Omega brand ambassador Eddie Redmayne was in London where Omega launched its Aqua Terra Shades collection
You may recognise Omega brand ambassador and British actor Eddie Redmayne from films like Fantastic Beasts series, Les Misérables, and The Theory of Everything, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar. Redmayne was most recently seen in the crime drama The Good Nurse in a performance that earned him a Golden Globe and a SAG Award nomination.
Tatler caught up with him in March at the London launch of the Aqua Terra Shades.
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You’ve been with Omega for eight years now. What’s the thing you love most about the brand?
My relationship started, obviously, through my family wearing Omega. My father had an Omega De Ville, and it was very much a treasured thing. So when I started wearing watches, that is what I was aspiring to. One of the joys I found with Omega is that there is so much storytelling. They have such a ripe history.
What do you think of the new Aqua Terra Shades and which is your favourite?
The Aqua Terra watches have a gentle elegance to them and yet they sing. They have a punch above simplicity. With these new colours, there’s a vibrancy that just makes them pop. I love the colour that I’m wearing now, which is the Sandstone, and also the Terracotta, which is a unique colour in that it’s not obvious and kind of vibrates in relation to the strap and the casing in a really curious way that has a charisma of its own.
What’s the most important element of a watch—design or function?
I think it’s really important that watches function incredibly well, and I love the classicism of it. I never was a digital man. But with things like phones, and all the magnetic fields that we have now which can screw up watches, the Master Chronometer element of what Omega did was pretty important.
Also, I’m not a huge jewellery fan and I don’t wear rings and bracelets, but a watch is the one piece of jewellery that I can make gentle statements through.
Do you agree that colours present different emotions?
Colours definitely evoke things in me. When I was in China with Omega, there was this extraordinary event held at the art museum. On the first floor was an exhibition on Yves Klein, a French artist who was obsessed with the colour blue. He created this pigment which he patented and copyrighted called International Klein Blue. At university, I wrote my history on art dissertation on this colour. So when I walked upstairs and saw an entire exhibition on this artist and this colour, my knees buckled. It was amazing; it is [still] a very emotional colour.
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