Colin Clark, author of My Week With Marilyn, is played by Eddie Redmayne in the forthcoming movie. In some ways this is a difficult role to take, because personally I don’t believe that Clark was really as close to Monroe as he claimed.
However, Eddie Redmayne is a fine actor – I loved his performance as Angel Clare in the BBC’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles - and I’m sure he will do well (and probably a lot better than Clark deserves…)
Redmayne recently spoke about My Week With Marilyn with David Colman of Interview magazine:
“COLMAN: So how did you come to this Marilyn Monroe project?
REDMAYNE: Originally, when the script came in, I read the book and I was fascinated by this character Colin Clark. He’d grown up surrounded by people like Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier and Margot Fonteyn, who were friends of his parents, but he wasn’t intimidated by their fame. He went on to become a runner in the film industry. The film industry is incredibly hierarchical, a bit like Eton [College], which is where Clark went to school—and also where I went to school. But as a runner on a film set, despite the fact that you’re the lowest of the low, you also have access to everything, so what was challenging for me was that the guy is kind of an observer and a cipher.
COLMAN: Were you a Marilyn Monroe fan going in?
REDMAYNE: I have to put my hand up here. I’m getting better, but I remain one of the most ill-educated filmgoers in the world, so it was a wonderful excuse to watch a lot of Marilyn Monroe movies. What’s amazing is this whole movie is about how she was going through this incredibly desperate, dark time, and was a nightmare from all accounts—and yet when you watch The Prince and the Showgirl, she has this lightness and frivolity and this kind of sexy effortlessness.”
