Jumping up from the couch, Redmayne shows me how one of the women he consulted with would look in the mirror before leaving the house every morning and sling a backpack over one shoulder — here he mimes putting on an invisible backpack, glances at me over his shoulder, and juts out his hip — before testing her stance, “to find curves that she didn't have in her body.” This influence is evident in Redmayne’s performance, as there are several scenes in The Danish Girl where Lili looks in mirrors in various outfits and stages of dress, trying to find her womanhood in her posture — not as a form of imitation, but as a way of being.

There were even times when Redmayne’s research exposed divergences between The Danish Girl’s script and the lived experiences of trans women he heard from. “What a lot of the women I met told me about were the disastrous failures of the first time they were going out [dressed in women’s clothes],” Redmayne confides, “but the script demanded that an audience at moments — and the public — believe Lili instantly in her femininity.”

In the movie, Lili first discovers her fascination with womanhood when her wife, Gerda, asks her to stand in for a female model in one of Gerda’s paintings. But as Lili’s interest grows, she decides to find women’s clothes for herself and go to a party with Gerda, who introduces her as her husband’s cousin from out of town. Many of the men at the party are instantly fascinated with the beautiful yet shy woman, and there is no hint in the movie that anyone suspects Lili to be the same person as Gerda’s husband.

Redmayne indicates that he took steps to reflect trans experience more realistically with the movie’s makeup and hair artist Jan Sewell. “I don't know what you think of the early stages of transition, of hyper-feminization or of trying too much makeup on,” Redmayne says, politely acknowledging my experience as a trans woman, as he does throughout our interaction, “but one of the things we came up with — because I look nothing like Lili, or Lili when she was known as Einar ­— working with Jan Sewell, the wig that she wears to begin with was quite strong.” This overly theatrical flourish during Lili’s first public appearance in women’s clothes was how Redmayne was able to play Lili as being instantly convincing as a woman, while still reflecting the common experience of trans women taking time to figure out how to occupy their new gender roles.