Last April Eddie Redmayne's six-year passion project culminated with Cabaret sweeping seven awards, including Best Musical Revival and him winning the Best Actor in a Musical at the 2022 Olivier Awards in London.
As a teenage student, Redmayne had previously portrayed the exuberant Emcee. This time round he was involved in initiating the revival, staged at the West End's Playhouse Theatre which has been transformed into Berlin's Kit Kat Club.
"This production was very intimate. We did it straight out after the embers of the pandemic, and you felt this need for people, whether the actors or the audience, to have an interaction and that level of intimacy," he said.
From November 2021 untill March last year, the British actor was fully occupied performing eight shows a week.
"It was incredibly rigorous. But it was also the most thrilling experience of my life. It felt like a marathon in some ways, but I find when I get fully engrossed in work that time just disappears," he said.
Omega's long-standing ambassador since 2015, Redmayne has been intrigued by precision timekeeping, and even more so when he visited its headquarters in Switzerland last September.
Omega has been based in Biel since 1880 following a relocation from La Chaux-de-Fonds, where the first workshop was established in 1848.
"You realise how much time and craftsmanship goes into the making of an Omega watch. You see the watchmakers on shifts of a couple of hours because the concentration needed when they're dealing with elements that miniscule is overwhelming. It made me appreciate what you're wearing on your wrist even more," he said.
The Londoner, however, had familiarised with the Swiss brand since his childhood.
"My dad had an Omega De Ville -- very beautiful, very classic. My visual memories as a kid of seeing him with the watch and taking it off before swimming, it was a very valued thing," he said.
Unlike his father, Redmayne can now swim wearing a sporty Seamaster with a rubber strap. His other favourite watches include those from the new Seamaster Aqua Terra Shades collection with nine colours to dress the dial.
"What I love about the Aqua Terra is first the simple classicism of the shape. I love that the colours give it a vibrancy, which means you can wear something quite classic, and it will do the talking for you," he said.
Along with fellow ambassadors Zoë Kravitz and Zhou Dongyu, Redmayne stars in the accompanying "Every Shade Of You" campaign.
The visuals feature him wearing the Atlantic Blue, Bay Green, Sandstone, Saffron and Terracotta versions of the Aqua Terra 150M in a 38mm polished stainless steel case.
"So, the big elephant in the room is that I'm red-green colour blind, but it just means I confuse colours. I see fully in colour, but probably how I see colours differs from how you see them," he said.
Despite the red-green colour blindness, Redmayne is fascinated by the visible spectrum. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he studied History of Art and did a dissertation on International Klein Blue, mixed and patented by French artist Yves Klein in 1957.
This distinctive ultramarine came upon him again when he was in Shanghai for the opening of the Planet Omega Exhibition at the Power Station of Art in April 2019.
"On the 1st floor was an exhibition of Yves Klein and this colour. And my knees buckled. It's a very emotional colour," recalled the award-winning actor.
His mother is a very good painter, he noted, and she uses Payne's Grey, which reveals a bluey tinge when diluted with water.
Redmayne has always been quite obsessed with this colour and relates it to what Rebecca Solnit wrote in A Field Guide To Getting Lost.
"When you look into the distance in a landscape, it always turns to blue or a bluey-grey colour. She talks about the beauty of this colour and that the aspiration of life is trying to get to this colour. But as you get closer, of course, it disappears," he said.
From the Aqua Terra Shades palette, he prefers the subtle Sandstone and striking Terracotta.
"The Terracotta is a unique colour. It kind of vibrates in relation to the casing and strap in a really curious way. So I like the conflict of colours," he said.
His theatre career blossomed through a blazing red. As Mark Rothko's assistant named Ken in Red, he earned his first Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role as well as a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play.
On stage, he also took the title role of Richard II before a hiatus of around 10 years, which was broken by his comeback in Cabaret At The Kit Kat Club.
On the silver screen, he has played Marius Pontmercy in Les Misérables, Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl, Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything, and Newt Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts films.
His accolades include an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his meticulous performance as Prof Hawking, who was afflicted by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
"A degenerative disease like that, in which you are given a time limit on your life, instantly throws the notion of what time means," he expressed. "One of the last lines in Richard II, 'I wasted time and now time doth waste me', is another example. That idea of not wasting time, of really filling every moment, is exacerbated when you know there's a limit to it."
