Interview: Taron Egerton and Director Dexter Fletcher Talk EDDIE THE EAGLE

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to attend a screening of Eddie the Eagle that featured a Q&A with director Dexter Fletcher and star Taron Egerton. (Hugh Jackman was supposed to be there too, but he ended up bailing at the last minute.) I liked the movie — you can read my review right here — and Fletcher and Egerton were both engaging, personable, self-deprecating, and fun to listen to as they spoke about the film. I've transcribed the best parts of the conversation below.

Fletcher, who was hand-picked by producer Matthew Vaughn to direct the film, talked about how he came on board the project:

Fletcher: The script has been floating around for fifteen years before we got ahold of it. So it has been around, it’s just taken its time to work its way through the machine and find the right team and the right group of people to tackle it in the way that we did and give it the heart we felt it deserved. Matthew sat and watched Cool Runnings with his kids. Cool Runnings is another great movie set during the same Olympics where there was a Jamaican bobsled team who came in last…it’s a very good film and a great story about endeavor and sport and achievement, and I think he felt the time was right to revisit it, but this time tell one man’s story or a story about friendship, so here we are.

Egerton on how he physically transformed to closely resemble Eddie:

Egerton: All it was was that I didn’t do any weight loss. (laughs) I looked at lots of footage of Eddie and Dexter said very early on that he wanted me to look like an unlikely athlete, an unlikely hero, and said, ‘Don’t spend any time at the gym.’ I immediately a fist-bump punch to the air, and thought, ‘Great!’ I watched a lot of footage of him. I wanted to affect an underbite. A lot of it was down to the glasses — this isn’t Christian Bale in The Machinist.

Fletcher: It’s as good in its own way, though, what you do. It’s easy to say, ‘I put on some glasses and I affected an underbite,’ but I think that what you get when you watch the film is how much heart and determination Taron brings to portraying Eddie. That’s the journey we go on. I think we admire that relentlessness that he does with such warmth and affection. We were always very clear that we wanted to treat Eddie with warmth and affection because we really admire him.

Egerton: That was something Dexter and I connected with very early on. There’s a great risk with this script that you could take the easy route and deride Eddie and mock him and make him a figure of fun, and we don’t shy away from the fact that he was an unlikely hero and there are a few moments where he looks a bit silly, but I feel — and I hope the audience feels — that the heart of it is that he was someone who was incredibly passionate and that’s what we set about trying to do.

Fletcher: It was a fine line to walk [not making Eddie too nerdy] and sometimes he would dial it up and I’d have him bring it down, but watching it as many times as I have, I can always see that the real challenge for Taron was to make him complex and not make him just two-dimensional. It’s very multilayered. Sometimes it’s quite subtle, but it is all in there. I’ve watched it many, many times and I can see many, many things going on. But that’s what sustains us as an audience through it, that there’s always another element of Eddie through each of these moments that he goes through that we discover about him. It’s not always so straightforward…he has many, many sides, and I think that’s a testament to this young man’s talent.

After hyping the crowd a little about the upcoming Kingsman sequel, Egerton spoke about going from that movie right into this one and playing such wildly different characters:

Egerton: It’s an absolute dream because you don’t spend two hours in the gym and eat chicken and spinach. Matthew first called me about this when it began to build momentum and said, ‘I know you really want to do something different. I think this might be the thing.’ It really was. As an actor, the dream is that you get to play different parts, so yeah, the variety of it is always great.

On the ‘80s-inspired score:

Fletcher: It’s set in a very particular period. It’s a costume drama, for all intents and purposes. All of the clothes are from the ‘80s. We had to go dig out these musty old costumes and that carried through really with the whole concept of the film. The music should be recreated in a very ‘80s way, all of the fonts that you see are very ‘80s and it helps evoke and recreate that era for those of us who remember it. Music is a big part of that, it can take people back to a certain time and place. And during the ‘80s, of course, there was this great revolution in synthesized music. The synthesizer came on the scene, and Gary Newman turned up, and all of these bands that suddenly had no real live instruments. We discussed with the composer creating a score that used only those synthesizers and it captured the era very well.

The production filmed in Germany where the real-life Eddie actually trained, but the studio (understandably) wouldn't let the actors do much skiing because of the risk of injury:

Egerton: I had never skied before in my life. When we went out to Germany, I came out a couple of weeks early and tried to learn to ski and fell over an awful lot. I ended up on a red slope, which was a source of pride for me. We started shooting, and this e-mail came through from production and they said, ‘No one is allowed to ski. At all.’ They feared we would injure ourselves…Hugh’s a sickeningly good skier. How irritating is it how good Hugh Jackman is at everything? (laughs)

Eddie the Eagle is still in theaters, and you should check it out if you're a sports movie buff.