Harry Lloyd felt the pressure to make sure The Theory Of Everything was a film worthy of Stephen Hawking.

The Iron Lady actor plays Brian, a fictional character, in the Eddie Redmayne-fronted biopic about Hawking’s early career and romance with his first wife Jane, at the time when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease.

Harry said: “The great thing was, I’m kind of the only person in the film who didn’t actually exist in real life. Brian was a conglomeration of lots of different friends he had in his life at that time, and for story purposes it’s easier to squeeze it into one.

Harry Lloyd
(Dominic Lipinski/PA)

“So I suppose I had less research to do than other people, to not look at a picture and think, ‘How do I make my face look like this guy?’ So I felt very liberated.”

But Harry added that the whole cast knew they needed to make the film a success so that they wouldn’t feel they had let Hawking down.

Eddie Redmayne Stephen Hawking
Eddie Redmayne plays Stephen Hawking in the film (Ian West/PA)

He explained of the pressure: “It was much more so for people like Eddie, but as ever, the biggest disservice you can do to someone whose life you’re portraying is to tell a bad story, and to tell it in a way that however truthful it may have been historically, the audience don’t care. Because otherwise, it doesn’t matter.

“Especially the story of a life that long and complicated, you can’t do it a service, it’s not a documentary. But they found a way of weaving a really personal and a really original story, a rare story that we haven’t seen very much.”

The Theory Of Everything is released in cinemas on January 1, 2015.