Benedict Cumberbatch

by Justin Lewis

  He had been especially eager to participate in an action flick. ‘I want to have my Daniel Craig moment! I want to run around a desert, shooting guns at aliens and looking like I barely have to take a breath. I’d love to do all that shit!’ Star Trek Into Darkness marked his entry into action-packed blockbusters, thanks to an impromptu and unorthodox audition piece he sent to the director J.J. Abrams.

  He had been wary and even critical of Hollywood big-budget action films, what he called ‘cookie cutters, two-dimensional villains and the English transition of an actor being from a different culture. We’d better give him the bad guy role and a cape, and just make him be really horrible’. But when Benicio Del Toro, rumoured to be playing the villainous Khan, dropped out of the project around Christmas 2011, Cumberbatch was made aware that Abrams was interested in casting him: ‘He fleshed out the whole world of the rest of the script, and there’s a purpose and intention to his otherwise violent and pretty distressing actions that make it really intriguing.’

  With all the casting directors in the UK on holiday over the Christmas period, he decided to send his audition via his smart phone. His best friend Adam Ackland offered his kitchen as an audition location. ‘I squatted under the one good overhead light, with Adam’s wife Alice balanced on two chairs holding my iPhone, and Adam feeding the lines to me off-camera,’ he told journalist Siobhan Synnot. ‘We eventually shot three takes of each scene. Then it took me a day to work out how to compress the file and email it to J.J.’s iPad.’

  Abrams was also away over the festive season, so once the file was sent, all he could do was to wait. He had found a way of relaxing himself in auditions of all kinds: ‘I try to imagine I’m the only person they’re seeing that day, because it could be overwhelming to try to fulfil everyone’s expectations rather than the people nearest to you in the creative process – be it your director, fellow actors, writers.’

  After New Year, Abrams contacted Cumberbatch by email with a cryptic invitation: ‘You want to come and play?’ The actor was confused. ‘I said, “What does this mean? Are you in town, you want to go for a drink? I’m English, you’ve got to be really straight with me on this. Have I got the part?”’

  He had been successful, but euphoria turned to self-doubt. ‘It’s very flattering to be offered work without an audition, but it also brings pressure because you haven’t won it. You haven’t proved your ability to do that role.’ His sure-footedness briefly deserted him when he began work on this, his first Hollywood blockbuster. It felt quite intimidating for him to reach the studio, and meet a room of five producers and many crew members. ‘I was the Brit abroad,’ he told the Daily Mirror. ‘I was terrified. I was jet-lagged and must have looked as white as a sheet, with dark rings around my eyes.’ The director, J.J. Abrams, was also a bit startled, though. ‘Everyone stood a little bit taller when he was around.’

  Cumberbatch had been cast as the intergalactic baddie Commander John Harrison (aka Khan), a ruthless and vengeful rogue officer, who had plotted a bomb attack in London, then a raid on Starfleet’s Californian nerve-centre, before beaming up on Kronos, the Klingons’ planet. The USS Enterprise was called back to Earth from an expedition in deep space to find an ‘unstoppable terror’ had destroyed the fleet. Harrison was not a cardboard villain, but a complex individual, exactly the sort of bad guy role that Cumberbatch always celebrated. ‘The action he takes has intent and reason,’ he explained. ‘He is not a clearly good or evil character. There’s a lot of reasoning and motivation behind what he does. He has a moral core, he just has a method that’s pretty brutal in our world.’

  Cumberbatch soon found his feet on the Star Trek shoot, finding it a supportive company, but because he had been cast relatively late, his appearance needed urgent attention. For one thing, the hair department on Into Darkness had some work to do. Khan needed to have dark hair, the opposite of Captain James T. Kirk’s blond. ‘The day he flew in, he walks in with super-short blond hair,’ said the film’s hair department head, Mary L. Mastro. ‘We had two weeks to darken and lengthen his hair.’

  Similarly, Cumberbatch’s six-foot frame needed filling out as Harrison was made of bulkier stuff. Every day for two weeks, in preparation, he trained for two hours and ate 4,000 calories: chicken, potatoes, broccoli, protein shakes. He later described the process as force feeding himself ‘like a foie gras goose’: ‘It was the most physical demand that’s ever been made of me for the screen. It was horrible. You turn into an absolute creature from hell!’ By the time the shoot went ahead, he had gone from a 38 chest to a 42, but was quick to point out that gaining weight wasn’t in itself skilful acting. ‘I’ve always been a bit po-faced that all you need to do to be put in the hallowed halls of method acting is put on shitloads of weight. The effort involved deserves some credit, but it doesn’t make a performance.’

  As part of his preparation, he also underwent some basic martial arts training, learning how to move and throw a punch. Supervising his progress was his stunt double, Martin de Boer. ‘I’ve had actors who want to be an action star, but don’t want to put in the work. He was the opposite: “I want to train as much as I can.”’ But the more dangerous stunts would be out of bounds for Cumberbatch; it was simply too risky. ‘If something happens to him we’re all screwed,’ noted de Boer. ‘That’s why I’d be on the wire, not him.’

  Ironically, Cumberbatch had been no particular Star Trek fanatic, prior to seeing Abrams’ reboot of the brand in 2009, but once seen, he was hooked. ‘Lo and behold, the Trekkie in me was reborn. The Trekkie world is phenomenally rich and entertaining, but at its core, it’s about humans and being human and how to aspire to a greater democracy than we have. Emotions are ramped up and men cry in this film.’

  For him it was vital that characterisation and story were central to Star Trek. He told The LA Times in May 2013: ‘They’re such condensed, incredibly beautifully drawn characters that are very now, even though it’s a future-scape with loads of rich, imaginative detail for fans to obsess over. The actual core content of the story is universal in time and place.’

  The Star Trek shoot would last four months, and for a time, Cumberbatch’s parents came to stay with him in the US. One day, they accompanied him to the set. Wanda Ventham, herself a veteran of sci-fi shows like UFO and Doctor Who, was amused by the endless takes. ‘It went on all day, just to get Ben in this bloody spaceship. At one point, I said to them, “You know, when I was doing UFO, it only took me three takes to get to the Moon!”’

  When Into Darkness (Abrams’ second Star Trek movie, and the twelfth film in all) opened in the UK in May 2013, critics recognised the moral core of Harrison. ‘A piece of full-on, chilly, orotund Shakespearean villainry,’ wrote Scotland on Sunday. ‘It’s a kick to see Cumberbatch roar, glower and run through glass windows like a weaponised Duracell bunny.’

  The rest of the cast included Chris Pine (Captain Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock) and Zoe Saldana (Lt Uhuru). There were opportunities for mischief on the shoot, and predictably the British comedy actor Simon Pegg (in the role of Scotty) was one of the main exponents of such tomfoolery. One stunt took place at a nuclear fusion laboratory in California called the National Ignition Faculty. Pegg warned Cumberbatch that special precautions had to be taken while they were shooting there. In particular, he would need to protect himself with some special ‘neutron cream’. ‘I was convinced that I had to put dots of this cream on my face,’ said the fall guy for the prank. ‘There was also a disclaimer I had to sign, basically saying, “I’m aware of the physical dangers of working in this environment.” God knows what else I’ve signed in my life that I might have got into trouble for.’

  Also featuring in the cast, as Dr Carol Marcus, was Alice Eve, whose connection with Cumberbatch stretched back to 2006’s Starter for 10. Like him, she was the offspring of two actors, in her case Trevor Eve and Sharon Maughan, and suggested that growing up in a family of thespians could be challenging: ‘The energy and the passion was fantastic to be aroun
d – but that has its other side, too. There was a lot of socialising. I think it was because of the unsettled nature of an actor’s life that I ended up seeking out a very structured education.’ For Cumberbatch, it had been Harrow, then Manchester University. For Eve, it was Westminster School and Oxford, ‘where the rules were rigid and people had a rigidity in their approach to life that I wasn’t familiar with.’

  At the end of the Star Trek shoot in the summer of 2012, Cumberbatch had sneaked in to record a guest voice for The Simpsons, before jetting back to the UK to read some war poetry at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, participate in a Sherlock event at the Edinburgh Television Festival, and do a round of interviews for the premiere of Parade’s End on BBC2. By late August, he was back in the USA filming 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1850s autobiography, which detailed his experiences of being kidnapped and sold into slavery. McQueen described the memoir as ‘the Anne Frank book of America… a meditation on family, freedom and love’. He found it both gripping and harrowing. ‘I was trembling. Every page was a revelation. I was upset that I didn’t know the book, then I realised no one knew about it.’

  Solomon Northup was a talented violinist with a young family, but was struggling to find employment. On the street of New York’s Manhattan one day in 1841, he was approached by two strangers offering him work. Although the state of New York had already outlawed slavery, many other US states had not, and the next thing Northup knew, he was in Washington, DC, then in New Orleans. The two strangers had drugged him. Over the next 12 years, he was sold as an enslaved person three times, forced to pick cotton, beaten numerous times, and faced a lynching. He was finally rescued when a Canadian called Bass, who was heavily involved in abolishing slavery in North America, stepped in, and sent a message back to New York. As a free man, Northup could not sue the men who had sold him into slavery (it was illegal for him to give evidence in court against white people), but he could at least publish a memoir.

  When 12 Years a Slave was published in 1853, it sold around 30,000 copies, and Northup strived to help other enslaved people be freed over the next decade. Sadly, his own story has an uncertain and mysterious postscript. In 1863, he travelled to the state of Vermont to help free slaves, whereupon he disappeared. Little was known about what happened next.

  For the film adaptation of 12 Years a Slave, Cumberbatch was cast as Ford, one of Northup’s slave owners. The character was meant to have a little more of a conscience than some of his contemporaries, but he was still presiding over a plantation ‘in which brutality reigns untrammelled’. Having read the memoir, and other relevant books for research with titles including Cultivation and Culture and We Lived in a Little Cabin in the Yard, he flew to New Orleans to join a cast which included Chiwetel Ejiofor (as Northup), Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt and Paul Giamatti, but he was still familiarising himself with America. ‘I feel slightly terrified about the heat, and about being a day player because it’s far harder to hit the ground running, but it’ll be fascinating.’

  Several scenes in the film would be unsparing in how they depicted the conditions under which Northup and others suffered. Steve McQueen, born in London to Grenadian parents, was unapologetic about the brutality of his adaptation. ‘My responsibility is this: either I’m making a film about slavery or I’m not. It was mental and physical torture, and people have to remember why I as an individual am sitting here today – I’m here because members of my family went through slavery. Fact.’

  Another of Cumberbatch’s projects to be filmed in the United States was another adaptation. August: Osage County had been a Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning stage drama written by Tracy Letts, and transferred to the screen with a cast that included Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep. Centred round the family of an alcoholic father (Chris Cooper), even while it was being made, it was already being talked about as a possible Oscar winner in 2014. Cumberbatch, who would co-star as Charles Aiken, had first met Meryl Streep at the Golden Globes. Star-struck, he found it surreal to discover that she was a Sherlock fanatic, as was Ted Danson. He was then given some advice on ‘how to handle all this’… from George Clooney. It just didn’t seem real – hanging around superstars he had been watching on the screen since childhood. He would wobble and freeze during one scene of August: Osage County: ‘We had one scene around the table with Meryl, and I just couldn’t act. I was in awe of her. She is spellbinding to watch.’ The film clearly had potential to win many awards, the first coming in October 2013 at the Hollywood Film Awards, in which it won the Ensemble Acting prize. More prizes seemed sure to come its way.

  * * *

  Benedict Cumberbatch had begun a hectic 2013 with yet another film shoot, one which would open before either August: Osage County or 12 Years a Slave. The Fifth Estate was to be the second Cumberbatch film with a connection to Steven Spielberg, whose DreamWorks company were making it. He had landed the part in October 2012. It would focus on the controversial exploits of the Australian Julian Assange, who had founded the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in 2006, but since June 2012 had been living under sanctuary at the Ecuador Embassy in London in the light of two controversies. At the time of writing, he remains a wanted man in Sweden for sexually assaulting two women, while the US authorities are also still trying to extradite him for leaking hundreds of confidential and classified documents on his website for public consumption, material which had originated from military and international government sources.

  The Fifth Estate was based on a book called Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, written by the hacker Daniel Domscheit-Berg. James McAvoy was originally slated to play him, until filming commitments on the X Men film, Days of Future Past, made him pull out. He was replaced by Daniel Bruhl, who had risen to prominence in the Quentin Tarantino 2009 movie, Inglourious Basterds.

  Filming on The Fifth Estate began in early 2013 in Iceland, where WikiLeaks had been launched, seven years earlier. The day before the cameras started rolling, Cumberbatch received a lengthy email from the man he was playing: Julian Assange himself. ‘It was a very considered, thorough, charming and intelligent account of why he thought it was morally wrong for me to be part of something he thought was going to be damaging in real terms, not just to perceptions but to the reality of the outcome for himself. He characterised himself as a political refugee, and with [Bradley] Manning awaiting trial, and other supporters of WikiLeaks who have been detained or might be awaiting detention, and the organisation itself – all of that being under threat if I took part in this film.’

  In his letter to Cumberbatch, Assange had described the book that the filmmakers had chosen to adapt as ‘deceitful’ and ‘toxic’: ‘I believe it will distort events and subtract from public understanding. It does not seek to simplify, clarify or distil the truth, but rather it seeks to bury it.’ He went on to say that although he believed the actor was ‘a decent person, who would not naturally wish to harm good people in dire situations’, nonetheless Cumberbatch would be ‘used, as a hired gun, to assume the appearance of the truth in order to assassinate it. In the end, you are a jobbing actor who gets paid to follow the script, no matter how debauched.’

  Cumberbatch stood firm and shot back an email of his own, stressing the film was furthering a debate and not casting judgement. ‘This is not documentary, this is not a legally admissible piece of evidence… It’s a starting point, that should both provoke and entertain…’ The claim that he was a ‘hired gun’ especially stung him, though: ‘He accuses me of being a “hired gun” as if I am an easily bought cipher for right-wing propaganda. Not only do I NOT operate in a moral vacuum but this was not a pay day for me at all. I’ve worked far less hard for more financial reward.’ Cumberbatch had been driven by integrity, not by celebrity or money, to work on The Fifth Estate, but he still acknowledged that the correspondence with Assange had made him truly analyse his motives for accepting the lead role in the first place. ‘It gave me
real cause for concern… it galvanised me into addressing why I was doing this movie.’

  But he believed his motives were good ones: he believed in civil liberties, democracy, and the rights of the general public to question those in charge. He had also felt compelled to explore the controversial character of Assange: ‘I wanted to create a three-dimensional portrait of a man far more maligned in the tabloid press than he is in our film, to remind people that he is not just the weird, white-haired Australian dude wanted in Sweden, hiding in an embassy behind Harrods.’

  The film’s director Bill Condon, previously at the helm of two Twilight movies, agreed it was a discursive piece of work about the impact of WikiLeaks, and how information was spread in the digital age: ‘This film won’t claim any long view authority on its subject, or attempt any final judgment. We want to explore the complexities and challenges of transparency in the information age and, we hope, enliven and enrich the conversations WikiLeaks has already provoked.’

  As ever, Cumberbatch was striving to understand Assange’s qualities and failings in a rounded character study, rather than branding him good or evil. He elaborated: ‘I said, listen, this film is going to explore what you achieved, what brought you to the world’s attention, in a way that I think is nothing but positive. I’m not acting in a moral vacuum. Whatever happens, I want to give as much complexity and understanding of you as I can.’