USA Today spoke to Eddie about his learning about his Academy Award nomination this morning!

LOS ANGELES — It’s not even 7 a.m. in Hollywood, but Eddie Redmayne is firing on all cylinders.

From between the sheets, of course.

“I’m in bed!” the best actor Oscar nominee says. “Twenty minutes ago I was in a deep, dark sleep, and there was this gigantic knock on the door. I stumbled in the dark and put a towel on and my manager was there brandishing a telephone with a lot of screaming coming out of it.”

As experts widely predicted, Redmayne is Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. But he says “the stakes just felt so high” when they started shooting the film, let alone last night. “Maybe I’m a pessimist by nature but all i could see was the potential for me not to get it right.”

Get it right, he did, with the Hawkings’ blessing to boot. Today’s Oscar news is “like cherries being placed on top of the most beautiful cake,” he says.

But the newly married man will have to wait to celebrate with his new wife, Hannah Bagshawe. “My wife had to go home the morning after the Globes,” he says. “I just spoke to her now, and she said, “Ed, how am I meant to do the tax returns today when I’m so excited?'”

Redmayne’s heading the the U.K. tonight; he’s been in town in rehearsal for a new movie, The Danish Girl. “I’ve got a big day’s work ahead of me,” he says, stifling a yawn. And then it’s Oscar time, his first trip back since singing during the 2013 telecast with the cast of Les Miserables. “When I was a kid we used to stay up late to watch them,” he says. “It genuinely never occurred to me that I’d have the opportunity to go back, let alone as a nominee.”