regret.

Redmayne did not express regret for the unnecessary pain, frustration that he caused the transgender community.

He did not acknowledge the schism that he widened within the transgender community. Some trans people welcomed him playing a transgender character insisting that cultural acceptance is incremental and not a sprint.

Some like myself hate it when high-profile roles like that are doled out to sucessfull cisgender actors without so much as a casting call for transgender actors.

In my opinion, a transgender person can bring a tangible substance to the part because of their life experiences, where it was painfully obvious that Redmayne failed to do that in The Danish Girl. But in all honesty you need to be trans to notice that.

Trans lives matter and that is not up for debate. That being said we welcome him acknowledging that taking a transgender role, hopefully, any transgender part by a cisgender actor is a mistake.