Eddie Redmayne takes on transgender role

Actor Eddie Redmayne. Photo / AP

He's already playing Stephen Hawking, and now actor Eddie Redmayne will take on another challenging role - a transgender woman.

Redmayne has revealed he is set to play the first transgender woman ever to have sex-change surgery in an upcoming project titled The Danish Girl, reports E! Online.

The 32-year-old Les Miserables actor will star in a semi-fictionalised look at the life of Danish painter Einar Wegener, who later became Lili Elbe following the operation in 1931.

Redmayne said he's been busy meeting with transgender women to help him get in to character.

"Even though it is period and under very different circumstances than today, I'm meeting many women from the trans community and hearing their experiences," he told E! Online.

"I have put on dresses and wigs and make-up. I'm beginning to embark on that and trying to find out who she is."

The film will be directed by Tom Hooper, who worked with Redmayne in Les Miserables.

Redmayne has also been busy this year filming The Theory Of Everything, which focuses on Hawkings early career and relationship with his first wife Jane, played by fellow British actor Felicity Jones.

For that role he said he spent hours alone practising his facial movements.

Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in a scene from The Theory of Everything. Photo / AP

"I had on an iPad (and) all the documentary footage I can get my mitts on, and then I would wait for my girlfriend to leave the house and I would sit in front of the mirror and try to get muscles working that were not used to working," he said.

- AAP