Freeman was born in Aldershot on September 8, 1971, the youngest of five children after Benedict, Laura, Jamie, and Tim. His parents, Geoffrey and Philomena, divorced when he was still a toddler, and Martin went to live with his father, a naval officer. His dad died suddenly of a heart attack when Martin was 10, and the boy returned to live with his mother. “My dad’s death was no picnic,” he says, “but, when I was younger, I was hell-bent on not looking bothered by it.” A quiet child who suffered from asthma and what he calls a “dodgy leg,” Freeman was nonetheless athletic, playing football and squash; he played on the British national squash squad between the ages of 9 and 14.
Though he joined a theater troupe at age 15, he didn’t decide to become an actor until two years later. “When I was 17, I acted in a play called The Roses of Eyam, about a Derbyshire village during the Great Plague of 1666. I remember thinking I was doing quite well. It was the first time I got a lot of really positive feedback for my acting — the first time I had real confidence in myself. Acting, for me, feels like an absolute expression — a really necessary one.” He attended the Central School of Speech and Drama, and after graduation it wasn’t long before he was getting roles in both television and film. The most important role was in the TV movie Men Only, where he met Amanda Abbington.
His big break came in 2001 when he was cast as Tim Canterbury on Ricky Gervais’s groundbreaking comedy The Office. Soon viewers all over the U.K. — and across the ocean — were swooning over Tim and Dawn, watching Freeman’s trademark reactions to the antics of David Brent, Gareth, and “Big Keith.” Overnight he went from a character actor to an instantly recognizable star, but being readily identified with one specific part had a major disadvantage: the nice-guy typecasting. Before Tim, Martin could play businessmen, rapists, pimps, even a beat-boxing thug in Ali G Indahouse. But now, for all intents and purposes, in the public imagination, he was Tim Canterbury, all-round nice guy. The series wrapped in 2003, and he was already starting to get sick of it.
“When people call me an everyman they think it’s a compliment,” he told the London Evening Standard. “I want to rip their f****** eyeballs out.” As his fame grew from taking parts like Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, the you’re-just-playing-yourself misperception grew as well.
“Well, no I’m not,” he told the Guardian in 2009. “If you mean I look a bit like him and I sound a bit like him — yeah, that’s because I’m playing him and it didn’t say ‘He’s Somalian’ on the script, otherwise I would have tried an accent. If the script says, ‘Guy in his 30s, my generation, lives in England,’ what am I going to do? Start acting like I’m half-lizard? There’s no point, because no one wants to see it.”
In 2014, when he was cast in the brilliant television series Fargo playing the unfortunate Lester Nygaard, he was faced with the question once again. “I don’t think other actors are asked all the time about the similarities between their roles,” he said. “I don’t think Ben [Cumberbatch] or Daniel Craig are asked that. I think it stems from my so-called perceived approachability … I’m a good actor; I can pretend.”
Dear journalists: please stop asking him this question.
After The Office, Freeman gave a critically acclaimed performance in Love Actually as a stand-in body double who’s shyly trying to ask the actress he’s fake-banging on film out on a date. He also appeared in the first two movies in Simon Pegg’s Cornetto Trilogy — Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz — and starred in the final one, The World’s End (which may have been an inspiration for John Watson’s stag night on Sherlock). He’s won a BAFTA and an Emmy for his role as John Watson, as well an Emmy nom for Fargo, and his lead role in The Hobbit has made him an international superstar.
Benedict Cumberbatch, for one, is very aware of Freeman’s astonishing talents. “He’s extraordinary,” he says. “I honestly felt myself get better as an actor playing scenes opposite him — he has a brilliant level of humanity. We all know how funny he can be from his work on The Office, but he can also play so much pathos — it’s an unsung talent of his that’s often clouded by his Office fame.”
One thing that drew Freeman to Sherlock was that he saw it as the perfect mix of comedy and drama, which is usually a marker of the best shows. “There is great comedy in The Sopranos,” he says, “and there is great pathos in Laurel and Hardy. I think because, with comedy, the reason I like doing [Sherlock], it’s not a new toy for me where I really want to flex that muscle and be funny. There are great funny moments in Sherlock but my instinct, especially because people think I am funny, is to always play against it and get rid of laughs. I like being straight. I want variation. I want to have my cake and eat it. Even in The Office, which I think is extremely funny, I was playing the straight man. Ricky Gervais’s David Brent gets most of the quotes. I don’t believe in hogging — the story has to be in charge.”
As his fame grew, Freeman, like his Sherlock co-star, valued his personal life even more. He and Abbington have two children, and when he tired of fans ringing his North London doorbell at all hours hoping “Tim” would open the door, the two of them moved out of the city. Despite being offered bigger and bigger roles, he often hesitates if he thinks the job will take him away from his family for long periods of time. “My main priority in any job is when is the soonest I can get back to the three people I love most in the world,” he says. “I even ummed and ahhed over The Hobbit.” While he readily admits to being a grump, he’s also a very hands-on father when he’s at home. “It goes without saying that you’re going to love your kids, but what you’re not expecting is wanting to kill everybody in your house,” he jokes. “I’m fortunate in that Amanda is generally a slightly nicer person than I am. If it were purely up to me, my kids would probably be vegetarian Catholic Marxists.”
When the second season of Sherlock was airing, Freeman and Abbington joined Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss at Gatiss’s house to watch “The Hounds of Baskerville.” Afterwards they asked Abbington to come out to the kitchen to discuss the part of Mary. She thought they wanted her advice, and then they told her they wanted it to be her. “I probably got quite emotional at that point,” she says. But the opportunity to work with her husband, thus meaning more time together, was irresistible. “I think Martin and I bounce off each other very well. He is one of my favorite actors. He’s so easy to work with and so creative. He brings something different to every single take. He is so on top of his lines that he can dig down and find a different angle every time. That really keeps you on your toes. Both characters go on a wonderful journey, and to do that with Martin was such fun.”
Her main hope for the character was not to be a third wheel to Sherlock and John, but instead to complement their relationship. “Ben and Martin have real chemistry, and I had to hold my own in the scenes with them,” she says. “It was daunting — not necessarily to come between them, but to arrive as another dynamic.” As soon as Mary told John she liked Sherlock, the fans knew they’d have very little to worry about.
One of the first scenes they shot that season was where Sherlock revealed himself to John in the restaurant. “It was slightly surreal,” says Abbington, “because it did feel like he’d been away, and [John] hadn’t seen him. It was so charged, that scene. When John sees Sherlock for the first time, and then looks at Mary, it’s that look of ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now.’ Both Martin and Ben pitched it so beautifully, especially Martin. In that one look, you see those two years of hurt. It was heartbreaking.”
While Freeman plays coy with the are-they-or-aren’t-they-married aspect of their real-life relationship, Abbington is clear that they aren’t, and that it was very strange to film the wedding episode of Sherlock when they hadn’t actually had one themselves. “Maybe one day we will,” she says. “It sometimes does [come up], ‘Should we do it?’ I think we will, eventually. Our children are saying now, ‘Mummy, you should get married.’ Th
ey know we’re not. Especially my son, who’s going, ‘Please, Mama, please be married.’ Maybe we’ll do it in Italy.”
A self-declared homebody who likes to stay in and listen to music or watch a movie on DVD with his family, Freeman is one of the cool kids who prefers the comforts of home to the wildness of international stardom. “Some people have that roar in their head, but I’m not sure I ever did,” he says. “That live-fast-die-young thing. No one wants it really — Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin — it’s not good. I want to live with Amanda till I’m 70.”
To truly wrap your head around BBC’s Sherlock, one must go to the source material written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat are such Doyle fanboys (they’ve been reading the books since they were in short pants), it’s often astonishing to find all of the little nods the writers slip into the individual scripts.
Born in 1859 in Edinburgh, Doyle was enrolled in a prep school by age nine, and being away at boarding school meant a treasure trove of letters home to his mother, Mary, whom he referred to as “the Mam.” These letters, finally opened to the public in 1997 by the Doyle family, offer extraordinary insight into the complicated man who’s as fascinating as the detective he created. Doyle studied to become a medical doctor, and at the University of Edinburgh Medical School he met the larger-than-life Joseph Bell, a professor who had a huge impact on Doyle’s life. At 39 years old, Bell was still rather young, but he was, according to Doyle biographer Russell Miller, “already a legend among medical students as a master of observation, logic, and deduction, possessing almost clairvoyant powers of diagnosis.” Bell taught the students how to diagnose a patient without asking them a single question, instead simply observing the patient and concluding from those observations what might be wrong. He believed that while the patient could provide information that was invisible to the doctor, there was a wealth of information available if one only observed properly. He used a trick in class to emphasize the importance of noticing small details: he passed around a container of horrible-tasting liquid, asking the students to stick their fingers in it and taste it. In the name of fairness, he did it first, which forced each student to do it after him. Only after the container made its way throughout the classroom, much to the discomfort of each student’s tongue, did he confess that he had stuck his index finger into the container but sucked on his middle finger. If they’d only paid close attention, they would have saved their tastebuds the horrible experience they’d just undergone.
Bell’s methods stuck with Doyle, and after he graduated he opened his own practice in Southsea. He began publishing fiction on the side, and in 1885 he married Louise Hawkins (whom he referred to as Touie). Two years later, Touie wrote to Doyle’s sister Lottie, “Arthur has written another book, a little novel about 200 pages long, called A Study in Scarlet. It went off last night.”
Doyle had long been a fan of the work of Émile Gaboriau, known as a pioneer of modern detective fiction, and Edgar Allan Poe’s Chevalier Dupin, and had longed to create a detective character of his own. He wrote in his memoir, “I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details. If he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganised business to something nearer to an exact science …” It was in this characterization of Joseph Bell that Doyle hit upon what would set his detective fiction apart from everything that had come before it: Sherlock Holmes would, according to Miller, “solve his cases by pure deduction and not, as was commonplace in popular detective fiction, because of an absurdly convenient coincidence which, [Doyle] said, ‘struck me as not a fair way of playing the game.’”
The first Sherlock Holmes novel was not an overnight success, even though it was a brilliant introduction to the character who was, as Orson Welles once put it, “the world’s most famous man who never was.” It was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887 for a one-time author fee of £25, with no ongoing royalties. (One can only imagine the income that Doyle and his heirs have lost in the years since its publication.) Despite the tepid public reaction to A Study in Scarlet, Doyle published the second Holmes novel, The Sign of Four, in 1889, and in 1891 Holmes short stories began appearing in the Strand. Excellent reviews for The Sign of Four led to an increased readership, and the new enthusiasm and public demand for more stories led to Doyle closing his practice to become a full-time writer; he was making more money through the stories than he made in his practice. The paltry payment he’d been given for A Study in Scarlet is less difficult to accept when one realizes that by the turn of the century Doyle was the highest-paid author in the world.
Critics praised the ingenious storylines: Doyle could write about Mormonism, then switch to a story involving the Indian Mutiny and an evil pygmy dwarf who picks off his victims with a blowpipe. What audiences winced at, however, was the revelation in The Sign of Four that Holmes was a cocaine addict. At the time, cocaine was not perceived as being as nefarious as it is now; in fact, it was regularly used in hospitals as an anesthetic (along with heroin), and one could obtain it with little to no hassle. But still, according to Miller, “Some readers were appalled that a man of Sherlock Holmes’s intellect and strength of character would inject himself with drugs, but Conan Doyle always wanted to distance his detective from the plodding image of a policeman: languid, bohemian, aesthetic, eccentric, Holmes viewed the science of criminal investigation as an art form and, as an artist, why should he not enjoy the pleasures of the needle?”
Doyle wrote each short story in under a week with almost no research (which accounts for the vast number of glaring inconsistencies between them). “A Scandal in Bohemia,” where Holmes is faced with a woman as brilliant as he is and must try to stop a royal scandal, was a smash hit upon publication. Doyle’s editor, Herbert Greenhough Smith, described what it was like receiving the manuscripts for the first time: “Here, to an editor jaded with wading through reams of impossible stuff, comes a gift from Heaven, a godsend in the shape of the story that brought a gleam of happiness into the despairing life of this weary editor.”
Doyle suggested to the Strand that they use Walter Paget, who worked with several magazines at the time, for the Holmes illustrations, but the art director couldn’t recall his first name, so he simply sent the request to “Mr. Paget.” It fell into the hands of Walter’s brother Sidney, who took the job. Illustrating the story “Silver Blaze” (which ultimately became the first story in the second collection, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes), Paget drew the detective in a deerstalker hat and a long cape, which have now become synonymous with Sherlock Holmes (despite the fact that Doyle never mentions either accoutrement in the stories).
By 1892, people were lining up at the newsagents waiting for a new story to come out, and Doyle was baffled and annoyed. He had wanted Sherlock Holmes to be a one-off character, not one that he would have to continue writing about for the rest of his life. A Study in Scarlet was written over a three-week period when Doyle was 27 years old, and by the time he was in his early 30s, he wanted to be finished with the great detective so he could focus on his science fiction and historical fiction. In a letter to his mother, he revealed that he’d decided to kill the character, and despite her pleading with him not to, he began working on that final story. In a letter in 1893 he wrote to her, “I am in the middle of the last Holmes Story, after which the gentleman vanishes, never never to reappear. I am weary of his name.”
And so, later that year, he killed off his greatest character in a fight to the death with the evil Professor Moriarty (a mathematician, a career choice inspired by Doyle having detested mathematics as a boy), as both of them tumbled over the great Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem.” The story was published just before Christmas, and readers were devastated and went into mourning, some young men going so far as to wear black crepe mourning bands on their hats or arms. For Doyle’s part, he simply wrote in his journal, “Killed Holmes.”
The detective was dead, and Doyle tried to move on with his life and his writing. His father, who had been a severe alcoholic and was institutionalized at the time, died, and then Doyle’s wife, Touie, contracted tuberculosis. Doyle began traveling, first becoming a war correspondent in Egypt, then in South Africa during the Boer War. Upon his return, he published some historical novels and continued to take care of his wife as she battled TB.
In 1897, he met and fell in love with another woman, Jean Leckie, but both vowed that despite their love, they would not act upon it until Touie had died. (Neither one of them could have foreseen that Touie was going to hang on for another nine years.) Leckie became a regular visitor at the home and got to know Doyle’s two children, Mary and Kingsley. Doyle’s letters to his mother during this long period express his passion for Jean, his love and devotion to Touie, his frustration at the situation, and even some regret. It’s unclear if Touie knew about Doyle and Jean’s true feelings for each other, though it’s likely she did.
In 1899, actor William Gillette portrayed Sherlock Holmes for the first time on the London stage. The play, written by Gillette with the approval and aid of Doyle, was an overnight success. Doyle had been hesitant at first, and turned down previous suggestions of putting Holmes onstage. “I am well convinced,” he wrote in the early 1890s, “that Holmes is not fitted for dramatic representation. His reasonings and deductions (which are the whole point of the character) would become an intolerable bore upon the stage.” The very first time Doyle met Gillette, however, Gillette stepped off the train in a cape and deerstalker, and began to deduce that Arthur Conan Doyle was indeed the famous writer of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle was instantly charmed, and Gillette looked exactly the way Doyle had always pictured Holmes in his head.
Investigating Sherlock Page 3
