Les Miserables’s Eddie Redmayne Talks Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy

Eddie Redmayne may not yet be cast in a comic book superhero movie, but the self-described fan seems bound for one eventually, with recent auditions for roles in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy.While out promoting the new film adaptation of Les Miserables, in which Redmayne stars alongside X-Men’s Hugh Jackman and The Dark Knight Rises’s Anne Hathaway, Collider cornered the actor with questions about how it feels to be auditioning for movies with such a big spotlight being shone on the whole process. Check it out below.

Collider: What’s it like for you being mentioned alongside all these other actors for say, Spider-Man 2 or Guardians of the Galaxy?Redmayne: I’ll tell you what’s interesting about it, is first it’s very flattering, but I don’t know it’s a bit like someone said in this interview earlier, “Did you know all the people you were auditioning against?” And I’m one of those people, I just quite like to keep my head down and put one foot in front of the other because I get affected by noise and the feeling of it. So I try not to look into that. And sometimes it’s true and sometime it’s not. It’s very flattering and I feel very privileged for the moments that are true, but I try not to look at it.Collider: Well I’ll say this because obviously there are many people that Marvel is looking at and Sony is looking at, I mean these are huge franchises, but I’ll ask you just as a comic book person are you a big comic book person? Are you familiar with these characters? The superhero genre is getting more and more popular.Redmayne: It is. No and I’ve always been, do you know what, I have been a fan. – I go and see those films and the ones are good I absolutely love, and the ones that aren’t I don’t so much. But having seen things like Andrew and Emma’s performance in Spider-Man, you know it’s often that the scale of the pieces can make an audience think that there’s so much going on that you sort of forget that there are brilliant things being done by the actors in the middle of it. And same thing with The Avengers and I’m lucky enough to have worked with some of these actors and some of them are friends. And so you do go in from an actor’s point of view scrutinizing that. and I think through The Dark Knight Rises and all these other films there’s is a weightiness that is being given to these pieces now that, for me, is so much more extraordinary than when they felt more light.Collider: Totally. I think that in Spider-Man Andrew and Emma’s performance, their relationship, is the best part of the film. I really do.Redmayne: They have fantastic chemistry don’t they?Collider: Well I think they were falling in love on screen.Redmayne: [Laughs] Yeah, but I’ve done that and often it reads as really bad chemistry, it’s that famous thing.

While the role he was reportedly up for in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 — that of Harry Osborn — eventually went to Dane DeHaan, the role he’s up for in Guardians of the Galaxy, that of Peter Quill/Star-Lord, is still up for grabs.