Benedict Cumberbatch (16 page)

‘You never quite get used to imagining how it must have been for men my age, 100 years ago,’ he added. ‘It’s a duty as an actor to respect their memory in a way, and you do feel an almost patriotic pressure to get it true and right.’

He narrowly escaped injury during the Belgium shoot. During the making of a dream sequence which involved an explosion, it went off in his face – ‘It was terrifying. I was engulfed in flames.’ Fortunately, he suffered no damage apart from his hair, eyebrows and eyelashes being singed, and none of this damage would be permanent.

From a twenty-first century perspective, of course, the events of World War I still had resonance for many, many people. ‘We’re living through a time where we are fighting wars with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘We are living in times of political hypocrisy, and there aren’t that many really good people. And Christopher is just that – a good man.’

The relevance of
Parade’s End
in 2012 didn’t stop at war either. ‘People are asking questions about how we behave as a society,’ commented director Susanna White, ‘the
environment
, money, politicians and the NHS, and that’s all in
Parade’s End
. It’s asking big questions about society and how we behave. Even the love triangle asks what happens if you marry the wrong person. I think there is a lot which will still chime with people.’

Parade’s
End
would be broadcast on BBC2 in late August and September 2012. In the week before broadcast, Benedict Cumberbatch would become headline news because of a handful of remarks he made in interviews to promote the show. Invited to comment on the notion that his new series could be classed as ‘a thinking person’s
Downton Abbey
’, he dismissed any comparisons as ‘crude’ and ‘a danger’, but later (while naming no names) promised that the five-parter would not be ‘some crappy, easily digestible milk-chocolate on a Sunday evening… It’s going to be hard work, but it will pay dividends if you stick with it.’

So was
that
a veiled criticism of
Downton Abbey
, already a hit on Sunday nights? One couldn’t be sure, although Cumberbatch then celebrated his new series as ‘funny, pointed, but also three-dimensional. We’re not serving purposes to make some clichéd comment about “Oh, isn’t it awful the way there’s this upstairs-downstairs divide.” It’s a little bit more sophisticated.’

It was a slow news week. Parliament was in recess for the summer. The London 2012 Olympics had just finished, and the Paralympics were yet to take place. And Cumberbatch was now a star in a way he hadn’t been even two years before, so anything he said would be instantly quotable. The press picked up his remarks and ran with them, engaging in much comment and debate. Was this deliberate provocation, to have a dig at the competition, or simply to send up the question put to him?

Yet if he did mean
Downton Abbey
on that occasion, he wasn’t alone in making the comparison. ‘I think we’ve got to
signal to people that they’re not going to turn on and get something cosy like
Downton Abbey
,’ said Susanna White. ‘It’s television that makes demands on you – if you go away to make a cup of tea, you’ll be lost.’

It may have required concentration, but plenty of viewers were prepared to sit tight and pay close attention.
Parade’s End
premiered on Friday nights, traditionally an evening for entertainment rather than drama, but over 3 million viewers saw the first episode, immediately making it BBC2’s highest rated drama series since
Rome
(another HBO co-production) in 2005. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the collection of the original books became a bestseller, zooming into the Amazon top 10 chart. And the presence of Benedict Cumberbatch was undoubtedly a key factor in the success of the series, with his brooding silences wowing the critics. ‘There’s something of the Alan Rickman about him,’ said the
Guardian
. ‘One drowsy droop of an eyelid, one slip of the planes of his face, can convey either wry honest amusement or withering contempt.’

It was generally agreed that any comparison between
Parade’s End
and
Downton Abbey
held little water, and the fuss died down, only to flare up again – more directly this time – only a few weeks later. In an interview with
Reader’s Digest
magazine, Cumberbatch believed that the second series of
Downton Abbey
was inferior to the first, and had ‘traded a lot on the sentiment’. He was quoted as branding it as ‘fucking atrocious’.

Inevitably, the showbiz desks of newspapers – both tabloid and broadsheet – rang round to find if anyone connected
with
Downton Abbey
would give a right of reply. Series creator Julian Fellowes stepped into the fray, fully aware of what the phrase ‘good copy’ meant: ‘I have known Ben since he was a little boy and I couldn’t be fonder of him. I am quite sure what he said has been taken out of context and does not at all reflect his real feelings. [It’s] all part of a surge of interest in television drama, which can only be good news for all of us.’

Cumberbatch confirmed what he had said had been a private joke. ‘Anyone who knows me, including my friends Julian Fellowes and Hugh Bonneville, just laughed when they read it.’ He went on to say that in his opinion the second run of
Downton Abbey
lacked the sharpness of the first series, ‘but what Julian does is great – it’s good Sunday night telly.’ In a subsequent interview, he would groan about the perceived slagging. ‘I’ve got family and friends in it. My dad was in the Christmas special, for God’s sake.’

Even beyond this, other Cumberbatch soundbites seeped into the mass media. At around the same time, he had told the
Radio Times
that he was tired of being ‘castigated as a moaning, rich, public school bastard’, followed by: ‘It’s all so predictable, so domestic, so dumb. It makes me think I want to go to America. I wasn’t born into land or titles, or new money, or an oil rig.’ The A-word of ‘America’ sounded an alarm bell of the notion that he’d decamp to the States at any moment as he would get away from posh roles there.

It was an over-reaction, delivered with his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek. Besides, he had been asked about America before, back in 2007. He had been seduced by the
glamour of it: ‘It was the red carpet treatment all the way – limousines, first-class flight – it was dreamy.’ But he didn’t want to relocate, and was irritable about the assumption from the press that he would move to Hollywood at the first possible opportunity. ‘Which is kind of tiresome, but people still think it sells papers.’

Radio Times
had become a publication that would customarily hit the headlines of a Tuesday morning for its star interview. It would crank up the controversy level of the interviewee, saying something as a joke and to garner attention would send it to the press. So it was with the Cumberbatch interview. The epitome of a storm in a teacup, but in a quiet week for news in the middle of summer, it was a jumping-off point for a subject that never seems to be off the agenda in the UK: the class system.

Reaction in the press was swift, although there was less outrage than wry amusement. Writing in the
Independent
about his protestations, Viv Groskop (a Cumberbatch fan) wrote that it was faintly ludicrous simply because ‘Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch has a name of exceptionally ridiculous proportions. One so silly no novelist would dare to propose it. The Americans so don’t deserve that name!’ Others pointed out that Harrow’s annual fees (£30,000 in 2012) were only just below the average annual salary for a British male, and that over half the British medallists at the Olympics had been in private education.

Generally cordial, courteous and entertaining in
interviews
, Benedict Cumberbatch could feel anger about media privacy. Happy to promote and discuss his work, he found
the prying into people’s personal lives to be unnecessary and unpleasant. Speaking to National Public Radio in the USA in 2012, he talked of his unease towards the British press: ‘We’re living in an era where there’s an awful lot of
soul-searching
, with the Leveson Inquiry, and [Rupert] Murdoch being held out to task, and just being exposed for the fraudulent, pathetic, abhorrent behaviour that is rife in all our media.’ Cumberbatch’s difficult experiences with the press about his own life were relatively minor, but even so, for an A-lister to be this outspoken about the tabloids was unusual. It underlined his ambivalence towards national and international fame.

I
n late 2010, Benedict Cumberbatch was limbering up for what would be his most high-profile stage role yet. In November, he joined forces with fellow acting titans like Sir Ben Kingsley, Samuel West, Romola Garai, Tom Hiddleston and Gemma Arterton for a special one-off charity show at South London’s Old Vic theatre.
The Children’s Monologues
was a dozen monologues, compiled by a team of playwrights from the testimonies of 250 children in South Africa. The original raw material had been gathered by the charity Dramatic Need, who had asked the children to each select a specific day in their life which had brought them either joy or sadness. The replies they received were both tragic and disturbing, including accounts of illness, violence and sexual abuse.

The director Danny Boyle, who organised the Old Vic
performance, described many of the stories as being like a punch in the stomach. ‘They have that directness that you find with children anywhere. They can’t compartmentalise or filter traumatic stuff so they just say it.’ Cumberbatch was proud to be associated with the evening. ‘One of the privileges of doing something as high profile as
Sherlock
is the effect that you can have, that you can help raise awareness or even money for a good cause. It’s an
extraordinary
position to be in.’

The special evening took place just as he and Boyle were preparing the ground at the nearby National Theatre for an ambitious stage project in early 2011. Cumberbatch was to co-star in a radical re-interpretation of Mary Shelley’s tale,
Frankenstein
. In an unusual twist, he and fellow lead actor Jonny Lee Miller would play two parts – the scientist Victor Frankenstein and the Creature he created – swapping roles for each performance. ‘Every other night they reinhabit each other,’ said Danny Boyle. ‘They are mirrors of each other. And it’ll make the play interesting for the actors to do – they won’t be able to settle and they’ll be constantly sparring.’

Danny Boyle’s background, before working in television and cinema, was in theatre. He had been a director at London’s Royal Court for five years (1982–87). Later, he was the director of
Shallow Grave
,
Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire
and
127 Hours
. But he hadn’t directed any theatre in 15 years. During this period, he was also preparing for the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics and in fact described
Frankenstein
as a ‘little
mini-sabbatical
’,
a distraction from the Olympic job – a task that took two full years of preparation.

To have two lead actors in a play swap roles on a nightly basis was relatively unusual, but not completely unprecedented. Way back in 1935, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier had faced each other in Gielgud’s production of
Romeo and Juliet
, switching back and forth between Romeo and his foil, Mercutio. Nearly 40 years later, in 1973, Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco tried the same thing with Richard II and Bolingbroke. As did Mark Rylance and Michael Rudko in a 1994 London production of Sam Shepard’s
True West
, a play examining the stormy
relationship
between two brothers.

Nick Dear was responsible for adapting
Frankenstein
for 2011. When one of his drafts suggested opening the play from the Creature’s perspective, Danny Boyle realised it, ‘gave the Creature his voice back’. This prompted him into switching the lead roles around. ‘Starting from the Creature’s point of view was the key to unlocking the adaptation,’ he went on. ‘Once you don’t start with Victor Frankenstein, you need to balance the Creature with his obsession with his creator. So we rebalanced our approach by double casting the actors.’

The double casting would leave no room for ego, and from day one of rehearsals, relations between the two were harmonious. ‘The dialogue between us is selfless and
co-operative
,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘If there’s something really good that he does, I will ask if I can incorporate it.’ ‘We’re not precious,’ added Jonny Lee Miller. ‘We’re more of a
team. We find it constructive to talk to each other about what looks good, what doesn’t.’

The dynamic between the two actors was highly rewarding. They could share their concerns, and feel like a team. ‘No one’s precious about it,’ said Jonny Lee Miller. ‘We’re watching each other a lot, and taking things from each other.’ There were a few drawbacks, though: a lack of time being one. ‘It’s double the workload,’ explained Cumberbatch, ‘but not double the rehearsal time.’ Another difficulty concerned learning the lines. This was complicated. One actor could start learning one part, only to find himself thrown by the other performer’s cues. ‘Having both characters on the same page is a distraction,’ admitted Cumberbatch. But Danny Boyle observed that this seemed appropriate: the two lead characters should become ‘the same in a way… two strands of the same part… They’re the creator and son, and the obligation in that relationship is very close.’ If there was a matinee performance as well as an evening one, the leads would remain in the same part for that particular day, but even so it demanded stamina and concentration. Plus, for whoever was playing the Creature, becoming black and blue was part of the job. ‘You come off stage with a cut on your lip, your wrists are bruised and you’ve just shed 5lb,’ summed up Cumberbatch. Still, as ordeals go, it was a rewarding one.

Getting the right actors, Boyle acknowledged, had been vital. Having cast Cumberbatch, he had worked with Jonny Lee Miller on
Trainspotting
15 years earlier, but had had no contact since. For Boyle to involve an actor he knew well
(Miller, by now a regular on American TV’s
Dexter
) and another he did not (Cumberbatch) was conscious. The actors needed to be bold and commanding, to fill the spacious stage. But Boyle soon knew he had the right men for the job: ‘The job of director is mostly fuelling actors. They are insatiable. And Benedict and Jonny are like a Venn diagram – they cross over constantly.’

Like the revamp of
Sherlock
, Boyle and Dear’s twenty-first century take on
Frankenstein
was both thoroughly modern and yet close in spirit to the source material. Mary Shelley’s original text was written in 1816, during a period when she had two poets in her life: her husband Shelley, and Byron. ‘She sees Byron as the noble savage in the Creature,’ explained Cumberbatch, ‘whereas she sees Shelley as this obsessive social misfit. So her novel makes sense of the psychodrama she found herself in.’

Yet, the grotesque figure of the Creature (which required 90 minutes in make-up before the curtain could go up) would not be based on its most famous screen incarnation inhabited by Boris Karloff in James Whale’s 1931 movie. This time there was to be no bolt in the neck, and the Creature would even gradually acquire language skills, and be able to talk back to his creator. Others to play the Creature had included Robert De Niro and Christopher Lee, but both Dear and Boyle wanted to bypass the story’s horror film connections and instead concentrate on the ideas explored in Shelley’s original novel, which was in its day extremely futuristic in its vision. ‘Shelley is looking forward to the technological revolution,’ explained Nick
Dear. ‘200 years on from when she wrote it, our technology is such that we are achieving now what she had nightmares about.’

For the audience, the play – two hours long with no interval – presented a tricky conundrum, of who to root for, and empathise with: the creator or the Creature. Victor Frankenstein has no real interest in procreating with his fiancée Elizabeth. As for the Creature devised by Victor, he longs to be helpful and decent (a humane attitude largely missing from his inventor’s character), but he is shunned by society, and as a result fights back in a destructive and aggressive fashion.

Under-15s were discouraged, if not actually banned, from attending
Frankenstein
, partly because of the nudity (the Creature was naked and caked in blood and gore for most of the first half-hour), but also because of a rape scene. Many youngsters sneaked in regardless, and
Guardian
writer Catherine Bennett took her 13-year-old daughter to see it. She was baffled by the age restrictions. ‘It is hard to see why the theatre decided to exclude so many potential converts,’ she wrote, ‘unless it was a fear of how younger teens might react [when] the piteous monster comes to life and learns to wriggle, then stagger, completely naked until his maker chucks him a large cloak.’

‘You can explore all these ideas – prejudice, not fitting in, love, revenge, original sin, nurture and nature – when you have a man creating a life,’ commented Jonny Lee Miller. ‘[The Creature] has a fully grown brain because it comes from an adult male corpse. But he’s a baby, yet he learns very
quickly. So the story is also about the growing and education of a man, which goes very wrong.’

This was a whistle-stop tour of human evolution, and when the play opened in February 2011, it immediately attracted feverishly enthusiastic notices. ‘Manages to be both graphic and subtle,’ said the
Independent
. ‘The most viscerally exciting and visually stunning show in town,’ ventured the
Telegraph
. And the
Guardian
paid tribute to ‘an astonishing performance’ by Cumberbatch. But for the most part, critics refused to place one actor’s performance over the other. Both were praised equally.

Part of the reason why it was so hard to get tickets was that some of the audience booked for multiple shows. Cumberbatch would see the same faces in the front row of the Olivier for several nights in a row. ‘Two young women from China saw every performance,’ he said. ‘I asked them, “How do you afford the time and the money?” And they just said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. We love you.” I used to be in the audience, I used to obsess about things, but I don’t
understand
this.’

For those unable to get tickets (so, most people), there would be an alternative. Two special live broadcasts of the play (on 17 March) were relayed via more than 400 cinemas or arenas around the world, including just over 100 in Britain. Obviously the cinema showing of the performance could never hope to match the live experience but with the play selling out so quickly, how else would people be able to see it? In addition, having the performance relayed via cinema, it could still be a shared experience, just like theatre.

Cumberbatch and Miller’s sterling work on
Frankenstein
would be recognised when the nominations were announced for the 2011 London
Evening Standard
Theatre Awards. They were in contention for Best Actor, alongside Dominic West, James Corden, Jude Law, Ralph Fiennes and Kevin Spacey. But how would the judging panel be able to favour one over the other if they were choosing a Frankenstein actor? It just didn’t seem right to separate them, and the panel knew it. So, on 20 November, they were heralded as joint winners of the category, a first in the 57-year history of the Awards. At the 2012 Olivier Theatre Awards, the two would again share a Best Actor gong.

In the wake of
Sherlock
becoming an international television hit, further Sherlock Holmes adaptations had been emerging. A second Guy Ritchie film with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law was released in 2011, the same year that Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate agreed that a new Holmes story could be published. Anthony Horowitz was chosen to write it, and
The House of Silk
duly became the first Sherlock story since Conan Doyle’s 13-part
Return of Sherlock Holmes
, finished in 1905. But in 2012, American television would adapt the Holmes/Watson relationship for a new primetime series,
Elementary
, set in contemporary New York City. For Sherlock Holmes himself, they were to select a potentially controversial lead.

It transpired that the CBS network in the US had initially
wanted to remake the BBC’s
Sherlock
series. ‘We said “No”,’ said Sue Vertue at Hartswood Films. ‘We could have gone for financial gain but we wanted to keep creative control.’ Even though the characters of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson had been re-imagined hundreds of times in films, plays, and TV and radio programmes, the stylised look of Hartswood’s
Sherlock
was highly distinctive, and the executives there would be watching
Elementary
very closely indeed to make sure it didn’t ape their series too faithfully. ‘It will be annoying if they use elements that can be traced to our show rather than the original stories,’ said Vertue. Her husband,
Sherlock
co-creator Steven Moffat, wasn’t best pleased either: ‘They’ve just decided to go off and do one of their own, having been turned down by us to do an adaptation of our version. What if it’s awful? If there’s this unrelated rogue version of
Sherlock
going around and it’s bad, it can be bad for us. It degrades the brand.’

So it was ironic that the lead actor hired for
Elementary
had a connection to the British Sherlock. CBS’s choice was Jonny Lee Miller, Benedict Cumberbatch’s co-star in
Frankenstein
. Miller’s Holmes would be a drug addict who was just out of a rehabilitation centre in Manhattan. The casting choice for Watson, though, was a bigger departure: Lucy Liu, who would play a former surgeon called Dr Joan Watson. Liu welcomed the opportunity not just to make Watson female but an Asian-American. ‘Watson’s ethnicity is a very big deal,’ she said. ‘I didn’t grow up seeing people like myself in films. Although it’s quite different now, it’s still a slow process.’

Miller had adored Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Holmes. After each showing of
Sherlock
aired, the two had chatted warmly about it. ‘I would call him up like a groupie,’ recalled Miller, ‘and we had a discussion about this project as well. I wanted to reassure him about how different this was: it’s another country and a whole lot of vibe.’ In light of this, an unwelcome Cumberbatch quote in the British free-sheet
ShortList
was potentially awkward. He was quoted as saying he had told Miller that he would have preferred him to turn down the
Elementary
job, ‘but you’ve got a kid to feed, a nice house in L.A. and a wife to keep in good clothes. When they waft a pay cheque at you, what are you going to do?’