Benedict Cumberbatch

by Justin Lewis

  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.

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nbsp; 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.

  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.’

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  As the cinema career was growing, so Cumberbatch’s st
age 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.