Eddie Redmayne and His Singing Face Samantha Barks may be the newest face in "Les Misérables," but Eddie Redmayne, another British actor, is a close second. Mr. Redmayne may be most familiar to American audiences as the production assistant who becomes besotted with Michelle Williams's Marilyn Monroe in "My Week With Marilyn." In "Les Miz," he plays Marius, the French revolutionary who becomes besotted with another blonde, Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) and is saved by her father, Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman). While much of the rest of the cast, like Anne Hathaway, has spoken about being terrified of singing live, at a party for the movie the other night (which we have been milking all week) Mr. Redmayne told us that he was quite eager to get his big number, "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables," over with. "I quite like being shoved in with a difficult scene," he said, "because there's nothing worse than tiptoeing around the event. With films you never shoot chronologically so there's never any system to it. So you might as well plunge into the deep end and then sort of create the rest of the performance around what you did on Turn 1. That's how I like to do it, anyway. But on "Les Miz," the director, Tom Hooper, and the crew seemed to conspire against his wishes. "I would come to set every day," Mr. Redmayne said, "and the crew would be going, 'Did you hear Annie's 'I Dreamed a Dream'? It was breathtaking. And then I was there witnessing Hugh sing 'Bring Him Home.' Each character had the gremlin of their big song, like it sat on their shoulder, and then Hugh's relief the day after 'Bring Him Home' - it's like, 'This is amazing. It's a whole new film!' And Tom Hooper, who I'd worked with and is a friend, kept masochistically moving my song further and further back into the schedule, to the point that I told him, I was like: 'Tommy, we need to shoot it now. Enough already. Can we just do it? And once it was finished it was a massive relief. The performance took 21 takes. "Tom told me that he ended up using the 21st take," Mr. Redmayne said, smiling, "so I'm really glad we pushed it." That was not the first scene he shot, though. "My first scene was the first scene that I'm in, in the film, which is shouting and screaming 'Vive la République!'" he said. And I was -- you know, first-day nerves, adrenaline pumping, trying to give it everything I could. And then I arrived on Day 2 of filming and had no voice left. So I then became properly aware that I should probably go through my schedule - " he pronounced it the proper British way, 'she-dule' - "working out when I was allowed to shout and when I wasn't." In a further bit of directorial masochism, Mr. Redmayne confirmed that Mr. Hooper did not let his cast look at dailes, though the actor sometimes wanted to. "I don't like watching it generally," he said, "but there were moments with this, because you would sing passionately but you don't know what your face is doing." There was a chance, he added, that it looked "super weird." He prepared as best he could. "My singing teacher made me stand in front of a mirror singing really loudly but without trying to contort my face into something that would make an audience throw up, basically," he said, "so it was that, learning to find a happy balance."