Benedict Cumberbatch (9 page)

Parts like these had secured Cumberbatch a Hollywood agent by his early thirties. ‘He thinks I’ve walked straight out of Dickens,’ he quipped. Even so Stateside blockbusters were still some way off, and he liked it that way. One particularly effective low-budget home-grown feature was
Third Star
, shot in only a month in the autumn of 2009 for less than half a million pounds. It was a moving comedy-drama and the directorial debut of Hattie Dalton. He played James, a young man on the brink of his thirties who has a terminal illness, but who opts for one last hurrah, and invites three close friends on a trip to a favourite beach in West Wales to celebrate their friendship while they still have time. ‘I think it explores sides of friendship that are often neglected,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘The streaks of competitiveness, support, love, irritation and trust are all here. But I also liked the idea that being robbed of your life too early doesn’t give you the right to tell others how to live … What I think is beautiful is that he’s the one who learns the most in the end.’

The film showed the irreverence that the closest of friends can show towards each other, even when tragedy is close by. When James – his illness by now in its advanced stages – tries to offer advice to the others about how they should live their future lives, and does not hold back with his reservations about them, they groan that, ‘It’s like going for a walk with a sick, white Oprah’. ‘It’s very understated, not touchy-feely,’ Cumberbatch told
The Times
, ‘not that modern disease of wearing your heart on your sleeve.’ It seemed a fair
assessment
.
ment. The relationship between the closest friends will always withstand plenty of joshing.

To look the part – slim, if not downright gaunt – other filming commitments made shaving his head impossible, but he could be strict about diet: ‘I ate healthily, but there was no snacking, no drinking, no bread, no sugar, no smoking.’ Even after he lost weight to look the part, he was still hard to lift off the ground, as J.J. Feild (playing his friend Miles) discovered when he needed to carry him. ‘I tried to look like I was being all strong and butch,’ commented Feild, ‘but humans are really heavy.’ When the month-long shoot ended, Cumberbatch drew a line under it by indulging in a pork belly roast.

The screenwriter Vaughan Sivell described James as ‘a man losing his place in the Universe, and wanting to right everything before he goes.’ Sivell was inspired to write the screenplay of
Third Star
out of the belief that a generation of affluent young people were not being rushed into maturity, as they were no longer obliged to go to war. ‘The time spent bumming around lasts and lasts. Their worst problem is that their laptop won’t sync with their phone. So I wanted to put pressure on these men, the time pressure that comes with someone dying, and watch what they did.’ The result was a picture that packed a big emotional punch, but it was
somehow
life-affirming. ‘It’s really about friendship. There were some real tears on that set,’ assured co-star J.J. Feild. ‘It’s a beautifully uplifting human film.’

Third Star
’s premiere took place in June 2010, as the closing attraction of the Edinburgh International Film
Festival. A month earlier, Chris Morris’s debut feature
Four Lions
(with Cumberbatch as a negotiator), about a bungling quartet of terrorist jihadis from Sheffield who are intent on causing destruction in London, had opened in the UK.

Cumberbatch was delighted that he had been able to be versatile and flexible in the roles he was offered, across stage and screen. ‘I’ve been complimented on my ability to shape-shift in the past, and I guess this little lot will really put that to the ultimate test. I love working in what I call the Philip Seymour Hoffman area, where you get a crack at the meaty character parts as well as the quirkier leading roles, while still retaining enough anonymity to keep things in balance.’

As the cinema career was growing, so Cumberbatch’s stage work remained as adventurous as ever. The autumn of 2007 brought revivals of two long-lost twentieth-century European plays at the Royal Court in London, and he starred in both of them.

That season there was some new blood at the Royal Court Theatre, where Dominic Cooke had taken over as artistic director. As Cumberbatch explained, ‘I liked the way that Dominic set out his stall by saying that he was going to question the values of the core Royal Court audience.’ His other reason for going back to stage work was that he dreaded getting rusty as a live performer. ‘Filming is a very fractured process,’ he told
The Stage
. ‘You never really know
what you’ve got until you see the completed film.’ The other advantage with live performance was that he would rarely get the chance to watch his efforts played back. By his own admission, he was not a good audience of his own screen work: ‘I find it painful enough watching myself on film at cast and crew screenings.’

The first of the two plays was
Rhinoceros
, an absurdist work from 1959 by Eugène Ionesco, unperformed in London since the mid-1960s when Orson Welles directed Laurence Olivier as Bérenger, who refuses to conform with society and discovers he is isolated when everyone else follows some rampaging rhinos and ends up being morphed with the creatures. The rhinos were represented by thunderous rumbling offstage, although at times due to the location of the theatre, audiences would confuse it with the nearby rumblings of trains on the Underground’s Circle Line.

‘The play is able to change with the times,’ said Cumberbatch, who played Bérenger in the revival. ‘It was written as a dark satire on Nazism, but it’s as relevant to any kind of fascism from East or West, which makes it much more than old wine in a new bottle.’ It still had considerable resonance in the modern age, regarding moral panics and thinking for oneself.

Dominic Cooke had wanted to move the Royal Court’s productions away from social-realist drama, a decision not popular with everyone, but his choice of Cumberbatch in the agitated lead role of Bérenger was applauded by several newspapers. ‘Cooke is a great actors’ director,’ wrote the
Independent
after press night, ‘and he releases something
in Cumberbatch we have not seen before. Here, he surpasses himself.’

Many of those in
Rhinoceros
, Cumberbatch included, would form the cast of
The Arsonists
, another relatively unknown play from the late 1950s, which is about appeasement. ‘It’s wonderful being in an ensemble,’ Cumberbatch said. ‘There’s a fluid approach to work. You play to each other’s strengths. I think Dominic hopes the plays will feed off each other.’
The Arsonists
by the Swiss dramatist Max Frisch, written in 1958, succeeded
Rhinoceros
at the Royal Court from November.

Written in 1958,
The Arsonists
had last been performed in London in 1961 as
The Fire Raisers
. Then, its director was Lindsay Anderson, later to direct
If
… and
O Lucky Man
for the cinema. Radio 3 had revived the production in early 2005 as a radio drama, with Phil Daniels as Eisenring. In the 2007 revamp, Cumberbatch played Eisenring, an icy and imposing member of a group of terrorists which moves into the house of Biedermann (Will Keen), a respected pillar of the community. Biedermann refuses to acknowledge or accept what is going on in his own home, even when ‘petrol drums pile up in the corner’.

The Arsonists
had been given a contemporary sheen, although to Cumberbatch’s relief, not in a clumsy way. ‘We are not walking around with mobiles and laptops like they always fucking do with Shakespeare,’ he sighed to
The Times
. The change in British society was archly addressed at the very outset of the play. One character prepared to light a cigarette, something that would have been commonplace in
theatre once upon a time, but the smoking ban in public places (then just introduced) had put paid to that, and so a group of firefighters pointed hoses at the cigarette.

With two plays at the Royal Court and the release of two feature films, all within the space of a few months, Benedict Cumberbatch’s name was suddenly everywhere. The man himself knew it and called 2007’s closing months ‘the autumn of Cumberbatch’, before immediately retracting on the grounds that it sounded a bit ominous. He was right though, and those four projects weren’t the sum total of his autumn.

There was also a one-off film for television. It was a dramatisation of Alexander Masters’ unconventional biography
Stuart – A Life Backwards
. Masters was an academic in physics at Cambridge University, and had met Stuart Shorter in the city in 1998 when he found him in the doorway of a shop. Stuart was a very different man to Masters – he was homeless and variously described as a ‘thief, hostage taker, psycho and sociopathic street raconteur’ – but the two bonded and became the unlikeliest of friends. After Shorter fatally collided with a high-speed train in 2002, Masters agonised over whether to write about their friendship, wondering if Shorter’s eventful but often harrowing and violent story might only reach a select readership. ‘I suppose I realised that Stuart was not classic biography material,’ he told the
Sunday Telegraph
in 2007. ‘As one critic put it, his was hardly the Life of Great
Achievement.’ Yet in print the result sold well over 100,000 copies, and inspired Sam Mendes (one of
Starter for 10
’s executive producers) and his production company to arrange a screen adaptation.

‘It’s a bizarre buddy relationship,’ commented Cumberbatch, who was cast to play Masters. ‘They’re an odd couple thrown together by circumstance.’ Certainly, the distance between the pair resulted in some grim but compelling humour, although the American cable network which co-funded the film persuaded Cumberbatch not to use too much of Masters’ Cornish burr. ‘HBO in their wisdom said, “We don’t know if it’ll play in Salt Lake City.”’

Tom Hardy played Stuart Shorter to Cumberbatch’s Masters, a casting choice that amused the real-life author. The two looked nothing like each other. How the actor dressed was a different matter, though. ‘His wardrobe is very real – whenever I see him on set, I think he must have stolen my clothes.’

Stuart – A Life Backwards
was not easy viewing, nor was it without levity. ‘Humour was almost the key thing,’ said director David Attwood. ‘There have been many films about the homeless and they’re generally worthy, and – that horrible word – “gritty”. The best way to tell this story is not by lecturing them, it’s by entertaining them.’

The Last Enemy
was Benedict Cumberbatch’s last television series prior to
Sherlock
. A political thriller in five parts, it
predicted the effects of surveillance technology on society and relationships in Britain in the near future. After a terrorist attack at Victoria Station in London, which kills over 200 people, the British government places restrictions on civil liberties, and armed police take over the streets.

Surveillance technology had become a controversial subject in the UK, where the average citizen could be captured on CCTV camera as often as 300 times every day, and where the nation had more surveillance cameras per head than anywhere else on the planet.

Filming began in mid-February of 2007, and lasted six gruelling months. ‘I reached that point of exhaustion,’ said Cumberbatch, who starred as Stephen Ezard, ‘when you’re too tired even to sleep. It was supposed to be set in the winter in North London, whereas we were filming in a studio in Budapest at the height of summer. We were all melting in the heat of 500 lamps.’

It also brought back some of the horror of 7 July 2005 in London. ‘Everyone on my bus was in a state of panic,’ Cumberbatch told the
Mail on Sunday
’s
Event
magazine in 2013. ‘They had heard about the bomb on the other bus across London in Tavistock Square and started running over each other. There were kids, there were women – it was a real fight to get them down the stairs. I staggered out into the street. I was on my way to help a friend with a workshop at the Young Vic theatre and I couldn’t get through to him. The phones were jammed. Everyone around me was also talking about massive explosions on the Underground.’

Ironically, writer Peter Berry had had to swiftly change
tack in the early drafts of
The Last Enemy
because of the 7/7 attacks. He had begun the series in 2005, and had managed to anticipate aspects of the calamity. ‘I wrote the first episode in which bombs went off on the London Underground about a month before 7 July 2005,’ Berry told the
Radio Times
. ‘So I had to take those out.’ It was an early example of how dystopian fantasy could be overtaken by horrific real-life events.

Despite bringing back unpleasant memories of 7/7 from time to time, Cumberbatch was excited by the concept and the execution of
The Last Enemy
. Months before the series aired, he exuberantly told one reporter about how ‘I got to run around with guns and dodge explosions, which I loved, because I’ve always wanted to do some of that kick-ass stuff.’ He was comparing it to the 1980s series
Edge of Darkness
, ‘a kind of personal liberty versus state security thriller … It’s about ID cards, iris-scanning and the extremes that surveillance can be taken to, which are terrifying.’

Peter Berry, formerly a writer on
Prime Suspect
, felt similarly strongly about the notion of ID cards being introduced into British society. ‘The idea of having to account for yourself to someone who has power over you is so appalling. You may not have to carry it, but if you don’t, you will have to report to a police station within 24 to 48 hours. I don’t want to live like that.’

Cumberbatch’s character Stephen Ezard is a
mathematician
just back from China, who becomes embroiled in a global conspiracy after he tries to establish what has happened to his brother Michael (played by Max Beesley),
who was killed by a landmine while working for a charitable organisation in Afghanistan. ‘He is complicit with the government,’ Cumberbatch said of Stephen, ‘becoming a puppet for it and not realising what he is getting involved in.’ Ezard has obsessive-compulsive disorder which he could relate to, even if he wasn’t technically a sufferer. ‘I have been known to check my temperature and worry too much about symptoms. And I do have threshold anxiety. I have this thing where I have to check the gas is off two or three times.’