Exclusive: Oscar Winner Eddie Redmayne On Playing Tom Hayden In ‘The Trial Of The Chicago 7’

Currently playing on Netflix is Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial Of The Chicago 7, featuring Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, Oscar-nominee Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman, Jeremy Strong as as Jerry Rubin, Golden Globe-nominee Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Richard Schultz, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seale, Alex Sharp as Rennie Davis and Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Fred Hampton. It will also star Michael Keaton, William Hurt, Thomas Middleditch, John Carroll Lynch, Daniel Flaherty, Noah Robbins, Mark Rylance, J.C. MacKenzie and Max Adler, who also serves as an executive producer.

Based on a true story, The Trial of the Chicago 7 follows protesters who disrupted the 1968 Democrat party convention with an anti-Vietnam war “carnival” that turned nasty. Demonstrators threw bricks, police responded with tear gas and the center of Chicago was engulfed in flames. Curfews only escalated the violence.

After the clashes, independent investigators blamed eight police officers and eight protesters including Hoffman, who had already disrupted the New York Stock Exchange with showers of fake money. The police were not charged but the protesters were accused of inciting a riot. One was jailed for contempt, leaving the seven to fight the charges.

Having won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, then garnering another Oscar nod for playing the transgender artist Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl, Redmayne is no stranger to playing real-life individuals. Even with fictional characters such as Newt Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts film series, or Marius Pontmercy in Tom Hooper's musical Les Misérables, Redmayne embodies the characters he plays with such conviction, whether they come from a source material or not. In speaking with BlackFilmandTV.com’s Wilson Morales, Redmayne talks about playing Tom Hayden and working with Aaron Sorkin.