Benedict Cumberbatch (13 page)

But would Steven Moffat really kill off Sherlock Holmes after just six instalments of the programme? No one seemed to be giving anything away. ‘[He] is not afraid of controversy,’ conceded the BBC. ‘Nobody would put it past him to kill off Sherlock as it would be a dramatic twist.’ The ultimate in dramatic twists, in fact. Moffat shrugged off the idea of it being beyond the pale: ‘Robin Hood died. Sherlock Holmes had a famous death. This is our version of the story and we can do what we like.’

The second series had won round doubters of the previous one. One
Radio Times
senior writer had dismissed the first series as ‘beautifully crafted but hollow’. Barely 18 months later, the same journalist branded it ‘a grown-up drama for people like us. And you can’t say that very often. The script is literate, witty and clever, full of lines that sing
out with intelligence.’ It was quite clear that
Sherlock
was a unanimous TV smash hit, and Benedict Cumberbatch was a star.

A
fter 2004, when he had starred as the young Stephen Hawking, Benedict Cumberbatch steadily became increasingly well-known, but remained able to carry on his day-to-day life as normal. Rarely was he snapped by the paparazzi or approached by members of the public. ‘I don’t get spotted,’ he said in 2007, ‘Maybe a girl will stop me in the street and ask: “Did I snog you at my cousin’s wedding?”, but that’s it.’

The first series of
Sherlock
, in July and August 2010, changed all that. At thirty-four, he had suddenly become very famous indeed. He later described the trajectory as ‘a horrific fairground ride’. Yet even before this, he was perceptive about how fame can distort one’s perception of the world. Having become accustomed to preparing for acting roles by observing society around him, it was going to be tough to
continue with this when he himself was going to be the centre of attention. And he was also now almost too busy to ponder and reflect. ‘One of the fears of having too much work is not having time to observe. And once you get recognised, there is nowhere for you to look any more. You can’t sit on a night bus and watch it all happen,’ he explained. ‘There are ways of not being recognised, of course, but planning is essential. Existing in the public space with any kind of private dimension is a fun game to play. That involves hats and glasses and just trying to keep a low profile in an Inspector Clouseau disguise.’

Success had brought financial stability, although some anxiety lingered about those of his contemporaries who had not secured the breaks in the way he had. ‘When you start getting jobs, and see your mates from drama school, you have this innate sense of guilt that it’s not fair that others aren’t doing exactly what you’re doing. It’s soul-destroying. There is a kind of weird guilt about doing well.’

Had he become a household name at the right moment? He couldn’t be certain. ‘If I’d had fame early on,’ he told the
Guardian
, ‘I’d have been able to abuse it in the way that a young man should. I’ve been working to this, but a lot of the fruits of it I can’t really enjoy.’ Faced with an intense level of adoration, it was still scrutiny. How would he cope in the circumstances? A big worry came with the group of people who would refer to him by the name of his most famous role. ‘You get known as “Sherlock”. That’s not just from people who can’t be bothered to remember “Benedict Cumberbatch”, and who can blame them, because it’s such
a strong signature.’ But then again, to his relief, it wasn’t as if George Clooney was called by his
ER
character name ‘Doug Ross’ anymore.

Cumberbatch was starting to get used to TV appearances under the character name ‘Himself’: chat shows, breakfast TV, entertainment juggernauts like
Alan Carr: Chatty Man, The Jonathan Ross Show
and
The Graham Norton Show
, perched on a sofa next to the likes of Kerry Katona, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and even Harrison Ford. 2010, though, was when the tabloid newspapers became interested in Benedict Cumberbatch. To them, he was not merely a successful and highly acclaimed actor, he was a celebrity. He was there not just to talk about his various films and TV shows, but to be photographed, and maybe to discuss his personal life.

He had always had a wry way in interviews, and was prone to being playful. Television and radio interviews would usually demonstrate an irony in the voice if he made a joke, but the face-value style of the tabloids could never quite do justice to this patter on the page. One of his first experiences of having a joke decontextualised came at the
Sherlock
press launch. ‘I’m always cast as sort of slightly wan, ethereal, troubled intellectuals or physically ambivalent bad lovers. I’m here to tell you I’m quite the opposite in real life. I’m a fucking fantastic lover!’ The remark would follow him around, much to his chagrin. ‘That got everywhere,’ he groaned only weeks later. ‘Everyone was coming up to me, going, “So, how good are you, exactly?” Jesus Christ…’ Mostly, he would politely distance himself from the idea that
he was a sex symbol. ‘People see a value in you that you don’t see yourself. So when I’m told of my sex-symbol status and all that nonsense I find it laughable, silly. I’ve been looking at this same old mush all my life.’

He was flattered by his devoted female fanbase, but was also careful. A Twitter account called @Cumberbitches had started up, sharing information and gossip about the object of its desire. As of September 2013, 60,000 fans had signed up. He felt uncomfortable with the account name, and opted instead for ‘Cumberbabes’, and eventually ‘Cumberwomen’ and ‘Cumbergirls’. ‘It’s not even politeness. I won’t allow you to be my bitches. I think it sets feminism back so many notches. You are… Cumberpeople.’

When
Sherlock
initially made him a star on television, Cumberbatch was still in a long-term relationship with Olivia Poulet, whom he had met on their drama degree course in Manchester. By the mid-noughties, Poulet’s star had also started to rise, with minor roles on television in
The Inspector Lynley Mysteries
and
The
Rotters
’
Club
leading to her first co-starring credit: as the young Camilla Parker Bowles in
Whatever Love Means
, an ITV drama about the romance between Camilla and Charles, Prince of Wales. Later she would perhaps be best known on television for playing Emma Messinger, the cynical Tory spin-doctor on Armando Iannucci’s
The Thick of It
. Cumberbatch and Poulet made a reluctant showbiz couple, rarely giving journalists more than the most basic of information. ‘We are good friends,’ Poulet had tantalised the
Sunday Telegraph
in 2005. ‘We’ve been good friends for a long time. But then we
were not such good friends for a bit. And now we’re good friends again.’

In the autumn of 2007, they moved from West to North London, from Shepherd’s Bush to Hampstead. Here, they bought a flat with a roof terrace described by Benedict as ‘my sanctuary’. The prospect of marriage was rarely raised publicly by either of the pair, but by his mid-thirties, he had godchildren, while she had nephews, and he regularly announced he was broody, even hoping he might reduce his workload in order to embrace parenthood. ‘I know you pick up an amazing amount of stamina the minute you become a dad, but I would like to be a young dad. I would love to have the ability to juggle a career and have a young child.’ His was not a secure profession. Acting, like many jobs in the creative arts, is feast or famine, but despite this, he was insistent he could make it work, given the chance. ‘Children are expensive,’ he was quoted as saying in the pages of the
Daily Telegraph
newspaper, ‘but as an actor, if you freak out about economic maturity you’ll never step out the front door. Everyone I know who has done it says you will never regret it. Your life doesn’t stop when you have children.’

He told
The Sunday Times
in the summer of 2010: ‘We both want children, but not necessarily right now, and not necessarily with each other. We’re great as we are for now.’ They had even appeared together in
Sherlock
’s second story, ‘The Blind Banker’. But in March 2011, with both parties’ careers in the ascendant, they chose to part amicably after 12 years together. Single again, but still with a great fondness for his ex, Benedict confessed that his broodiness was still
present, but recognised, ‘the reality of children is you have to be in the right place with the right person.’ The split with Poulet would bring some unwelcome attention from the press for Cumberbatch, and he was doorstepped by reporters and photographers. ‘It was unnerving to think they knew where I lived,’ he told the
Radio Times
.

After their break-up, Poulet continued in
The Thick of It
on BBC2, played Carol Thatcher (daughter of Margaret) in a Channel 4 biopic, and shone in a revival of Caryl Churchill’s
Top Girls
in the West End. She also wrote comedy sketches with the writer-performer Sarah Solemani, a drama script about women in their thirties for the BBC, and a screenplay about four young women who had rowed the Atlantic Ocean.

The newly-single Cumberbatch suddenly became one of showbusiness’s most eligible bachelors, regularly linked to other women in the gossip columns. Later in 2011 the designer Anna Jones accompanied him to the Venice Film Festival where
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
was opening, but if this was a relationship, it seemed relatively short-lived. Photographs circulated, too, of him with the supermodel Lydia Hearst, and he was seen out and about both with the Russian model Katia Elizarova, and with the actress Liv Tyler in Los Angeles. The gossipmongers could get carried away, though. There was the night he was snapped by a swarm of paparazzi in the company of a mystery woman, who turned out to be his personal assistant. ‘We got papped to the point that I couldn’t actually see, and I had to put my head down. Immediately, they presume,
“Ah, beautiful blonde…”’ The personal assistant was also his niece.

Even after the end of his long-term relationship with Poulet, he remained keen to start a family but knew that he wanted to find the right person. ‘There are always moments and meetings and chance encounters,’ he said in the summer of 2012. ‘But to make meaningful relationships is very hard at the moment. Also, I was in a very long, long relationship all through my twenties and early thirties, so I know about looking for the right one, I guess.’ ‘One of his regrets,’ his half-sister Tracy Peacock was quoted as saying, ‘is that he hasn’t found someone to settle down with. I think they would have to be someone not in the acting profession, someone who was happy to hold the fort while he went off and pursued his career.’

It’s one thing to have your stage and screen performances becoming the centre of attention, quite another to find that you yourself are scrutinised and spotted. At least to begin with, Cumberbatch didn’t mind being recognised, and found that meeting the public was mostly painless. ‘You do get a few spiky people who want to have a go, but I can just about deal with them. I’ve got the energy for it. It might be different if I was older.’ But it was at the deli counter in Tesco’s when he realised he had crossed the line into superstardom. ‘The staff all stared at me. A younger guy split off from the group and said, “Mate, I’m not being funny but you know that series
Sherlock
? You look quite a lot like him.” I said, “I am Sherlock”.’

He admitted that he was unprepared for being in the
constant glare of the media. ‘I hadn’t really made myself a target,’ he said, citing his roles of Hawking, Pitt the Younger, Van Gogh and Frankenstein – four roles sufficiently different to prevent any kind of consistent personality from breaking through. Now not merely a famous actor, it was presumed that he was a Personality. And with the arrival of celebrity can come a sense of loss. ‘Just because I’m in my thirties,’ he told the
Radio Times
in August 2012, ‘it doesn’t make the weirdness of no longer being private any less. I don’t think it matters whether it happens when you’re 25 or 55. Something is suddenly taken away.’

Personality and celebrity can be a trap, and Cumberbatch has to date dealt well with becoming a star, with a few wobbles. Genial and charming in company, he was mostly happy to sign autographs for fans, but would quip that afterwards he would have to ‘have ice cubes put to my wrists’. Occasionally, he would lose patience a little and wonder aloud about the value of signing autographs. ‘What is this need for proof we all have? Why do people need me to ruin the front page of a book with my terrible signature so that they can prove that they’ve met me? Will no one believe them otherwise?’

An over-sensitive reaction? Perhaps, but if you haven’t sought the limelight for its own sake, adjusting to the constant attention is not easy. You are recognised by people you don’t know. They know all about you, or at least the version of you that they’ve read about. There’s an argument that once someone is in the public eye, part of the job is to be professional and polite with the public. But it is still a job,
and the problem with fame is that it is impossible for other people to relate to you directly, especially if you’re an actor. Do the autograph hunters expect Sherlock, or Cumberbatch, or the Cumberbatch with the celebrity sheen? Being famous is still an act.

To Benedict Cumberbatch, fame with permission was fair enough. For the more obsessive fans, he expressed concern, although often more for their own welfare. But without any permission or warning, the attention could feel intrusive and unpleasant. He did not appreciate opportunists trying to take his picture without asking. ‘I feel it’s cowardly and a bit pathetic,’ he said. ‘Just ask me if you really want me to have a photograph with you.’

In March 2013, he was at home one night when he discovered that someone was watching him from another property nearby and live-tweeting his every move. ‘It was the strangest fan experience that I’ve ever had. It was such a strange and a direct thing to see these tweets. I found it really worrying and very hard to deal with.’ The tweeter quickly deleted the messages and baked a cake by way of an apology. Cumberbatch would say little more about the matter, and did not contact the police, but it did underline the fact that you couldn’t escape attention if you were a celebrity, especially with 24-hour media coverage and social media (Cumberbatch does not tweet). ‘The sad thing is I don’t really have anonymity any more in the UK, as it has got just like it is in America.’ He didn’t mind being spotted sometimes, or stopped – but it was a strange life for it to happen all the time.

Cumberbatch knew that the rate he was going, he was unlikely to become much more famous: ‘It won’t last on quite the same level, but what you have to do is just treat each bit as a job and get the best out of those experiences. If you constantly walk around in a bubble of excitement you wouldn’t be able to do any work.’ The answer was to try and remain grounded with his nearest and dearest, who even if he had wanted to get too grand, wouldn’t have let him. When he was sent an outsize black whip with a red heart on the end by an anonymous admirer, he couldn’t resist mentioning it on a TV chat show… only to discover that the fans who sent it were some of his friends.