Benedict Cumberbatch (17 page)

A displeased Cumberbatch soon hit back, insisting he had been misquoted. ‘I never said that Jonny took the job for the paycheck, nor did I ask him not to do it. What I said is I would have preferred not to be in the situation where we will again be compared because we are friends. I know for a fact his motivations were to do with the quality of the script and the challenges of this exceptional role.’ He looked forward to Miller’s Sherlock Holmes and wished him the very best of luck with it.

In any case, insisted Miller,
Elementary
was for a different audience: ‘We’ve made our Sherlock Holmes rougher around the edges. It examines Holmes’s flaws and how damaged he is. You see him struggle.’ With CBS being a mainstream commercial network in America, it might have a bigger audience too, given that PBS, which broadcast
Sherlock
, was unavailable to some of the US. ‘The BBC show is very popular,’ added Miller, ‘but it hasn’t been seen by most of America.’

Elementary
premiered on the CBS network in September 2012, and began showings on Sky in the UK the following month. Critics in the States approved, with
The New York Times
saying that Miller’s Holmes was a ‘likeable hangdog… showing the glint of mania, without the pyrotechnics that Cumberbatch brings to his performance in
Sherlock
’.

Where Cumberbatch’s
Sherlock
had been about
fast-moving
plot, Miller’s
Elementary
was more about Holmes’s brooding and addictive psyche, a complexity of character in keeping with the groundbreaking US cable TV hits like
The Sopranos, Breaking Bad
and
Boardwalk Empire
. ‘Our Sherlock has emerged with a tiny kernel of self-doubt where one previously never existed,’ said Rob Doherty, series creator of
Elementary
, and formerly a writer/producer on
Medium
. ‘It’s not something we are going to speak to very often, but I think it’s one of the things that drives him.’

Ultimately, Cumberbatch approved of Miller’s take on Holmes. ‘He sent me some messages,’ said Miller, ‘when he’d first seen the show. He’s been very supportive the whole way.’ Although they were friends, after all, with inbuilt loyalty. ‘I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have sent me a text message saying, “You suck!”’

The co-existence of
Elementary
and
Sherlock
meant that the possibility of restaging
Frankenstein
on Broadway with its two National Theatre leads would not take place. There was also a problem finding a suitable venue. ‘I don’t think there’s any theatre that’s right for it,’ bemoaned Cumberbatch. ‘The Olivier is an old-fashioned acting theatre with this incredible machinery and a drama in the middle of
it. There aren’t many places like it.’ Another stumbling block to transferring
Frankenstein
to the States seemed to be Cumberbatch’s schedule. Jonny Lee Miller’s career had blasted into international orbit some time before, and now it was Benedict’s turn.

B
enedict Cumberbatch had always been the sort of actor who would take ‘big parts in small films, and small parts in big films’. Even now, on the brink of international stardom, that maxim would remain. He had not abandoned independent cinema.
Wreckers
, a British drama with a tiny budget, which opened in the UK just before Christmas 2011, was a case in point. He co-starred with Claire Foy as a recently-married couple, who move back to the small Suffolk village where he had been raised, but whose idyllic life is disturbed by the arrival of his troubled sibling, Nick (Shaun Evans). Nick, like Dr John Watson, had been in service in Afghanistan, and back on Civvy Street was in a tormented state, but once under pressure, David would show Dawn (Foy) a side of him that was testier and tenser.

After
Wreckers
, though, much of Cumberbatch’s film
shoots would be conducted abroad. Though several of his film appearances had been seen in the USA, he remained cautious about ever moving there and attempting a
full-time
Hollywood career. ‘You’ve really got to commit to make it there,’ he had said in 2007. ‘I’m in a lucky position now that I can get enough good work to have a career here.’ Five years on, in 2012, he would spend much of the year filming overseas.

The move into big-time cinematic roles had been a dream of his for some time, although the ‘star’ system of the movie world was a far cry from the ensemble nature of theatre. Compared to the community spirit of theatre, in which the cast, director and crew worked as a whole, cinema is more of a star-led medium, in which individual actors are encouraged to compete for being the star on which a picture depends. ‘It’s all about a graph. You are commodified in a way that doesn’t really happen in theatre,’ he had told Mark Lawson of the
Guardian
in 2008. ‘Does this person tick the gay box, the married-couples box, the under-25 box and so on?’ It could be another kind of typecasting, but as ever, Cumberbatch would keep moving, refusing to be trapped as one character.

He had been especially eager to participate in an action flick. ‘I want to have my Daniel Craig moment! I want to run around a desert, shooting guns at aliens and looking like I barely have to take a breath. I’d love to do all that shit!’
Star
Trek Into Darkness
marked his entry into action-packed blockbusters, thanks to an impromptu and unorthodox audition piece he sent to the director J.J. Abrams.

He had been wary and even critical of Hollywood
big-budget
action films, what he called ‘cookie cutters,
two-dimensional
villains and the English transition of an actor being from a different culture. We’d better give him the bad guy role and a cape, and just make him be really horrible’. But when Benicio Del Toro, rumoured to be playing the villainous Khan, dropped out of the project around Christmas 2011, Cumberbatch was made aware that Abrams was interested in casting him: ‘He fleshed out the whole world of the rest of the script, and there’s a purpose and intention to his otherwise violent and pretty distressing actions that make it really intriguing.’

With all the casting directors in the UK on holiday over the Christmas period, he decided to send his audition via his smart phone. His best friend Adam Ackland offered his kitchen as an audition location. ‘I squatted under the one good overhead light, with Adam’s wife Alice balanced on two chairs holding my iPhone, and Adam feeding the lines to me off-camera,’ he told journalist Siobhan Synnot. ‘We eventually shot three takes of each scene. Then it took me a day to work out how to compress the file and email it to J.J.’s iPad.’

Abrams was also away over the festive season, so once the file was sent, all he could do was to wait. He had found a way of relaxing himself in auditions of all kinds: ‘I try to imagine I’m the only person they’re seeing that day, because it could be overwhelming to try to fulfil everyone’s expectations rather than the people nearest to you in the creative process – be it your director, fellow actors, writers.’

After New Year, Abrams contacted Cumberbatch by email with a cryptic invitation: ‘You want to come and play?’ The actor was confused. ‘I said, “What does this mean? Are you in town, you want to go for a drink? I’m English, you’ve got to be really straight with me on this. Have I got the part?”’

He had been successful, but euphoria turned to self-doubt. ‘It’s very flattering to be offered work without an audition, but it also brings pressure because you haven’t won it. You haven’t proved your ability to do that role.’ His
sure-footedness
briefly deserted him when he began work on this, his first Hollywood blockbuster. It felt quite intimidating for him to reach the studio, and meet a room of five producers and many crew members. ‘I was the Brit abroad,’ he told the
Daily Mirror
. ‘I was terrified. I was jet-lagged and must have looked as white as a sheet, with dark rings around my eyes.’ The director, J.J. Abrams, was also a bit startled, though. ‘Everyone stood a little bit taller when he was around.’

Cumberbatch had been cast as the intergalactic baddie Commander John Harrison (aka Khan), a ruthless and vengeful rogue officer, who had plotted a bomb attack in London, then a raid on Starfleet’s Californian nerve-centre, before beaming up on Kronos, the Klingons’ planet. The USS
Enterprise
was called back to Earth from an expedition in deep space to find an ‘unstoppable terror’ had destroyed the fleet. Harrison was not a cardboard villain, but a complex individual, exactly the sort of bad guy role that Cumberbatch always celebrated. ‘The action he takes has intent and reason,’ he explained. ‘He is not a clearly good or evil character. There’s a lot of reasoning and motivation behind
what he does. He has a moral core, he just has a method that’s pretty brutal in our world.’

Cumberbatch soon found his feet on the
Star Trek
shoot, finding it a supportive company, but because he had been cast relatively late, his appearance needed urgent attention. For one thing, the hair department on
Into Darkness
had some work to do. Khan needed to have dark hair, the opposite of Captain James T. Kirk’s blond. ‘The day he flew in, he walks in with super-short blond hair,’ said the film’s hair department head, Mary L. Mastro. ‘We had two weeks to darken and lengthen his hair.’

Similarly, Cumberbatch’s six-foot frame needed filling out as Harrison was made of bulkier stuff. Every day for two weeks, in preparation, he trained for two hours and ate 4,000 calories: chicken, potatoes, broccoli, protein shakes. He later described the process as force feeding himself ‘like a foie gras goose’: ‘It was the most physical demand that’s ever been made of me for the screen. It was horrible. You turn into an absolute creature from hell!’ By the time the shoot went ahead, he had gone from a 38 chest to a 42, but was quick to point out that gaining weight wasn’t in itself skilful acting. ‘I’ve always been a bit po-faced that all you need to do to be put in the hallowed halls of method acting is put on shitloads of weight. The effort involved deserves some credit, but it doesn’t make a performance.’

As part of his preparation, he also underwent some basic martial arts training, learning how to move and throw a punch. Supervising his progress was his stunt double, Martin de Boer. ‘I’ve had actors who want to be an action star, but
don’t want to put in the work. He was the opposite: “I want to train as much as I can.”’ But the more dangerous stunts would be out of bounds for Cumberbatch; it was simply too risky. ‘If something happens to him we’re all screwed,’ noted de Boer. ‘That’s why I’d be on the wire, not him.’

Ironically, Cumberbatch had been no particular
Star Trek
fanatic, prior to seeing Abrams’ reboot of the brand in 2009, but once seen, he was hooked. ‘Lo and behold, the Trekkie in me was reborn. The Trekkie world is phenomenally rich and entertaining, but at its core, it’s about humans and being human and how to aspire to a greater democracy than we have. Emotions are ramped up and men cry in this film.’

For him it was vital that characterisation and story were central to
Star Trek
. He told
The LA Times
in May 2013: ‘They’re such condensed, incredibly beautifully drawn characters that are very now, even though it’s a future-scape with loads of rich, imaginative detail for fans to obsess over. The actual core content of the story is universal in time and place.’

The
Star Trek
shoot would last four months, and for a time, Cumberbatch’s parents came to stay with him in the US. One day, they accompanied him to the set. Wanda Ventham, herself a veteran of sci-fi shows like
UFO
and
Doctor Who
, was amused by the endless takes. ‘It went on all day, just to get Ben in this bloody spaceship. At one point, I said to them, “You know, when I was doing
UFO
, it only took me three takes to get to the Moon!”’

When
Into Darkness
(Abrams’ second
Star Trek
movie, and the twelfth film in all) opened in the UK in May 2013,
critics recognised the moral core of Harrison. ‘A piece of full-on, chilly, orotund Shakespearean villainry,’ wrote
Scotland on Sunday
. ‘It’s a kick to see Cumberbatch roar, glower and run through glass windows like a weaponised Duracell bunny.’

The rest of the cast included Chris Pine (Captain Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock) and Zoe Saldana (Lt Uhuru). There were opportunities for mischief on the shoot, and predictably the British comedy actor Simon Pegg (in the role of Scotty) was one of the main exponents of such tomfoolery. One stunt took place at a nuclear fusion laboratory in California called the National Ignition Faculty. Pegg warned Cumberbatch that special precautions had to be taken while they were shooting there. In particular, he would need to protect himself with some special ‘neutron cream’. ‘I was convinced that I had to put dots of this cream on my face,’ said the fall guy for the prank. ‘There was also a disclaimer I had to sign, basically saying, “I’m aware of the physical dangers of working in this environment.” God knows what else I’ve signed in my life that I might have got into trouble for.’

Also featuring in the cast, as Dr Carol Marcus, was Alice Eve, whose connection with Cumberbatch stretched back to 2006’s
Starter for 10
. Like him, she was the offspring of two actors, in her case Trevor Eve and Sharon Maughan, and suggested that growing up in a family of thespians could be challenging: ‘The energy and the passion was fantastic to be around – but that has its other side, too. There was a lot of socialising. I think it was because of the
unsettled nature of an actor’s life that I ended up seeking out a very structured education.’ For Cumberbatch, it had been Harrow, then Manchester University. For Eve, it was Westminster School and Oxford, ‘where the rules were rigid and people had a rigidity in their approach to life that I wasn’t familiar with.’

At the end of the
Star Trek
shoot in the summer of 2012, Cumberbatch had sneaked in to record a guest voice for
The Simpsons
, before jetting back to the UK to read some war poetry at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, participate in a
Sherlock
event at the Edinburgh Television Festival, and do a round of interviews for the premiere of
Parade’s End
on BBC2. By late August, he was back in the USA filming
12 Years a Slave
, Steve McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1850s autobiography, which detailed his experiences of being kidnapped and sold into slavery. McQueen described the memoir as ‘the Anne Frank book of America… a meditation on family, freedom and love’. He found it both gripping and harrowing. ‘I was trembling. Every page was a revelation. I was upset that I didn’t know the book, then I realised no one knew about it.’

Solomon Northup was a talented violinist with a young family, but was struggling to find employment. On the street of New York’s Manhattan one day in 1841, he was approached by two strangers offering him work. Although the state of New York had already outlawed slavery, many other US states had not, and the next thing Northup knew, he was in Washington, DC, then in New Orleans. The two strangers had drugged him. Over the next 12 years, he was
sold as an enslaved person three times, forced to pick cotton, beaten numerous times, and faced a lynching. He was finally rescued when a Canadian called Bass, who was heavily involved in abolishing slavery in North America, stepped in, and sent a message back to New York. As a free man, Northup could not sue the men who had sold him into slavery (it was illegal for him to give evidence in court against white people), but he could at least publish a memoir.

When
12 Years a Slave
was published in 1853, it sold around 30,000 copies, and Northup strived to help other enslaved people be freed over the next decade. Sadly, his own story has an uncertain and mysterious postscript. In 1863, he travelled to the state of Vermont to help free slaves, whereupon he disappeared. Little was known about what happened next.

For the film adaptation of
12 Years a Slave
, Cumberbatch was cast as Ford, one of Northup’s slave owners. The character was meant to have a little more of a conscience than some of his contemporaries, but he was still presiding over a plantation ‘in which brutality reigns untrammelled’. Having read the memoir, and other relevant books for research with titles including
Cultivation and Culture
and
We Lived in a Little Cabin in the Yard
, he flew to New Orleans to join a cast which included Chiwetel Ejiofor (as Northup), Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt and Paul Giamatti, but he was still familiarising himself with America. ‘I feel slightly terrified about the heat, and about being a day player because it’s far harder to hit the ground running, but it’ll be fascinating.’

Several scenes in the film would be unsparing in how they depicted the conditions under which Northup and others suffered. Steve McQueen, born in London to Grenadian parents, was unapologetic about the brutality of his adaptation. ‘My responsibility is this: either I’m making a film about slavery or I’m not. It was mental and physical torture, and people have to remember why I as an individual am sitting here today – I’m here because members of my family went through slavery. Fact.’