Benedict Cumberbatch

by Justin Lewis

  CHAPTER 14

  VICTOR AND THE CREATURES

  In late 2010, Benedict Cumberbatch was limbering up for what would be his most high-profile stage role yet. In November, he joined forces with fellow acting titans like Sir Ben Kingsley, Samuel West, Romola Garai, Tom Hiddleston and Gemma Arterton for a special one-off charity show at South London’s Old Vic theatre. The Children’s Monologues was a dozen monologues, compiled by a team of playwrights from the testimonies of 250 children in South Africa. The original raw material had been gathered by the charity Dramatic Need, who had asked the children to each select a specific day in their life which had brought them either joy or sadness. The replies they received were both tragic and disturbing, including accounts of illness, violence and sexual abuse.

  The director Danny Boyle, who organised the Old Vic performance, described many of the stories as being like a punch in the stomach. ‘They have that directness that you find with children anywhere. They can’t compartmentalise or filter traumatic stuff so they just say it.’ Cumberbatch was proud to be associated with the evening. ‘One of the privileges of doing something as high profile as Sherlock is the effect that you can have, that you can help raise awareness or even money for a good cause. It’s an extraordinary position to be in.’

  The special evening took place just as he and Boyle were preparing the ground at the nearby National Theatre for an ambitious stage project in early 2011. Cumberbatch was to co-star in a radical re-interpretation of Mary Shelley’s tale, Frankenstein. In an unusual twist, he and fellow lead actor Jonny Lee Miller would play two parts – the scientist Victor Frankenstein and the Creature he created – swapping roles for each performance. ‘Every other night they reinhabit each other,’ said Danny Boyle. ‘They are mirrors of each other. And it’ll make the play interesting for the actors to do – they won’t be able to settle and they’ll be constantly sparring.’

  Danny Boyle’s background, before working in television and cinema, was in theatre. He had been a director at London’s Royal Court for five years (1982–87). Later, he was the director of Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours. But he hadn’t directed any theatre in 15 years. During this period, he was also preparing for the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics and in fact described Frankenstein as a ‘little mini-sabbatical’, a distraction from the Olympic job – a task that took two full years of preparation.

  To have two lead actors in a play swap roles on a nightly basis was relatively unusual, but not completely unprecedented. Way back in 1935, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier had faced each other in Gielgud’s production of Romeo and Juliet, switching back and forth between Romeo and his foil, Mercutio. Nearly 40 years later, in 1973, Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco tried the same thing with Richard II and Bolingbroke. As did Mark Rylance and Michael Rudko in a 1994 London production of Sam Shepard’s True West, a play examining the stormy relationship between two brothers.

  Nick Dear was responsible for adapting Frankenstein for 2011. When one of his drafts suggested opening the play from the Creature’s perspective, Danny Boyle realised it, ‘gave the Creature his voice back’. This prompted him into switching the lead roles around. ‘Starting from the Creature’s point of view was the key to unlocking the adaptation,’ he went on. ‘Once you don’t start with Victor Frankenstein, you need to balance the Creature with his obsession with his creator. So we rebalanced our approach by double casting the actors.’

  The double casting would leave no room for ego, and from day one of rehearsals, relations between the two were harmonious. ‘The dialogue between us is selfless and co-operative,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘If there’s something really good that he does, I will ask if I can incorporate it.’ ‘We’re not precious,’ added Jonny Lee Miller. ‘We’re more of a team. We find it constructive to talk to each other about what looks good, what doesn’t.’

  The dynamic between the two actors was highly rewarding. They could share their concerns, and feel like a team. ‘No one’s precious about it,’ said Jonny Lee Miller. ‘We’re watching each other a lot, and taking things from each other.’ There were a few drawbacks, though: a lack of time being one. ‘It’s double the workload,’ explained Cumberbatch, ‘but not double the rehearsal time.’ Another difficulty concerned learning the lines. This was complicated. One actor could start learning one part, only to find himself thrown by the other performer’s cues. ‘Having both characters on the same page is a distraction,’ admitted Cumberbatch. But Danny Boyle observed that this seemed appropriate: the two lead characters should become ‘the same in a way… two strands of the same part… They’re the creator and son, and the obligation in that relationship is very close.’ If there was a matinee performance as well as an evening one, the leads would remain in the same part for that particular day, but even so it demanded stamina and concentration. Plus, for whoever was playing the Creature, becoming black and blue was part of the job. ‘You come off stage with a cut on your lip, your wrists are bruised and you’ve just shed 5lb,’ summed up Cumberbatch. Still, as ordeals go, it was a rewarding one.

  Getting the right actors, Boyle acknowledged, had been vital. Having cast Cumberbatch, he had worked with Jonny Lee Miller on Trainspotting 15 years earlier, but had had no contact since. For Boyle to involve an actor he knew well (Miller, by now a regular on American TV’s Dexter) and another he did not (Cumberbatch) was conscious. The actors needed to be bold and commanding, to fill the spacious stage. But Boyle soon knew he had the right men for the job: ‘The job of director is mostly fuelling actors. They are insatiable. And Benedict and Jonny are like a Venn diagram – they cross over constantly.’

  Like the revamp of Sherlock, Boyle and Dear’s twenty-first century take on Frankenstein was both thoroughly modern and yet close in spirit to the source material. Mary Shelley’s original text was written in 1816, during a period when she had two poets in her life: her husband Shelley, and Byron. ‘She sees Byron as the noble savage in the Creature,’ explained Cumberbatch, ‘whereas she sees Shelley as this obsessive social misfit. So her novel makes sense of the psychodrama she found herself in.’

  Yet, the grotesque figure of the Creature (which required 90 minutes in make-up before the curtain could go up) would not be based on its most famous screen incarnation inhabited by Boris Karloff in James Whale’s 1931 movie. This time there was to be no bolt in the neck, and the Creature would even gradually acquire language skills, and be able to talk back to his creator. Others to play the Creature had included Robert De Niro and Christopher Lee, but both Dear and Boyle wanted to bypass the story’s horror film connections and instead concentrate on the ideas explored in Shelley’s original novel, which was in its day extremely futuristic in its vision. ‘Shelley is looking forward to the technological revolution,’ explained Nick Dear. ‘200 years on from when she wrote it, our technology is such that we are achieving now what she had nightmares about.’

  For the audience, the play – two hours long with no interval – presented a tricky conundrum, of who to root for, and empathise with: the creator or the Creature. Victor Frankenstein has no real interest in procreating with his fiancée Elizabeth. As for the Creature devised by Victor, he longs to be helpful and decent (a humane attitude largely missing from his inventor’s character), but he is shunned by society, and as a result fights back in a destructive and aggressive fashion.

  Under-15s were discouraged, if not actually banned, from attending Frankenstein, partly because of the nudity (the Creature was naked and caked in blood and gore for most of the first half-hour), but also because of a rape scene. Many youngsters sneaked in regardless, and Guardian writer Catherine Bennett took her 13-year-old daughter to see it. She was baffled by the age restrictions. ‘It is hard to see why the theatre decided to exclude so many potential converts,’ she wrote, ‘unless it was a fear of how younger teens might react [when] the piteous monster comes to life and learns to wriggle, then stagger, completely naked until his maker chucks
him a large cloak.’

  ‘You can explore all these ideas – prejudice, not fitting in, love, revenge, original sin, nurture and nature – when you have a man creating a life,’ commented Jonny Lee Miller. ‘[The Creature] has a fully grown brain because it comes from an adult male corpse. But he’s a baby, yet he learns very quickly. So the story is also about the growing and education of a man, which goes very wrong.’

  This was a whistle-stop tour of human evolution, and when the play opened in February 2011, it immediately attracted feverishly enthusiastic notices. ‘Manages to be both graphic and subtle,’ said the Independent. ‘The most viscerally exciting and visually stunning show in town,’ ventured the Telegraph. And the Guardian paid tribute to ‘an astonishing performance’ by Cumberbatch. But for the most part, critics refused to place one actor’s performance over the other. Both were praised equally.

  Part of the reason why it was so hard to get tickets was that some of the audience booked for multiple shows. Cumberbatch would see the same faces in the front row of the Olivier for several nights in a row. ‘Two young women from China saw every performance,’ he said. ‘I asked them, “How do you afford the time and the money?” And they just said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. We love you.” I used to be in the audience, I used to obsess about things, but I don’t understand this.’

  For those unable to get tickets (so, most people), there would be an alternative. Two special live broadcasts of the play (on 17 March) were relayed via more than 400 cinemas or arenas around the world, including just over 100 in Britain. Obviously the cinema showing of the performance could never hope to match the live experience but with the play selling out so quickly, how else would people be able to see it? In addition, having the performance relayed via cinema, it could still be a shared experience, just like theatre.

  Cumberbatch and Miller’s sterling work on Frankenstein would be recognised when the nominations were announced for the 2011 London Evening Standard Theatre Awards. They were in contention for Best Actor, alongside Dominic West, James Corden, Jude Law, Ralph Fiennes and Kevin Spacey. But how would the judging panel be able to favour one over the other if they were choosing a Frankenstein actor? It just didn’t seem right to separate them, and the panel knew it. So, on 20 November, they were heralded as joint winners of the category, a first in the 57-year history of the Awards. At the 2012 Olivier Theatre Awards, the two would again share a Best Actor gong.

  * * *

  In the wake of Sherlock becoming an international television hit, further Sherlock Holmes adaptations had been emerging. A second Guy Ritchie film with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law was released in 2011, the same year that Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate agreed that a new Holmes story could be published. Anthony Horowitz was chosen to write it, and The House of Silk duly became the first Sherlock story since Conan Doyle’s 13-part Return of Sherlock Holmes, finished in 1905. But in 2012, American television would adapt the Holmes/Watson relationship for a new primetime series, Elementary, set in contemporary New York City. For Sherlock Holmes himself, they were to select a potentially controversial lead.

  It transpired that the CBS network in the US had initially wanted to remake the BBC’s Sherlock series. ‘We said “No”,’ said Sue Vertue at Hartswood Films. ‘We could have gone for financial gain but we wanted to keep creative control.’ Even though the characters of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson had been re-imagined hundreds of times in films, plays, and TV and radio programmes, the stylised look of Hartswood’s Sherlock was highly distinctive, and the executives there would be watching Elementary very closely indeed to make sure it didn’t ape their series too faithfully. ‘It will be annoying if they use elements that can be traced to our show rather than the original stories,’ said Vertue. Her husband, Sherlock co-creator Steven Moffat, wasn’t best pleased either: ‘They’ve just decided to go off and do one of their own, having been turned down by us to do an adaptation of our version. What if it’s awful? If there’s this unrelated rogue version of Sherlock going around and it’s bad, it can be bad for us. It degrades the brand.’

  So it was ironic that the lead actor hired for Elementary had a connection to the British Sherlock. CBS’s choice was Jonny Lee Miller, Benedict Cumberbatch’s co-star in Frankenstein. Miller’s Holmes would be a drug addict who was just out of a rehabilitation centre in Manhattan. The casting choice for Watson, though, was a bigger departure: Lucy Liu, who would play a former surgeon called Dr Joan Watson. Liu welcomed the opportunity not just to make Watson female but an Asian-American. ‘Watson’s ethnicity is a very big deal,’ she said. ‘I didn’t grow up seeing people like myself in films. Although it’s quite different now, it’s still a slow process.’

  Miller had adored Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Holmes. After each showing of Sherlock aired, the two had chatted warmly about it. ‘I would call him up like a groupie,’ recalled Miller, ‘and we had a discussion about this project as well. I wanted to reassure him about how different this was: it’s another country and a whole lot of vibe.’ In light of this, an unwelcome Cumberbatch quote in the British free-sheet ShortList was potentially awkward. He was quoted as saying he had told Miller that he would have preferred him to turn down the Elementary job, ‘but you’ve got a kid to feed, a nice house in L.A. and a wife to keep in good clothes. When they waft a pay cheque at you, what are you going to do?’

  A displeased Cumberbatch soon hit back, insisting he had been misquoted. ‘I never said that Jonny took the job for the paycheck, nor did I ask him not to do it. What I said is I would have preferred not to be in the situation where we will again be compared because we are friends. I know for a fact his motivations were to do with the quality of the script and the challenges of this exceptional role.’ He looked forward to Miller’s Sherlock Holmes and wished him the very best of luck with it.

  In any case, insisted Miller, Elementary was for a different audience: ‘We’ve made our Sherlock Holmes rougher around the edges. It examines Holmes’s flaws and how damaged he is. You see him struggle.’ With CBS being a mainstream commercial network in America, it might have a bigger audience too, given that PBS, which broadcast Sherlock, was unavailable to some of the US. ‘The BBC show is very popular,’ added Miller, ‘but it hasn’t been seen by most of America.’

  Elementary premiered on the CBS network in September 2012, and began showings on Sky in the UK the following month. Critics in the States approved, with The New York Times saying that Miller’s Holmes was a ‘likeable hangdog… showing the glint of mania, without the pyrotechnics that Cumberbatch brings to his performance in Sherlock’.

  Where Cumberbatch’s Sherlock had been about fast-moving plot, Miller’s Elementary was more about Holmes’s brooding and addictive psyche, a complexity of character in keeping with the groundbreaking US cable TV hits like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire. ‘Our Sherlock has emerged with a tiny kernel of self-doubt where one previously never existed,’ said Rob Doherty, series creator of Elementary, and formerly a writer/producer on Medium. ‘It’s not something we are going to speak to very often, but I think it’s one of the things that drives him.’

  Ultimately, Cumberbatch approved of Miller’s take on Holmes. ‘He sent me some messages,’ said Miller, ‘when he’d first seen the show. He’s been very supportive the whole way.’ Although they were friends, after all, with inbuilt loyalty. ‘I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have sent me a text message saying, “You suck!”’

  The co-existence of Elementary and Sherlock meant that the possibility of restaging Frankenstein on Broadway with its two National Theatre leads would not take place. There was also a problem finding a suitable venue. ‘I don’t think there’s any theatre that’s right for it,’ bemoaned Cumberbatch. ‘The Olivier is an old-fashioned acting theatre with this incredible machinery and a drama in the middle of it. There aren’t many places like it.’ Another stumbling block to transferring Frankenstein to the States seemed to be Cumberbatch’s schedule. Jonny Lee Miller’s career had b
lasted into international orbit some time before, and now it was Benedict’s turn.

  CHAPTER 15

  CUMBERBATCH INTERNATIONAL

  Benedict Cumberbatch had always been the sort of actor who would take ‘big parts in small films, and small parts in big films’. Even now, on the brink of international stardom, that maxim would remain. He had not abandoned independent cinema. Wreckers, a British drama with a tiny budget, which opened in the UK just before Christmas 2011, was a case in point. He co-starred with Claire Foy as a recently-married couple, who move back to the small Suffolk village where he had been raised, but whose idyllic life is disturbed by the arrival of his troubled sibling, Nick (Shaun Evans). Nick, like Dr John Watson, had been in service in Afghanistan, and back on Civvy Street was in a tormented state, but once under pressure, David would show Dawn (Foy) a side of him that was testier and tenser.

  After Wreckers, though, much of Cumberbatch’s film shoots would be conducted abroad. Though several of his film appearances had been seen in the USA, he remained cautious about ever moving there and attempting a full-time Hollywood career. ‘You’ve really got to commit to make it there,’ he had said in 2007. ‘I’m in a lucky position now that I can get enough good work to have a career here.’ Five years on, in 2012, he would spend much of the year filming overseas.

  The move into big-time cinematic roles had been a dream of his for some time, although the ‘star’ system of the movie world was a far cry from the ensemble nature of theatre. Compared to the community spirit of theatre, in which the cast, director and crew worked as a whole, cinema is more of a star-led medium, in which individual actors are encouraged to compete for being the star on which a picture depends. ‘It’s all about a graph. You are commodified in a way that doesn’t really happen in theatre,’ he had told Mark Lawson of the Guardian in 2008. ‘Does this person tick the gay box, the married-couples box, the under-25 box and so on?’ It could be another kind of typecasting, but as ever, Cumberbatch would keep moving, refusing to be trapped as one character.