Brit bunch: Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch and Felicity Jones grace the annual Hollywood Vanity Fair cover
Britain's Hollywood dominance is illustrated in this striking portrait of the year’s most celebrated actors.
Half of the 10 actors featured in the photograph, shot exclusively for the 21st annual Hollywood cover of Vanity Fair by Annie Leibovitz, are British.
The men are dressed in bespoke white-tie while the women wear gold and red “old Hollywood glamour”.
The British stars include Oscar nominees Eddie Redmayne, 33, who played Professor Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything, his co-star Felicity Jones, 31, and Benedict Cumberbatch, 38, honoured for his performance as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game.
Other British actors featured are Golden Globe nominee David Oyelowo, 38, who played Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, and American Sniper star Sienna Miller, 33.
They are joined by US rivals Reese Witherspoon, 38, who is nominated in the best actress category at the Oscars for Wild, Oscar Isaac, 35, of A Most Violent Year, and Whiplash star Miles Teller, 27.
Amy Adams, 40, who won a Golden Globe for Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, poses on the shoulders of Foxcatcher star Channing Tatum, 34, prompting him to joke: “I’m wearing Amy Adams.”
Oscar Nominations
Leibovitz, who shot the first Hollywood issue cover in 1995, said they did the shoot in the same studio as the original.
She told Vanity Fair: “It looks fairly simple, but in fact it was difficult … Usually you shoot from fairly far away, but we wanted to get really close to the actors. We made an effort to create a feeling of intimacy. I pushed into them, shooting to the left and then the right, coming in as tight as I could. It was hair-raising.”
At a luncheon for Oscar nominees in Beverly Hills yesterday, Redmayne revealed how he relished being asked about his Golden Globe at the airport.
He said: “It was on the X-ray machine and I saw them stop it and go close-up on this thing and the woman said: ‘I think it is an award or something’. I was praying for them to ask me to open it up. And they did.”
From the March issue of Vanity Fair, out Friday February 6
