Benedict Cumberbatch

by Justin Lewis

  The real-life Hawking had eventually lost the power of speech, although not until the mid-1980s when he contracted pneumonia during a scientific conference, and had to undergo an emergency tracheostomy. With the help of an American voice synthesiser, Hawking could now communicate – albeit slowly – by selecting highlighted words from a computer screen, which he then arranged into sentences. But he never switched the setting of the voicebox from an American accent to an English one. Cumberbatch discovered the reason why during the shooting of the film. Hawking had told him: ‘I find that American and Scandinavian accents work better with women.’

  Great care had to be taken so that the behaviours of someone with severe illness were not overplayed. How to display increasing severity of symptoms without acting in dubious taste? ‘I thought I’d give it five stages,’ explained Cumberbatch, ‘so that the viewer would know where we were through the walk and talk. We specifically chose certain symptoms to emphasise, which does actually happen; one day the speech would be a lot worse than the fine motor skills.’

  Cumberbatch felt strong responsibility for the portrayal, as he knew that for many, he was representing motor neurone disease on screen. ‘There will be thousands of people with motor neurone disease who will have that interest in the film.’ It was essential to get his portrayal right.

  It wasn’t just Hawking’s worsening physical condition which was a challenge to dramatise. How can a narrative bring to life the subject of theoretical physics, which does not lend itself easily to visual representation in a drama? The scientist had hoped that the film might find room for his work on black holes in the 1970s and 80s, but Philip Martin – whose own background was in making science documentaries – worried it would have alienated the public. ‘By the time you get to Stephen’s work on black holes, the cosmology gets so complicated it’s very difficult to explain.’ Yet the final cut would satisfy the scientist, by then 62 years of age and a twice-married father of three. He would say of the film, simply: ‘It captured the spirit of the time.’

  Hawking was broadcast by BBC2 on Tuesday, 13 April 2004, opposite several middling reality TV series on rival channels: A Life of Grime, The Games, Neighbours from Hell. It was a much more interesting proposition. A few press critics were guarded about how effective the mix of science, romance and illness actually was, and pointed out that some of the material was factually different to the content of a documentary screened immediately afterwards on BBC4. For instance, it was stated in the latter that Hawking’s first collapse had not occurred at his twenty-first, as suggested in the drama, but several months earlier while ice-skating with his parents.

  But is the function of the biopic to document a life story as accurately as possible, or to encapsulate the heart and soul of its subject? Anyone’s life story poured into a 90-minute drama would be reductive. What seemed to be most important here was to access the essence of Stephen Hawking in the 1960s, and the critics were unanimous that Benedict Cumberbatch had achieved just that.

  If reviews of the film itself, then, were relatively guarded about the mix of science, romance and illness, one thing that united critics was the brilliance of Cumberbatch in the title role. The Guardian’s Nancy Banks-Smith marvelled, ‘There was a gawkiness, arrogance and charm about Cumberbatch, which reminded you of a child taking a watch apart. And putting it together better.’ Over at The Times, Joe Joseph was also impressed at how Cumberbatch balanced the failings of Hawking’s body – ‘conveying Hawking’s humour, his passion, his lack of self-pity, and giving the gist of Hawking’s features, his melting posture, those inquisitive eyes, that sloping gash of a smile, without overstepping the mark into parody.’

  In the summer of 2005, Hawking would win Cumberbatch his first major award: the Best Performance by an Actor at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival. He lost out at the BAFTA Television Awards when Rhys Ifans triumphed for his portrayal of Peter Cook in the single drama Not Only But Always, but he was delighted to be in the running for Best Actor in the first place. He insisted that he was simply delighted to be able to attend the ceremony with his mother and father, and to be able to show off the Jil Sander suit he had bought specially. He later revealed that he had often been up against fellow nominee Michael Sheen in auditions, for parts Sheen gained and he hadn’t.

  Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Hawking rarely connected again after the making of Hawking, but their worlds would occasionally collide. In 2010, the pair would share narration duties on a three-part documentary series for the Discovery Channel called Stephen Hawking’s Universe (unrelated to the Philip Martin series of the 1990s), for which Hawking wrote the scripts, on subjects including time travel, alien life forms and the life and death of the universe itself. In late 2012, both attended an informal ‘summit’ about the nature of existence in a Central London bar with other science enthusiasts including the author Will Self and the comedian Dara O Briain.

  Cumberbatch’s connections with scientists were to continue. In early 2013 he played the quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg in a radio dramatisation of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Set in World War Two Denmark, when the country was under Nazi occupation, it explored how scientific research between Heisenberg and fellow scientist Bohr (Simon Russell Beale) was under threat, due to their political disagreements. ‘These are such extraordinary people,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘with so much on their shoulders. So much of what they did affected so many people. It’s a ripe topic for drama.’

  Not necessarily accessible topics, but such was the brilliance and sensitivity and intelligence of Frayn’s writing that he managed to make potentially difficult material into compelling drama. ‘You can’t betray the intelligence of the characters for the sake of simplifying the story,’ declared Cumberbatch. ‘At the same time, you can’t leave the audience in the dust. I’ve struggled with science in things I’ve played before, but it’s important to understand what’s in front of you, given the speed at which Bohr and Heisenberg deliver it, because they are that smart.’

  By then, he had also portrayed a botanist (in the 2009 film Creation) and both Victor Frankenstein and the monster he created – of which, much more later – and had a personal passion for the power and importance of science. To this end, in March 2013, he was appointed guest director of the Cambridge Science Festival. ‘My link to a science festival may seem a little tenuous, yet as an actor who has researched playing Stephen Hawking, Joseph Hooker, Werner Heisenberg, and both Frankenstein and his creation, I’ve long had a passion for all fields of science. Our engagement with it has reached a crucial crossroads.’

  Ten years before this appointment at the Cambridge Science Festival, Benedict Cumberbatch had been in the city filming Hawking. Not only had he learnt about performance from Stephen Hawking, he had also concluded something about the value of life itself: ‘Life’s very precious. You’ve got to give it 120 per cent. Just celebrate the fact that we’re alive and enjoy it.’ And for him the best review came from its subject: Hawking himself. Even though the Professor was in poor health at the time, suffering from pneumonia, he was said to have enjoyed the result, and the portrayal of him. ‘He’s said he likes the film,’ Cumberbatch reported back. ‘For a man of few words those are potent ones.’

  CHAPTER 6

  AFRICAN ADVENTURE

  The success of Hawking meant that Benedict Cumberbatch was in demand for television work. Small roles came and went, from a second instalment of Heartbeat, to Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker’s satire on London hipsters, Nathan Barley. But for his biggest project of 2004, he was off to South Africa to film a mini-series for BBC2, which, at a cost of £5 million, was one of the channel’s most expensive productions yet.

  To the Ends of the Earth conflated into three parts a trilogy of novels written by William Golding: 1980’s prize-winning Rites of Passage, and its two successors, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below. It was set in 1812 and was about the passengers and crew sailing from England to Australia squeezed on to a vessel which had once been a robust
warship, but was now in sorrier, ropier condition. The story was told almost entirely from the perspective of Edmund Talbot, a young aristocrat travelling to Sydney to take up a government post arranged for him by his godfather in his native England. Edmund documented the voyage in a journal, which would be sent back to his godfather.

  William Golding had died in 1993, but his daughter, Judy Carver, agreed to share some of his private journals with the BBC, as a way of showing the estate’s support and trust in their making the series. She revealed that her father had intended making the first novel a stand-alone affair, but could not resist extending the story. ‘I think he said at one point, “I’ve left all these people sitting around in the middle of the ocean, and I keep thinking of things that Edmund would say.” I think he did walk around imagining himself in the world he had created. His imagination was very strong, to the extent that he could actually feel things. He could feel the texture of the wood on the boat.’

  The unpredictable climate in Britain would have made for a difficult filming schedule, and other locations like Australia and Malta were considered too costly. So it was decided to shoot the entire production in South Africa, making it the biggest television project ever made in that country. Cumberbatch (as Edmund) and a supporting cast including Sam Neill, Jared Harris (son of Richard), Victoria Hamilton and Daniel Evans made it to Richard’s Bay Harbour, a few hours away from Durban, just as the BBC crew were completing months of work on constructing sections of the boat. ‘We had this really brilliant mixed crew,’ commented Cumberbatch, ‘though it was possibly a bit colonial, because we had these Zulu boys who were literally employed to rock the boat.’ Even there, the weather was often influencing the shoot. Heavy rain could come without warning, and the tides wouldn’t necessarily swell at the right moments of filming.

  There were other uncomfortable aspects to the shoot. Heat was one. ‘The set was housed in what was basically a massive corrugated iron shed: a giant oven,’ Cumberbatch told the Radio Times. ‘The temperature was incredible. The sweat was just running off you, especially in those old, thick velvet costumes. It made it virtually impossible to do any make-up because nothing would stick to your face. No matter how much water you drank, no matter how much rest you had, some days we just had to give up and stop filming.’

  One of the producers, Lynn Horsford, compared To the Ends of the Earth to Golding’s most famous work, Lord of the Flies. ‘It has similar themes of what happens in a closed society. There’s a very strong sense of class structure – it’s like Britain in miniature. It has looked incredibly intimate, like Big Brother on a boat.’

  In fact, the gestation of To the Ends of the Earth had already taken five years, pre-dating Big Brother. The adaptation’s genesis dated as far back as 1999, but the project had collapsed after the death of its original screenwriter, Leigh Jackson. Finally, Tony Basgallop was hired to complete the script when the Russell Crowe sea-based film Master and Commander (directed by Peter Weir) had been commercially successful, making To the Ends of the Earth financially viable.

  As Edmund Talbot, the central character, narrator and guide for the entire voyage, Cumberbatch represented the story’s voice and conscience, the figure the viewers were asked to relate to. Over the course of the three 90-minute episodes, he was hardly off the screen. He described it as ‘a nineteenth-century rock’n’roll gap year’: ‘It has all the same ingredients – drug-taking, casual sex and a journey of self-discovery.’ Hopefully, unlike his experiences in Tibet in 1996, this would be a gap year where he would be in no danger.

  Edmund was a poor sailor, but at least Cumberbatch only needed to act being seasick. ‘He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth,’ he said, ‘and this is a pioneering trip, but he thinks it’s going to be all plain sailing.’ Among those joining Talbot aboard the craft were the anti-royalist Mr Prettiman (Sam Neill), the no-nonsense and irascible Captain Anderson (Jared Harris), a strict governess by the name of Miss Granham (Victoria Hamilton), and a well-oiled artist called Brocklebank (Richard McCabe).

  The ambitious, priggish and often arrogant Edmund Talbot was not an easy narrator to empathise with, but Cumberbatch brought plenty of humanity to the part, recognising that under the bumptiousness, there was vulnerability and curiosity. ‘He’s always open to learning. He’s a product of his time.’ If Talbot’s voyage began with what was described to him as ‘the objectivity of ignorance’, he was assured that he would be completing it, ‘with the subjectivity of knowledge, pain and the hope of indulgence.’ To try and empathise with Talbot’s limitless self-confidence, Cumberbatch drew on his experiences back at Harrow in the early 1990s, and recalled how some of his wealthy contemporaries had already assumed a sense of authority and position, having been born into a privileged existence.

  To the Ends of the Earth marked Cumberbatch’s first-ever screen sex scene, with Paula Jennings in the role of Zenobia. ‘We were both terribly terrified,’ he said of the experience. ‘You’re doing it all in front of a bunch of strangers. There was a large group in a small cabin.’ The character would have been sexually very confident, and in any case, because of his point of view, he would have been keen to paint himself as a sexually experienced figure. ‘In the book, Edmund knows what he’s doing. But I imagine that, rather like others of his ilk, his father had probably given him a chambermaid or prostitute to initiate him.’

  Although a great deal of the budget (which would eventually double to £10 million) was spent on constructing the ship sets to look as authentic as possible, many of the most memorable scenes came with the more intimate moments: the tensions between characters in tiny rooms. ‘We had to build all that,’ said David Attwood, the director, ‘just for one character to look another in the eye. But that’s what it’s about, I think.’

  Attwood had been especially keen for the adaptation to look gritty and uncomfortable, rather than a glamorous travelogue. ‘David wanted [it] to be an accurate representation of what it was like to pull off a trip on the sea in those days,’ said Jared Harris, playing Captain Anderson. ‘He was eager to deglamorise the idea of the beautiful high seas. He wanted to make To the Ends of the Earth as frightening as it must have been. Back then, it was lethal. Everyone was taking a huge risk just by setting foot on a boat.’ Sea travel was no fun, it could be rough, tedious and dangerous.

  As he was on screen for just about the whole of the series, Cumberbatch was busy as could be, but said, ‘Each day was a new challenge. I loved hurling around that boat on ropes, with bits of rigging falling around me in flames.’ With any spare time when the cameras weren’t rolling, he – like many of his co-stars – couldn’t wait for the chance to let his hair down. The surroundings of South Africa offered safaris on horseback, and he spent time skydiving and learning to scuba dive.

  But there were also dramas off set. Future Gavin & Stacey star Joanna Page (Marion Chumley, another of Edmund’s potential love interests) had a narrow escape. One day, she hailed a taxi and had an alarming experience. ‘The driver refused to take me back to my hotel. He drove me around for ages and said that he would only take me back if I let him take nude photos of me. I politely refused.’ Page managed to get back to base unharmed but after she had returned to the UK, something even more worrying happened on the South African highways to three of her fellow cast members.

  One evening, Benedict Cumberbatch, Denise Black and Theo Landey were in a car on the highway to Santa Lucia, near the South African border with Mozambique. The soundtrack to their journey was a Radiohead song, ‘How To Disappear Completely’, and Cumberbatch had felt about as relaxed as could be. ‘It was one of the best times in my life. Then bang! Every time I’m feeling really good, a bit of me is waiting for that bang.’

  The bang began with a tyre blowing. They had no choice but to stop. Stranded in the dark, they now found themselves surrounded by six armed men, who had crept out from a eucalyptus plantation. ‘They frisked each of us for weapons and valuables,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘then bundled us back in
to the car and drove us into the bush.’

  Once there, the men stopped the car, the three actors were hauled out, and they were told to put their hands on their heads. The men swiftly tied the victims’ hands behind their backs, ordered them to kneel down, and were put in ‘the execution position’ with a duvet over their heads in order to silence the shots. When Cumberbatch tried to stand up, the robbers told him to get in the boot of the car. ‘I heard Denise saying, “Please don’t kill him.”’

  It was in the car boot that Cumberbatch quickly hatched a plan: he pretended to be severely claustrophobic and thought in the panic he might die. ‘There’s a problem with my heart and my brain,’ he told their captors. ‘If you leave me in here, I will die, possibly have a fit, and it will be a problem for you. I will be a dead Englishman in your car.’ After a few minutes, the men agreed to let him out. They took him up the hill on his own, and tied his hands behind his back once again. Then the men disappeared. After a time, the three actors made a run for it, and contacted the police. They had no money, transport or debit cards but at least they were alive, and pretty much unharmed (although Cumberbatch still has a scar from being tied up).

  ‘I thank God I had the presence of mind to give them the idea that it would be better to keep me alive,’ he would later say. Their ordeal had lasted around three hours, and for much of that time they had not known if they would survive it. ‘I knew my mother was going to get a call, either from me or someone else,’ Cumberbatch would recall, ‘and the difference would change her life.’

  Maybe what saved their lives was to remain polite and helpful at all times. That was the advice offered in an email that, by happy coincidence, Theo Landey had received only days before filming started, about to how to react in the event of a car-jacking or maybe it was because they were accustomed to being directed, even if it was usually by someone infinitely friendlier. ‘It was only because we were actors,’ believed Denise Black, speaking in 2011, ‘and so used to taking instruction and being able to keep yapping, that we were able to talk our way out of it.’ Indeed their performances were so persuasive that they had been spared.