Benedict Cumberbatch (8 page)

But through all of this, Benedict Cumberbatch always stayed loyal to radio, whether drama on BBC Radio 3 and the World Service channel (the latter heard worldwide), or material for Radio 4 and its sister speech station, BBC Radio 7 (later, BBC Radio 4 Extra). In January 2013, just as the fourth series of
Cabin Pressure
was being broadcast, it was announced that he would feature in a new adaptation (by radio producer Dirk Maggs) of Neil Gaiman’s
Neverwhere
, a cult fantasy set in an alternative subterranean version of London. It was a London where fictional characters would live alongside real historical figures and peculiarly apt that Cumberbatch was cast for this. Here is a man who has spent roughly half his professional career portraying real people,
and half playing created characters – even though some of those fictional figures are so vivid and enduring, it’s tempting to imagine them as real. This time he met yet another of his idols on the project, Sir Christopher Lee.

‘It was extraordinary to talk to that man. I’m very new to all this so I’m still tongue-tied when I meet my heroes.’

Cumberbatch, then, loves working in the medium of sound only. Even though it generally pays less than film, television and stage, the advantages – as with all voice work – are that it is relatively quick to do, and there are no long and expensive location shoots. With a talented director and an able cast, a radio drama can be recorded in a day in a studio with artful effects and sound design. ‘It’s nice to intensely concentrate on and listen to the word,’ he told the
Radio Times
. ‘Radio’s just a joy.’

I
t was 2006, and Benedict Cumberbatch was approaching his thirtieth birthday. Over the next few years, he would tackle more and more ambitious roles, some minor, some major. He was becoming one of the most versatile actors in British drama, able to switch between the different demands of stage, film and TV with a seeming effortlessness. Over the next three or four years, his diary would be crammed with commitments. His film work would include some of the most acclaimed British features of the period, as well as some diverting work on lower-budget productions. On the London stage, he would excel in some interesting revivals. And on television, he would flourish in both drama and comedy.

In 2005, Benedict Cumberbatch had been one of nearly 150 actors hired for
Broken News
, a new sketch show for BBC2, which parodied television news and current affairs output. In
the 1990s, Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris’s
The Day Today
had been a groundbreaking and pitch-perfect distortion of slick, aggressive magazine shows and bulletins like
Newsnight
. But
Broken News
’s creators, John Morton and Tony Roche, wanted to reflect the 24-hour news channels of the twenty-first century, which had to stretch material in order to fill space, and so made great play of switching between channels in the middle of items, as if the show were being controlled by a bored, jaded viewer. ‘It reflects how we’ve become news addicts in this multi-media age,’ said Morton, previously creator of the documentary pastiche
People Like Us
and later writer of
Twenty Twelve
. ‘In
Broken News
, the frenetic world of news isn’t about news anymore. It’s about predictions, speculations, recap, taking a look at tomorrow’s or yesterday’s papers – possibly even last Thursday’s papers.’

Cumberbatch played a roving reporter on
Broken News
, the hapless Will Parker, whose official job title was worldly affairs correspondent for a fictional network called PVS. ‘Unlucky Will is on the spot in prime locations,’ he explained, ‘but there are usually empty podiums behind him because the people he’s waiting for don’t turn up. So he fills airtime with ridiculous conversations about the person he is expecting to see.’ For instance: ‘Well, the speculation here in Washington has been at least as much to do with what Mr Rumsfeld isn’t going to say as it has been about what he might or might not say, when he arrives any minute now behind me.’

‘Will is always first on the scene,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘waiting for a story to break, but he’s so early that he doesn’t
really know anything. Basically, he has to fill lots of empty space saying the same idiotic thing in lots of different ways. If you watch any big story unfolding on TV, you’ll realise it’s painfully close to reality.’

On another assignment, Parker found himself in Greece waiting outside a hospital for an exclusive on the potentially worrying outbreak of tomato flu. As John Morton acknowledged, ‘News has started to borrow the grammar of theatre. It has become a dramatisation, which is strange because drama has been heading in the opposite direction by borrowing the grammar of documentary.’

Had
Broken News
been made any more recently, Cumberbatch would have been arguably too well-known to have been convincing in the part of Will. Part of the joke with a television satire of form is to be persuaded that the cast are real people, and several other future famous names lurked in the
Broken News
ranks, among them Sharon Horgan (creator and star of the sitcom
Pulling
) and Miranda Hart’s sidekick on
Miranda
, Sarah Hadland. ‘We wanted faces that could sort of slip under your radar,’ explained the producer of the series, Paul Schlesinger, ‘which is why we spent over three months in casting. When you look at the screen, we need you to believe that you really are watching a news network.’

After a shaky start, Cumberbatch’s film work was finally starting to gather pace. By his late twenties, he had featured
in a short film, 2002’s
Hills Like White Elephants
(based on an Ernest Hemingway short story), and as ‘Royalist’ in
To Kill a King
, a drama about Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax, but little else. But in the wake of his success as
Hawking
on TV, the cinematic offers finally began to roll in.

Though he only had a small role in it,
Starter for 10
was a success. It was a coming-of-age comedy set in 1985 and adapted from a best-selling novel by David Nicholls, who cut his teeth writing for ITV’s
Cold Feet
, and would later pen the even more successful
One Day
. James McAvoy played a Bristol University undergraduate and quiz addict called Brian Jackson, who had a hunger to appear on the inter-college quiz
University Challenge
(a TV fixture since the early 1960s), but whose general knowledge about social and sexual situations was less certain. ‘It’s about a teenager trying to fit into the world,’ said McAvoy. ‘That’s a story that will be told forever.’

Cumberbatch’s appearance in
Starter for 10
was one of the film’s highlights. He played Patrick, the fiercely ambitious and pedantic captain of Bristol University’s
University Challenge
team. ‘He’s old before his time, and very
bad-tempered
, all of which are attributes which I’m very much aware of myself, so that was easy to play.’ But he had also drawn inspiration for the part from several contemporaries from his younger days. ‘He is an amalgamation of a lot of people I was at school with and people I felt a little bit sorry for at university. They are always there at the freshers’ fair, wearing a tie, bless them.’ As ever, when Cumberbatch played someone irritating or arrogant, he avoided any
temptation to make them one-dimensional caricatures of ‘poshness’, and always took care to render them more complex and human.

Nowadays, Jeremy Paxman urges dithering contestants on
University Challenge
to ‘come on!’, but for 25 years, its quizmaster was Bamber Gascoigne, who preferred the gentler, almost apologetic murmur of ‘Must hurry you’. Gascoigne was played in
Starter for 10
– with quite unerring accuracy – by Mark Gatiss, a founder member of
The League of Gentlemen
, and a man who would a few years later be instrumental in Cumberbatch’s career.

While the American funding for
Starter for 10
enabled the film to be made in the first place (Tom Hanks was one of the producers), Cumberbatch felt a little uneasy with the editorial interference that could come from the backing. ‘American investment comes with editorial control. That side of your industry worries me. In a comedy drama about
University Challenge
, who cares that they might not
understand
what Heinz ketchup means?’

Cumberbatch and McAvoy quickly became good friends, and the pair had various adventures and misadventures when the cameras stopped rolling. At one point in 2006, they had defied the elements and walked up the highest peaks of the Brecon Beacons in mid-Wales, but had started their journey far too late in the day after an extended lunch during which Cumberbatch had consumed a large
steak-and
-kidney pie in Hay-on-Wye. ‘It was fucking hilarious,’ McAvoy told the
Observer
newspaper. ‘We finally started walking up Pen-Y-Fan at half past three. And of course the
cloud came down.’ A somewhat bloated Cumberbatch, with a bellyful of pie, protested. ‘But I thought: Ben, I am not stopping because of your bloody pie. We kept walking and ended up with 5ft visibility.’

McAvoy and Cumberbatch would again play lead and supporting role respectively in
Atonement
, Joe Wright’s
big-screen
treatment of Ian McEwan’s novel. Cumberbatch played a creepy confectionery businessman called Paul Marshall, one of the least likeable characters he would ever portray.
Atonement
opened in British cinemas in September 2007, and was soon followed in 2008 by
The Other Boleyn Girl
. Based on the historical novel by Philippa Gregory, this was a drama about Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary, about whom relatively little was known. Here, Cumberbatch was cast as a merchant’s son William Carey, who marries Mary (Scarlett Johansson). The role required him to take part in a wedding night bedroom scene with Johansson. He helpfully summarised the shoot for the
Daily Telegraph
. It sounded underwhelming and bathetic. ‘I get on top of her and go “Ooh!” Knuckles whiten and I roll over, say “Thank you” and start snoring.’ A sex scene lasting seconds. ‘I guess it’s what any man would suffer,’ he later shrugged, ‘when faced with beauty that intense.’

Larger roles had also come his way. In 2005, he had landed the part of William Pitt the Younger, who in 1783 had become – at the age of just 24 – the youngest man ever to be British Prime Minister. It was all part of a feature film called
Amazing Grace
, which told how William Wilberforce campaigned to abolish slavery in Britain. During the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an estimated 11 million men, women and children had been sold into the barbaric and undignified world of slavery, but it took over two decades for Wilberforce’s campaign to succeed. The film’s title came from the famous hymn of the same name, one of many penned by John Newton, formerly captain of a slave ship who on becoming a clergyman saw the light and was also instrumental in the campaign to abolish slavery.

In actual fact, Cumberbatch had a connection with the real life of the slave trade. There was a brief period when he tried to hide his unwieldy name (apparently of German origin), of which he would later say, ‘LA agents think I’m a Dickens character’. Mum Wanda had tried to convince him to drop the ‘Cumberbatch’. ‘“They’ll be after you for money,” she used to say,’ ‘they’ being the descendants of Britain’s slave trade. ‘There are lots of Cumberbatches in our former Caribbean colonies,’ Benedict elaborated. ‘When their ancestors lost their African names, they called themselves after their masters. Reparation cases are ongoing in the American courts. I’ve got friends involved in researching this scar on human history and I’ve spoken to them about it. The issue of how far you should be willing to atone is interesting. I mean, it’s not as if I’m making a profit from the suffering – it’s not like it’s Nazi money.’ Even so, he concluded those Cumberbatches were likely to be ‘pretty dodgy’. Was his involvement in
Amazing Grace
a pure coincidence, the
Scotland on Sunday
newspaper wondered? ‘Maybe I was trying to right a wrong there,’ he admitted.

Playing Wilberforce was Ioan Gruffudd, familiar to
Hollywood and the international film industry, and his commercial viability allowed director Michael Apted to surround his lead with other great British actors of every generation. These were names like Albert Finney, Ciaran Hinds, Rufus Sewell, Michael Gambon … and Benedict Cumberbatch. ‘Doing a scene with Michael Gambon,’ Cumberbatch later said. ‘What could be better?’

The insistence on casting well-known and talented figures rather than Hollywood stars was a conscious effort on Apted’s part. Here was an opportunity to make, as he put it, ‘a British-based film about a British subject, with a British cast.’ This was important to him, as he did not want a ‘celebrity cast’. ‘I wanted to get believable performances out of people who are well known, rather than
international
stars.’

Cumberbatch and Gruffudd got on well, on and off screen. ‘He’s a tremendous actor, he’s breathtaking actually, and quite fun to be around,’ said Gruffudd, who revealed that the two would often go ten-pin bowling during the making of the film. ‘Because, more often than not,’ he explained, ‘we were living in Holiday Inns on some back-
of-beyond
industrial site, where there was only a Cineplex and bowling alley.’

Michael Apted’s career had taken him from TV work in the 1960s at Granada in Manchester – the seminal
7 Up
documentary series and a new popular serial called
Coronation Street
– to feature films:
Gorillas in the Mist, Gorky Park
and the James Bond film of 1999,
The World is Not Enough
. ‘I wasn’t interested in making a dull biopic,’
said Apted of
Amazing Grace
. ‘I wanted to make a film that showed how heroic and relevant politics can be. I wanted to portray it as a generational battle – the young men taking on the older generation – like the Kennedys and their Camelot court were to America in the 60s.’ Steven Knight, who wrote the screenplay, also had a background in television; he was one of the three creators of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
, one of the best-selling TV formats in the world. Additional help was sought from Wilberforce’s biographer, the politician William Hague.

Amazing Grace
had premiered to tie in with the bicentenary (in 2007) of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. Two years later, 2009 marked two anniversaries relating to the scientist Charles Darwin: 200 years since his birth, and 150 years since the publication of his masterwork, 1859’s
On the Origin of Species
. Darwin’s vision about how the world was created had clashed with his wife’s
strongly-held
religious beliefs, a disagreement which would deepen following the death of the couple’s daughter.

Creation
, starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly as Darwin and his wife Emma, was described as a combination of ghost story, psychological thriller and love story.
Co-funded
by BBC Films, its source material largely came from a book called
Annie’s Box
, written by Darwin’s great-
great-grandson
, Randal Keynes. The director was Jon Amiel, now busy in Hollywood, but once a television director in the UK on such masterpieces as Dennis Potter’s
The Singing Detective
. Cumberbatch co-starred as the botanist Joseph Hooker, an ally of Darwin’s who had tried to persuade him
to complete
On the Origin of Species
, against the backdrop of family crises.