Eddie Redmayne on learning to be Stephen Hawking

Award season kicks off Friday evening with the star-studded Hollywood Film Awards on CBS. One star who will be attending the ceremony sat down to discuss his latest project, "The Theory of Everything."

Eddie Redmayne said meeting Stephen Hawking, the man off whom the romantic biography is based, was one of the greatest experience of his life.

"I didn't sleep, no," he said.

But portraying the renowned theoretical physicist didn't come natural to Redmayne. He said he had a painstaking process to learn how to mimic Hawking.

"I created one actually," Redmayne said. "I mean, I didn't really know what the right way to approach it was but, I'd spent so long in front of the mirror, trying to replicate his facial muscles and really trying to get a sense of who he was that in the end, you get so frustrated that you were never quite getting close enough."

But at the same time, he said, "it was amazing."