by Justin Lewis
‘In true British spirit, it has to get really wet and dangerous before the show is stopped,’ said Cumberbatch. Yet at least in torrential rain, a cast and an audience suffer together. At one As You Like It performance, he faced an early exit alone when he lost his voice. The awful moment occurred just after Orlando had whispered the line, ‘I cannot speak to her!’ A lone member of the 1,000-strong audience chuckled aloud at the unfortunate predicament facing the actor. As his understudy took over his lines, a despondent, voiceless Cumberbatch cycled home.
He encountered another embarrassing situation in the spring of 2003. It took place offstage, but it was mortifying nonetheless for the rising star. Casting was taking place for The Lady from the Sea at London’s (thankfully indoor) Almeida Theatre. At the audition, partly down to a self-confessed inability to remember names easily, he accidentally and repeatedly called the Almeida’s artistic director Sir Trevor Nunn ‘Adrian Noble’, at the time the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Fortunately, Nunn cast Cumberbatch anyway. The Lady from the Sea, which marked the theatre’s relaunch, was an unsparing emotional drama from the 1880s by Henrik Ibsen. The production starred Natasha Richardson, whose mother Vanessa Redgrave had delivered a stunning performance in the central role of Ellida 25 years earlier. It told the story of a married woman living in the mountains who still yearns to be free, both for the sea and for a sailor she once loved. Now married to a country doctor, and with two young daughters, she loses another baby at just five months of age.
Cumberbatch was in a supporting role, as an ailing but self-important sculptor by the name of Lyngstrand. It was a part that required him to master the emotive and the darkly comic. ‘What made him funny,’ he later recalled, ‘is that he had no idea how ridiculous he was. When people were laughing at me in the audience, I tried to put a bit of white noise out there to block it out.’ The pomposity of Lyngstrand was the sort of role he was being offered more and more, which he was already a little concerned about. ‘Gaucheness is a default mechanism with me, so it’s immediately something people see I fit into a box of. But when you go home and look at yourself in the mirror, the one thing you don’t want to be is that person all the time.’
Cumberbatch was a more familiar name to the public by March 2005, when he was back at the Almeida in another Ibsen revival – this time 1890’s Hedda Gabler. Director Richard Eyre, fresh from presiding over a West End version of Mary Poppins, had claimed to have had the idea to revive the play after reading a copy of Hello! magazine in a dentist’s waiting room, in which there was an interview ‘with a rich, posh young woman who was celebrated for being celebrated’ and who confessed to having ‘a great talent for boredom’. ‘Mmmm, Hedda Gabler lives,’ thought Eyre, and on seeing Eve Best appearing in a National Theatre production of O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, he knew he had his Hedda.
Opposite Hedda’s icy contempt, Cumberbatch was Tesman, her husband and a struggling academic. He was widely praised for underplaying the foppishness of the character, instead emphasising his scholarly and thoughtful qualities. ‘It’s more interesting for me to play him differently,’ he said. ‘And it’s better for the ensemble too. I’ve always felt it belittles both her tragedy and his to present this idea that, right from the start, they’ve missed the boat because she’s married an idiot.’ The play sold out its run at the Almeida, and from late May of 2005, transferred with the same cast for a 10-week run at the Duke of York’s Theatre.
A year later, a lead role came Cumberbatch’s way: George in Period of Adjustment, a tragi-comedy from the pen of American playwright Tennessee Williams, and not often performed. Set on Christmas Eve, George is a Korean War veteran, who has just married Isabel (Lisa Dillon) but finds it impossible to consummate the union. He is reassured by Ralph (Jared Harris), his friend from army days, that such problems are not unusual for newlyweds, but it transpires Ralph himself is experiencing a disintegration of his own marriage to Dorothea (Sandy McDade). Williams was not generally known for comedy, and Period of Adjustment was by no means classed as one of his greats, unlike A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and it had not been performed in London since 1962, but the performances drew some positive comment. Time Out’s theatre critic wrote that Cumberbatch ‘brings a virile warmth that makes us hope for the marriage’. Once again, he would be making both audience and critics alike root for a flawed character.
* * *
In addition to Cumberbatch’s stage work throughout this period was a surge in television roles. If the 18 months following his brief Heartbeat showing in 2000 had been fallow, the autumn of 2001 found him filming Fields of Gold, a two-part thriller for the BBC about genetically modified crops and the way that governments collude with big business. It was written by two journalists, one of whom – Alan Rusbridger – was (indeed at the time of writing still is) the editor of the Guardian newspaper. It had, though, also been partially inspired by the John Wyndham sci-fi story The Day of the Triffids, and was focused on how scientific advances were spiralling out of control. It was broadcast in the summer of 2002.
Even in the minor roles of the cast list – about halfway to two-thirds down – Cumberbatch was eager to prepare for the part he had been assigned, and worked hard on background research, a decision that was not always popular. When working on Dunkirk in 2003, a documentary-drama about World War Two’s unforgettable May 1940 maritime evacuation, he found himself barred from contacting the surviving relatives of his character’s real-life incarnation. ‘The BBC were saying, “You might upset them.” I’m about to play him on screen! If that’s going to upset the relatives, I might as well get it over with now.’
Another role of 2002 saw him in the opening episode of that autumn’s most-talked about drama: Tipping the Velvet, boldly adapted by Andrew Davies from the equally bold Sarah Waters’ novel, and starring Rachael Stirling and Keeley Hawes. He would be subject to a great deal of good-natured ribbing from friends after accepting the part of Freddy. ‘I was the boy that turned a girlfriend into the most celebrated lesbian on television. I got so much stick for that.’
At the time of writing, Cumberbatch has only ever appeared in a few full television series, and July and August of 2003 saw the transmission of the first of these. Fortysomething, written by Nigel Williams and based on his own 1999 novel, was a comedy-drama about the midlife crisis, and marked the return of Hugh Laurie to television comedy nearly a decade after his last series with Stephen Fry. Laurie played Paul Slippery, a general practitioner alarmed by the impending and unstoppable onset of middle age. Slippery’s crisis, in which he worries about his moribund sex life, is compounded by the amount of sex his three grown-up offspring are enjoying, not to mention his wife’s bid for liberation, now that their children have come of age.
In an illustrious cast – Anna Chancellor, Sheila Hancock and Peter Capaldi among many others – Cumberbatch was Slippery’s idealistic daydreamer of an eldest son, Rory. There were some concerns that the novel’s setting was a bit insular, with Paul Slippery being an actor in a BBC radio drama (the media as a subject for drama rarely attracts big audiences), so his occupation and workplace were changed to healthcare, as a satire on the NHS, as well as an exploration of how a middle-aged man could rediscover his love for his wife.
Maybe on BBC2 where high ratings were not quite as vital, Fortysomething may have had a chance to build an audience over its six-week run. But it was broadcast on ITV – which was aggressively chasing viewers – and not even a guest cameo by Stephen Fry in the second episode could stop the ratings from tumbling. ITV panicked and shifted the series from a prime slot on Sundays to a graveyard one after 11 o’clock on a Saturday night. Repeats of the reliable Midsomer Murders filled the gap on Sundays. A handful of broadsheet critics continued to carry a torch for the series, but regrettably, it has never been repeated, and remains relatively obscure. Hugh Laurie, who had also directed some of the series, licked his wounds and auditioned for the part of an
other disillusioned medic. It would mean Laurie being resident in Los Angeles for several years making one of the most watched television series on the planet. An arrogant pedant of a man, who plays a musical instrument and lives at 221b, the character of Gregory House MD makes frequent nods towards the detective Sherlock Holmes in the way he could coldly analyse rare and otherwise undiagnosable medical conditions. It was the kind of character that fascinates a viewing audience, the kind that Benedict Cumberbatch would later get to play.
For now, though, in these early years as a professional, and as uncertain as his career could be, he was satisfied with his lot: stage and screen work gathering pace. ‘You can’t predict how it’s going to turn out,’ he said of this uncertain time. ‘What happens is you do your bit, you settle, and see where you are in the grand picture of where everyone else is. You go, “Ooh, I’d like a bit of what that person’s doing, and I think I can get up to that standard, and I think I could be taken seriously enough to do that.’ Just as Fortysomething was demoted into virtual obscurity by ITV, Benedict Cumberbatch was about to play a part which would make him – if not a star – a name.
CHAPTER 5
THE SCIENTIST
In September 2003, filming began in Cambridge and London on a new film for television about Professor Stephen Hawking. Its director, Philip Martin, had excelled as a documentary filmmaker for TV, with credits including a full six-part series for the BBC in 1997 called Stephen Hawking’s Universe, in which the scientist’s theories on the evolution of the cosmos, black holes and time travel were explored.
Stephen Hawking became famous outside scientific circles with the publication of A Brief History of Time in 1988, which detailed his studies and explorations into the Big Bang Theory – the theory stating that the creation of the universe occurred 15 billion years ago via a gargantuan explosion. The book became a best-seller, but Hawking had long been confined to a wheelchair for many years after the onset of motor neurone disease.
The new BBC film, simply titled Hawking, concentrated on the period between 1963 and 1965, when he was studying for his doctorate at Cambridge University, but against the growing shadow of his illness. ‘It’s about the nature of time on both a deeply personal and a universal scale,’ commented the film’s producer, Jessica Pope. ‘At the moment when his intellect was striving to grow to its full potential, his physical self was cruelly closing down.’
At the outset of Hawking, Stephen is celebrating his twenty-first birthday in his hometown of St Albans, Hertfordshire. Lying on the grass beside his future wife, Jane Wilde, and stargazing, he finds he is unable to get up and soon discovers that he has only two years to live, due to the onset of his illness.
The film’s screenwriter, Peter Moffat, had written Cambridge Spies for broadcast in 2003, a four-part drama about Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, in which Cumberbatch and fellow ex-Harrovian Patrick Kennedy briefly featured. The lead roles were taken by a new generation of promising young actors: Samuel West, Toby Stephens, Rupert Penry-Jones and Tom Hollander.
A year later, Hawking marked Cumberbatch’s debut as a lead on television. He confessed that while the prospect of playing Stephen was a thrill, it was daunting too. ‘That initial elation of getting the job passed over very quickly, because I thought, “I’ve got a lot of work to do”.’ Even so, he would discover that those pressures would lead to some rewarding moments during the making of the film, and would call it ‘the most satisfying job I’ve done’ in his career up to this point.
The task of portraying on screen someone who is still alive can be fraught with difficulties. Hawking himself had co-operated with the filmmakers, but had questioned an early draft of the script where, in one scene, his character was seen to have discussed his illness. He wondered if this was too ‘soap opera’. ‘I think what Stephen thinks is a soap opera is rather different from what the rest of us think,’ commented director Philip Martin just before the film received its TV premiere. The affair was written up in the press as if there had been big arguments, but Cumberbatch denied it. ‘The fact that he didn’t like the first draft of the script is par for the course,’ he said. ‘We made changes to accommodate his views, and he remained continually in conference with the production team. He’s been integral to the film.’
Stephen Hawking met Cumberbatch twice during the making of the film – first at a script meeting, and at a subsequent day of shooting at Caius College in Cambridge, the city in which the Professor (by now in his sixties) was still living. ‘We got a call that Stephen might pop in and see it being filmed,’ said Philip Martin. ‘So Stephen as he is now met Stephen as he was then, in his old college quad. It must have been strange for him to see himself portrayed. He said it was really great to be played by someone much better-looking than himself.’
The young actor was nervous about meeting the scientist, especially on set. ‘There he was – this incredibly intelligent, forceful presence – and there was I, a dopey actor feeling anything but intelligent.’ But any anxieties soon fell away. ‘There was lots of joking. He watched a bit and then said, “Very good, very realistic – but you’re much too handsome.”’ He was a lively presence during the shoot, even if communication could be an arduous process. ‘He is very keen to beat you to making the first joke,’ said Philip Martin. ‘The business of communicating is so difficult, he gets down to what he wants very quickly, so you have very productive meetings and he tells you exactly what he thinks.’
Someone else who visited the set was the real-life Hawking’s son, Tim. ‘Tim looked quite shell-shocked,’ Cumberbatch told the Radio Times. ‘He told me that he had only ever spoken to his dad through his voice synthesiser, and had only ever seen him in a wheelchair, so it was very spooky seeing me as his father, walking and talking.’
Because of Hawking’s condition, casual conversation could be an involved process, and Cumberbatch longed to have more time with him to ask questions. ‘You want to sit down and have a pint and ask, “Are you left-handed or right-handed? What do you look for in a girlfriend?” I couldn’t because having a conversation with him is such tortuous hard work.’ But he came to understand the slight awkwardness between them. ‘Every now and again our eyes would catch and I’d look away and then I held his gaze for a little bit and he looked back up again and I smiled at him and he smiled back and it was fine. I suddenly realised he must be uncomfortable with this whole thing.’ In 2007, he elaborated further: ‘It was a bit frustrating because you’re not allowed to ask him any questions. Perhaps he feels that everything you might want to know is already available in his work.’
The real-life Jane Wilde, Hawking’s first wife, visited another university location shoot, this time at Trinity Hall, and was moved to tears watching Lisa Dillon and Cumberbatch playing her and Stephen as they had been 40 years earlier. ‘It reminded me of how idealistic we felt then. That is one of the most difficult things to cope with, to see how it’s all gone so horribly wrong,’ she told the Daily Mail in 2004. ‘But people will see how things were, and make a comparison with the present, and in that sense the timing is fortuitous.’
Confining the story mostly to just a two-year period in the distant past did mean that the team working on the film had greater freedom than they would have done had they tackled a biopic of Hawking’s entire life. ‘With this period of his life,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘we almost had carte blanche because not many people know that much about it.’ This was long before A Brief History of Time, and long before Hawking became famous. ‘Unusually in playing a real person, I had pretty much a blank canvas. There isn’t even any film from those days.’ There was, however, some footage of Stephen’s mother, and further inspiration came from friends of Hawking’s, and from Jane Wilde.
The aim was to give a performance somewhere between an impersonation and his own interpretation of the man. But Cumberbatch was determined to make the character a realistic one. ‘It’s very important to portray Stephen as a human being rather than as a kin
d of superhero icon, which of course he is. We wanted the audience to engage with this person beyond what he was struggling through with his body, so that his character and the great joy of scientific discovery and finding true love were at the forefront.’
As part of his preparation, Cumberbatch enlisted the help of a movement teacher and consulted with two men who actually had motor neurone disease. To act the role, it was essential to examine how the disease affects the body’s gravity. His findings made him feel grateful for his physical condition, and every night after filming, rigorous exercise was a must. ‘Every night after filming, I’d do stretching exercises to expand my limbs in a way that I couldn’t during the day, while playing someone who’s losing the use of his muscles.’
Emulating Hawking’s declining speech patterns was also hard work, although Cumberbatch was said to have come close even during his audition. ‘It was quite clearly written in the script,’ he told The Times. ‘It’s slightly like the atonal palate of a deaf person because the soft palate goes, the tonal variation goes, the tongue loses its elasticity, so it’s very vowelly, the consonants go. It’s like me when I’m very, very hungover, really.’
