The Unexpected Adventures of Martin Freeman (14 page)

He never went knocking on Hollywood’s door. He didn’t need to because Hollywood called him, or rather New Zealand did.

2
012 would bring some incredible opportunities to Freeman as he returned to Baker Street and also made a trip to Middle Earth in the great fantasy world of author J.R.R. Tolkien.

The writers of
Sherlock
, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, came to the conclusion that they should rework three of Conan Doyle’s most well-known stories as the friendship between Holmes and Watson developed. Even Watson was brought in as the lead detective in episode two, ‘The Hounds Of Baskerville’, which was sandwiched between ‘A Scandal In Belgravia’ (aired 1 January 2012) and ‘The Reichenbach Fall’ (aired 15 January 2012) and was first shown on TV on 8 January 2012.

The series-two finale, ‘The Reichenbach Fall’, was Freeman’s favourite episode to film. He was very excited about it as soon as he’d read the script. The finished programme is superlative.

The Washington Post
’s Hank Stuever said of Cumberbatch
and Freeman, ‘He’s [Cumberbatch] quite something, all right, but I can’t be the only one who finds this particular version of
Sherlock
to be a little grating. He’d be almost unwatchable if it weren’t for the tender devotion and counterbalance Martin Freeman brings to the role of Watson.’

Den of Geek
’s Louisa Mellor wrote, ‘Cumberbatch and Freeman remain a fantastic double act, with even more bickering and gags at their status as a couple this time around. There can’t be a greater pleasure on telly at the moment than seeing the look of arch disdain on Cumberbatch’s face dissolve into boyish giggles with Freeman on a sofa in Buckingham Palace, or in the back of a cab.’

As with any friendship, partnership or marriage, there is a familiarity between the pair and, as such, there is also contempt and love, compassion and everything else that is fuelled in a relationship. They’ve settled for each other. The relationship between Holmes and Watson is what the public have enjoyed about the series. It was a gratifying experience for both Freeman and Cumberbatch to see how much the characterisation between the two characters had progressed. The writing is excellent and, when the scripts are so good, that’s half the job done.

The duo may be best friends on screen but behind the camera, due to their busy schedules, they don’t have the closeness of Holmes and Watson.

‘We are very friendly [Benedict and I] and we’re good work colleagues but we’re also quite busy and I don’t really hang out with many of, or any of, my co-stars,’ Freeman admitted to
Yahoo
.

There’s a tendency for the public to think that actors hang out with each other and become lifelong friends after a film is made, which may be true in some cases but, for the most part, actors work together on set for a few weeks or months and, through the nature of the job, they automatically make friends but once filming is wrapped up they move on and perhaps never see each other again.

Freeman added, ‘It’s obviously because of the closeness of that relationship on screen, people expect it, or want it to be echoed in real life, which is understandable… You want all your favourite band members to live together in a flat and they don’t.’

Martin spoke to
ShortList.com
about the show’s increasingly rapid and ever-growing fan base: ‘…
Sherlock
is a much finer line between love and hate [laughs]. Because they love it so much that they have to hate it as well and they have to sort of hate you, or hate aspects of what you do, or hate Stephen [sic] Moffat if he’s said something that is half a degree off menu for what they want him to say.’

It’s fun to watch the relationship between Holmes and Watson develop throughout the first two series. It has become more of a partnership with Watson only one step behind Holmes rather than six. Watson still gets annoyed by some aspects of Holmes’s behaviour but he learns how to deal with the detective’s quirky and eccentric personality. Even with the nail-biting scenes between Holmes and Moriarty, Watson still has a presence there. The writers have not side-lined him at all. Moriarty is one of the most famous villains in all of literature and he comes across remarkably well in the series.

At the same time that
Sherlock
series two was broadcast director Guy Ritchie released the sequel,
A Game of Shadows
, to his surprise blockbuster Hollywood version of Sherlock Holmes with the American Robert Downey Jr as Holmes and Brit actor Jude Law as Watson.

‘Well, obviously Jude has the misfortune of not being very good-looking, so he has to watch jealously,’ Freeman joked with
Empire
’s Nick de Semlyen. ‘No, we all went to see the first film and came away going, “We wanted to hate that, but we didn’t.” It was very entertaining and I love Jude. He’s good.’

‘A Scandal In Belgravia’ was nominated for thirteen Primetime Emmy Awards, including ‘Outstanding Supporting Actor In A Miniseries Or Movie’ for Freeman’s portrayal of Watson, while Freeman bagged the TV Movie/Miniseries Supporting Actor award at the Gold Derby TV Awards in May 2012. The episode won three British Academy Television Craft Awards and later the Edgar Award for ‘Best Episode In A TV Series’ in May 2013.

‘It’s a very good idea not to read reviews, because for better or for worse, you can end up “playing the review”. But I have [read them] – that’s why I’m awful in the second series!’ he said to
Digital Spy
’s Morgan Jeffery in 2011. ‘I didn’t actively seek [reviews] out, but we’ve all got an ego and if you know people are saying really nice things about you, you tend to open your ears. But I wasn’t maniacal about hunting down everything, because most actors hunt down the bad stuff – you want to know who thinks you’re a prick!’

Sherlock
was inundated with further awards and nominations in 2012. Freeman picked up a Tumblr TV Award for Outstanding
Supporting Actor In A Drama Series, a Crime Thriller Award for Best Supporting Actor and a nomination at the PAAFTJ Awards for Best Supporting Actor In A Miniseries Or TV Movie. The series won a PAAFTJ Award for Best Cast In A Miniseries or TV Movie and Best Cast at the Tumblr TV Awards.

Freeman continued to be shocked by the success of the series.

‘Some of the viewing figures we got with the second series of
Sherlock
were fucking outrageous,’ he told
Esquire
’s Michael Holden in 2012. ‘One week we beat
EastEnders
, and I’m so proud – not because we beat
EastEnders
– but I’m just proud that millions, I mean literally millions and millions, of people wanted to watch it then. That night, do you know what I mean?’

Aside from
Sherlock
, Freeman voiced the character of ‘The Pirate with a Scarf’ in the 2012 film,
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!
which was renamed in New Zealand as
The Pirates! Band of Misfits
. Directed by Peter Lord,
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!
is a British-American 3D stop-motion film produced by Aardman Animations, the British company behind
Chicken Run
and
Wallace and Gromit
.

Freeman had wanted to work with Nick Park and his Bristol-based Aardman Animations for a while and had first approached Park about a possible collaboration at a British Comedy Awards several years earlier.

Hugh Grant made his first animated feature debut while Imelda Staunton, David Tennant, Jeremy Piven, Salma Hayek, Lenny Henry and Brian Blessed also lent their voices to the
film. It is loosely based on the book of the same name in the Gideon Defoe
The Pirates!
series.

Freeman told a journalist at
Douban.com
about his experience with voice work, which is everything Martin doesn’t want acting to be – alone in a room reading from a script.

‘It was very unique, you don’t even know what their physicality is,’ he said. ‘I had seen minutes here and there of what my character was going to be, I knew what he was going to look like, but he’s not literally me. I was doing the physicality that you normally are in an acting job, but you leave his actual physicality to the team of animators, a team of people you hadn’t met in another city somewhere. There’s a lot of trust, I suppose, that goes on – definitely on both sides. I think from our point of view you feel quite privileged to be on the film anyway, every actor who was in it was, I’m sure, was quite chuffed to be a part of it, having seen all their work previously.’

Freeman much prefers to work with actors and, while it was a new experience for him, he was genuinely only interested because it was an opportunity to work with Aardman. He didn’t get into acting to do this sort of work though because, for the most part, voice work is working alone. Freeman loves people and being sociable and voice work does not provide that sort of interaction. Acting is more ‘community based’, as he has described it. He loves to hear stories on set from other actors and mingle with the cast and crew.

Martin’s inspiration for his character, Pirate With Scarf, was John Le Mesurier in
Dad’s Army
; basically someone who is cleverer than his superior and is level headed and knows how to deal with his superior officer. Freeman’s character is the
Captain’s right-hand man. His Captain takes him for granted sometimes but knows he can rely on him. Pirate With Scarf would run through hoops for his Captain. In the film Pirate Captain gets a crisis of confidence and forgets how much high esteem his crew hold him in so, when he starts to feel negatively about himself, Pirate With Scarf boost up his boss’s confidence. None of the characters in the film have names as such – Pirate With Scarf, Curvaceous Pirate, Pirate With Gout and so on – and so they’re more like stock characters.

It was a reasonable box-office success after its 28 March release but it was a critical hit and was nominated for the 2013 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Time
’s Richard Corliss wrote, ‘
The Pirates!
, for all its vagrant appeal, isn’t in that exalted category; it lacks urgency and coherence. The movie is like a pirate without a parrot, Darwin without Natural Selection, Wallace without Gromit.’

LA Times
’s Kenneth Turan enthused, ‘The twists and turns of the
Pirates
plot are many, but hanging on for the duration is a pleasure. The visual treats are many, including random signage (“Live Sports: Urchin Throwing, Cockney Baiting” reads one) and a clever riff on movie maps that illustrate nautical progress.’

The New York Times
reported it was: ‘More eccentric than whimsical,
Band of Misfits
is set in a somewhat louder, rowdier key than some of Aardman’s earlier charmers. It’s the first of the studio’s stop-motion features to be shot in digital and the first shot in 3-D, developments that some Aardman purists may find the outrageous equivalent of Bob Dylan going electric or David Fincher going digital.’

A short film was also released on 13 August called
So You
Want To Be A Pirate!
which features the voices of Freeman, Hugh Grant, Brian Blessed, David Tennant and Russell Tovey.

Freeman also had a part in an almost forgotten half-English, half-Spanish fantasy film called
Animals
, co-written and directed by Marçal Forés, best known for his work on a BBC pilot (‘The Things I Haven’t Told You’) that never became a series. The film is about a teenager named Pol who lives with his brother and is still at school. He has a fairly ordinary life but he has a secret – his cuddly teddy bear, Deerhoof, can think, talk and move. Pol shares his secrets with him. The school that he attends sees the arrival of a student called Ikari, who is an elusive somewhat enigmatic character with something to hide. Pol is intrigued by Ikari and his interest in his new classmate sparks off a series of dark and disturbing events that turn his life from the ordinary into the extraordinary. It was released in Spain on 22 October 2012.

The Hollywood Reporter
’s Neil Young wrote of the film, ‘A self-satisfied slice of quirky Catalan cool,
Animals
boasts flashes of brilliance but squanders considerable potential on a waywardly sophomoric script. Sales prospects for the slick-looking feature debut of Barcelona’s Marçal Forés are boosted by a photogenic young cast, the large amount of English-language dialogue and the unexpected presence in a supporting role of popular British star Martin Freeman – Bilbo Baggins in the upcoming
Hobbit
trilogy. But while combining
Ted
and
Donnie Darko
– with touches of
Afterschool
and
Ghost World
– sounds like a promising concept on paper, the results are too strenuously weird for anything other than marginal youth interest.’

Variety
’s Jonathan Holland wrote, ‘Troubled teens and a
talking teddy bear populate the bizarre world of
Animals
, Catalan helmer Marçal Forés’ shimmering, ambitious debut. This stylishly wrought item shuttles between fantasy and realism a la
Donnie Darko
in its exploration of its protag’s problematic emotional life, although too much of the lead character’s delicate, self-regarding preciousness spills over into the film itself. But while the last half-hour has an anything-goes air, there’s still enough verve and quality in the early reels – including some wonderfully dreamy atmospherics – to suggest that Forés is one to watch. Limited fest pickups are likely.’

Freeman’s role in the film came as a surprise to many fans and to this day it remains something of an oddity in his arsenal of movies.

DVD Talk
’s Tyler Foster wrote of the DVD release, ‘
Animals
is a frustrating film, packed to the brim with symbolism that director Marçal Forés has trouble stringing into a cohesive story. Watching the trailer, the film looks like a bizarre dark fantasy which has no boundaries, pitching Pol’s emotional growth as the start of a rift between himself and the bear that turns bloody, but the actual movie is far more contained, trying to string together important bits of subtext into a portrait of teen angst. At times, the film touches on feelings that young people, especially gay teens, may find incredibly familiar, but Forés complicates his movie with too many subplots and additional ideas to explore, resulting in a murk that prevents the film from having much of a point.’