Iwasjusthappynottoget firedbecauseofmyvoice
OSCAR WINNER’S FEARS BEFORE EARLY MAN
and you find out who the character is. “What is amazing here is that Nick brought in a Plasticine Dug and showed me a little bit of animation of him and he just had such wide eyes and was clearly so hopeful and uncynical and optimistic that we just started playing around there. “We tried lots of things but it was really embarrassing – there are probably some hideous out-takes of me trying weird and bizarre voices. I’ve blanked that memory.” Describing one particularly tricky day, he said: “There was a slightly hideous moment before Christmas when we were doing the last session and I had got a really brutal cold. Suddenly Dug’s voice (he adopts husky tones) was down here.”
But one upside to the voiceover humiliations for the film, which also features Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams, was that he didn’t have to scrub up well for the camera, which must be an advantage as Eddie has a 19-month-old daughter, Iris Mary.
He said: “You don’t have to think about what you’re wearing.
“You can fall out of bed and arrive in the booth. It’s probably not that pleasant for Nick if I turn up in my pyjamas, though.”
It must be strange for an actor who has gone through so many physical transformations for his roles – including physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything and transgender artist Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl – to use only his voice.
“Well, I got pretty physical in the booth,” he admitted. “There is this weird thing that happens where you go to this very famous sound booth in Soho. When I went for the first time I went to the loo – but the loo of this lovely place is a bit like going to a sort of slightly gross club.
“I don’t know if it’s the same for women but these places have 700 different types of deodorant and eau de toilette and stuff.
“I looked at it and I thought, ‘Oh, this is a bit much’. But after about an hour in the booth, I was spraying all of them on me.
“It’s smelly, physical work being a voiceover actor.” ● Early Man is out now.