Moviemaking, Without Superheroes

As film pitches go, The Danish Girl—about a transgender artist in 1920s Copenhagen—should have been a hard sell. Instead, British producers Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan, co-chairmen of Working Title Films, thought they’d spotted a rare gem. They quickly greenlighted it in 2014, casting Eddie Redmayne as a repressed husband discovering his true self as a woman.

That was before Caitlyn Jenner thrust the transgender movement into the headlines. It was also before Fellner and Bevan knew their previous film with Redmayne, The Theory of Everything, would be a runaway success in 2015. Redmayne won a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of physicist Stephen Hawking in a film that cost $15 million to make and grossed $123 million at the box office. Many critics expect Redmayne to get another Oscar nomination for The Danish Girl.