Einstein does a Night Manager – and exposes the gravity of his depravity
IT BEGAN with Tom Hiddleston in The Night Manager – and now even revered Nobel Prize winners are getting in on the act.
A new television drama about the life of Albert Einstein shows the brilliant physicist engaged in a very intimate embrace with his secretary.
The shocking scene – shown in our exclusive pictures – comes just minutes into the first episode.
And it carries uncanny echoes of Hiddleston’s romp with co-star Elizabeth Debicki in the BBC’s award- winning series The Night Manager last year.
In the new ten-part series, called Genius, Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush plays Einstein, who is portrayed using his intellect to seduce women who cross his path.
When, during the opening sex scene, his secretary Betty Neumann – portrayed by Charity Wakefield – cries out ‘Oh God, oh God!’, the incorrigible boffin replies: ‘God would most likely disapprove of this idea but I would convince him.’
He then tries to persuade Betty to move in with him, even though he is happily married t o his second wife Elsa.
‘Monogamy is not natural,’ he tells Betty. ‘It’s a construct of religious authority. I love Mozart and Bach, I love the Swiss Alps and the Baltic Sea. Why can’t love you and Elsa?’ Producer Ken Biller said: ‘Albert Einstein had many important women in his life and they play a central role in this series. I don’t know if I would call him a womaniser because he didn’t objectify women. He loved women, he loved many women, and he had very set ideas about how he should conduct his life. He did not believe in monogamy, for instance. He thought it was a social construct.’ The series, which also stars Johnny Flynn as a younger Einstein, paints a deeply unconventional picture of the scientist best known for his General Theory of Relativity, which explains that what we perceive as the force of gravity in fact arises from the curvature of space and time. The drama shows that Einstein and second wife Elsa, played by Emily Watson, had an arrangement that allowed him to sleep with other women.
But Biller said: ‘The series is very historically accurate. We know that during his marriage to Elsa he had many, many affairs and he had an arrangement which allowed that to happen. It’s also a historical fact that he had an affair with Betty Neumann.’
Einstein begins tonight at 9pm on the National Geographic channel.