Eddie Redmayne reveals he occasionally pays the rent of struggling actors
'It's impossibly expensive to live in London'
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Your support makes all the difference.Eddie Redmayne has admitted to occasionally paying the rent for struggling actors in London as he realises the capital is “impossibly expensive”.
The Danish Girl actor acknowledges he had a great "privilege" as his parents lived in London when he was looking for acting work so he now likes to lend a hand to others who aren’t in as fortunate a position as he was.
He told GQ magazine in their upcoming issue: “The greatest privilege that I had was that my parents lived in London. So when I was out of university and out of work for a year, working in a pub, I didn’t pay rent.
“And I get letters from people trying to go to drama school and needing to pay their rent. And so that’s something I occasionally do. It’s impossibly expensive to live in London.”
Redmayne is not the first actor to publicly recognise the extortionate fees for drama school in the UK. In 2014, Dame Judi Dench also revealed she receives countless letters from young actors asking for help funding their education.
She told the Observer: “Anyone who’s in the theatre gets letters countless times a week asking for help to get through drama school. You can do so much, but you can’t do an endless thing. It is very expensive.”
Another respected actress, Julie Walters echoed Dame Judi’s sentiments in January, 2015 telling the Guardian: “People like me wouldn’t have been able to go to college today. I could because I got a full grant. I don’t know how you get into it now. Kids write to me all the time and I think, I don’t know what to tell you."
Redmayne, 33, was born in Westminster, he was educated at Eton college in the same year as Prince William. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge with a degree in History of Art.
He initially begun working as a model and landed coveted campaigns like Burberry in 2008 and 2012. He rose to prominence as an actor through stage and film roles such as My Week with Marilyn and Les Miserables before winning the Oscar for Best Actor in 2015 for portraying Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.
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