#bendict

Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan

- Star Trek: Into Darkness

the class discussion was valuable, as it helped us to identify artists who had a similar sound and genre style to our own chosen artist. In order to make our video look like a singer/songwriter music video its important we look at similar artists and see if their are patterns that emerge from their videos as it might be a recurring feature which is used by many of these artists. So by looking at other Artists who are similar we see what the typical conventions of a singer/songwriter video are and can apply these ideas to our own work.

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His half-sister, Tracy, from his mother's first marriage, was babysitting him in the middle of winter. She put a crying Benedict on the roof to calm him for a moment or two. "Then," says Cumberbatch, laughing, "she forgot about me! I mean, it was funny. She was in the kitchen with her friends and she suddenly saw the snow falling through the window..."When she ran upstairs, she found Benedict serene - teeth chattering, but still smiling, still in awe. He had to be thawed out on a radiator before his parents returned home ("I had turned blue").

  When he went to Manchester University to study drama, he had a blast - girls, drinking, clubbing. Pills? "I was a student in Manchester," he says with a laugh, by way of an answer. "But, uh, I'll take the Fifth." Yet he soon overdid it: "I got very ill in my first year. I got glandular fever. I had to calm down a bit. It was my body going, 'What the f***?'"

  He got lost while hiking with friends. Armed only with a biscuit and a piece of cheese between four of them, he remembers walking across outcrops lined with ice and down semi-frozen rivers, "nearly breaking our necks", poking yak droppings in the hope they were warm - "to see how far we could be from some kind of civilisation".

  He remembers, finally, breaking through the tree line, falling on his knees near the home of a Sherpa shepherd and "making the universal hand-to-mouth gesture of food". He remembers getting a meal of spinach and meat, and the dysentery he got straight after eating it. He remembers it as the best meal he's ever had. 

  It's not that he's rude, you understand - he's unfailingly polite, funny, generous with his time and wonderful company. It's simply that, when he begins a sentence, you're locked in for the paragraph, and if you try to interject, often he'll just keep talking while you talk.                             It is also, I think, down to a feeling he has of being misrepresented by the press, and it's only by giving the exact line, his exact position, without distraction, that he can hope not to be misquoted. 

  While filming the third series of Sherlock, meanwhile, Cumberbatch held up a piece of paper to the paparazzi hovering nearby that read: "Go photograph Egypt and show the world something important". Then, later, a four-page treatise he'd written about civil liberties regarding the Guardian and the government's attempt to muffle the paper. Yet it was the Guardian once again - this time via Marina Hyde - that stuck the boot in, referencing his class with a piece headlined, "Benedict Cumberbatch's vital mission to educate the hoi polloi".

"I was really shocked with what was going on," he says, "so I just thought, if this culture is so fixated on me, I may as well use it to ask questions. I wasn't trying to trash popular culture. I don't belittle the appetites of people who just want to see shots of Sherlock." 

Benedict Cumberbatch worries a lot. I suggest, in fact, he might worry too much.   "I know. And I am getting better at that. I remember something happening during the filming of Sherlockand someone said, 'You've got a thin skin.' And it was like, 'I've done it again. I've f***ing done it again.' I mean, I do [have a thin skin] when something is said at my expense. But I'm learning. Regret is too big a word, but I'm learning." 

And yet there is a clear and wonderful flip side to all this concern of his, which is unbelievable enthusiasm. As much as he seemingly worries about everything, he's excited and thrilled about everything else. 

He's excited about the coffee we order (the barman gets a lengthy grilling on what exactly is a flat white); by how this magazine works; by wild swimming in Hampstead Heath; by the burgers we order; even, as we leave the pub - him to stroll home, me to unlock my single-speed racer - by my bike (he recognises the make of frame, the bike nerd in me is impressed). 

    Seeing all these enthusiasms - and these are just the minor, slightly unexpected ones - I can't help but think two things.

First, the follow-through of rampant enthusiasm is often naivety, and I understand why his Sherlock co-star Martin Freeman says he's easy to "screw over" ("He's sweet and generous in an almost childlike way. I could take advantage of him playing cards"), or how Simon Pegg convinced Cumberbatch while they were filming Star Trek Into Darkness in a nuclear facility that he needed to wear a special face cream to protect him from radiation; he obliged, and even became convinced it was why he kept screwing up his lines ("Guys, I'm sorry," he said. "I've got a real headache. I think the ions were getting to me"). 

But mostly, I feel, compared with Cumberbatch, like someone going through existence with the contrast dial turned down. To him, it seems, everything is neon bright. The barbs may sting more sharply, but his sun must shine that much brighter. 

  [about sherlock]  "I've said for quite a long time I'd like him to have a different haircut. I quite like my hair being short. You know, we've been away two years, let's f*** around with his outfit, let's f*** around with his haircut, let's do something different."  Was he allowed to? "Not really, no." 

  Matthew Goode has a different take when I suggest it must be hard for Cumberbatch to -distinguish when it comes to women. "Ha ha, you know, this is a man we're talking about! Look, he's not that old, but he's coming to the end of his thirties, so he's looking [for a long-term partner]. But if he has to have a few conquests to get the right one, I'm sure that won't bother him either. I'm sure the cream of the crop will be coming towards him. He's going to enjoy himself."

As for Cumberbatch himself, he'll simply say this: "It is harder [meeting women], because people think they know more about you than they actually do. And you can't control that. You can't control perceptions of you."

  ·         [About the kidnapping experience] He remembers being taken out of the boot and being forced to crouch in the execution position. He remembers the duvet that was placed over his head, to silence the shot. He remembers thinking: "No matter how loved you are in this life, you will die alone." 

  Some of this harrowing encounter, in varying parts and in varying detail, he has recounted before. What he has not spoken about are the after-effects. He woke up the next morning, he says, and went to the balcony of the house they were staying in, which looked out to the sea. 

"And I felt the heat on my face, and I looked across and thought, 'I want to swim in that sea. I want to walk across that dune, I want to be with those people I can see playing. Every atom of me wants to be part of it. Because I'm alive.'"