Eddie Redmayne, photographed in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn.

It takes about 45 minutes before the wraps are removed from Eddie Redmayne in The Pillars of the Earth—or should I say the cowl? Although Redmayne's Jack lags in the shadows during his long reveal—hooded, his voice mute, his manner shy-away—we can detect that he's a poetic spirit by his beseeching eyes, cute freckles, and sensitive lower lip. In the dramatic cosmos of roiling England circa A.D. 1120, having a sensitive anything is a mortal liability, what with all the behandings, beheadings, sword spearings, rapes, poisonings, pillagings, torchings, and backstabbings—a guy could get hurt. A Starz Originals pay-cable mini-series based on Ken Follett's international best-seller (among its executive producers are Ridley and Tony Scott, their joint film credits a guarantee of burly warriorship and empowered womanhood) that premieres this summer, The Pillars of the Earth brandishes a cast that would do any medieval pageant proud, including Ian McShane, Rufus Sewell, Donald Sutherland, Alison Pill, Hayley Atwell, and Matthew Macfadyen, but it is Redmayne who furnishes the contemporary emo. Only 28 years old, educated at Eton and Cambridge, this English stage actor (who won a 2010 Tony Award for Red, reprising his role from the original London production) has already proven his vulnerable, stoic stuff on-screen in the brutal mire of Black Death and soon may be thrown into an even more panoramic muckheap. Reports are that he is director Steven Spielberg's top choice to star in War Horse, a heroic saga about a young man and his beloved horse, Joey, in the trenches and battlefields of World War I, not the friendliest setting for man nor beast. If and when Redmayne hugs that horse, I just know we're all going to cry.