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Benedict Cumberbatch: King of all he surveys

The Sherlock star is the BBC’s new Richard III. It’s a role he was born to play.

A few weeks ago, Benedict Cumberbatch and his wife, Sophie Hunter, attended a talk by President Obama on his visit to the UK.

“We were right beside the press pack, and there were people there with telephoto lenses. When they realised that Barack was going to be another five minutes, the whole lot just went wumph, onto me, onto the side of my face. I was, like, ‘How many times can you take a photograph of a not particularly attractive profile — again and again?’ I mean, thank God Sophie was there, so that kind of drew the eye in the photographs, as it always should. But it was just embarrassing.”

Afterwards, Cumberbatch met the leader of the free world, one of the few men left who is probably more famous than he is. (In 2014, they both appeared in Time magazine’s 100 most influential people list.) No matter how you slice it, Benedict Cumberbatch, the man with a surname that sounds like a fart in a bath, the man who looks like Sid the Sloth from Ice Age (both his descriptions), has somehow become a whopping great multimedia macro-millennial megastar.

A good portion of his fame is that rare thing - deserved. The first two films of the BBC’s new Bard-buster, The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, contain but a few glimpses of Cumberbatch as Richard III. A few is all that is required. Although he is surrounded by pretty much every British acting grandee who didn’t make it into the first Hollow Crown series four years ago - Judi Dench, Hugh Bonneville, Sophie Okonedo, Michael Gambon - it is Cumberbatch who is magnetic. He walks off with scenes like a pickpocket nabbing wallets in a crowd, whistling a ditty.

In part, it’s because only Cumberbatch’s Richard gets to break the fourth wall, suddenly turning to camera to deliver his soliloquies straight to the viewer, not unlike Francis Urquhart in the original House of Cards. But his performance across all three films is a masterclass in restraint, showing Richard III as a work-in-progress, drip-feeding subtle modulations that together build up a portrait of how a young man became one of history’s most notorious psychopaths. Then, in Richard III, the final film, Cumberbatch is unleashed, oozing malice and “determined to prove a villain”.

“I was fascinated by the idea of getting to play that trajectory - most actors playing Richard don’t,” says the actor, who turns 40 this summer. “He’s someone who’s bought up in a family of Kennedy-esque Adonises. [Sam Troughton plays Clarence; Geoffrey Streatfeild, Edward IV; Adrian Dunbar is their father, Richard of York.] These are really physical, beautiful specimens, and he’s this deformed, crippled child. He’s somebody who was a real outsider, a black sheep, not malignant, but somebody who had to find his own pathway through - and it was a political one. He was the smartest of the group in many ways.”

That arc comes packaged in films that are as bloody and precipitous as Game of Thrones, a series that is itself (loosely) based on the Wars of the Roses. “It’s the brutalisation of medieval warfare. Richard witnesses his brother’s death close at hand, and his father’s summary execution, and his vendettas spring out of those. He’s feminised and rejected and belittled, and all of this in a male-dominated world - it creates a ticking bomb that starts very early on.”

The Henry VI plays are some of Shakespeare’s least-loved works. Yet the trilogy and the ensuing Richard III were his first commercial successes, and arguably they make much more sense repackaged as 21st-century television. The first two films work almost as soap opera - a rolling maul of feuding both between two families, York and Lancaster, and within those families. Cumberbatch doesn’t appear at all in the first film, and he says it’s given him some critical distance.

“As an audience member of the first one, I can say I think the genius of the adaptation is the fact that it is condensed, completely comprehensible and utterly riveting. The struggle is so sprawling at times in the actual drama that to just maintain the focus on who is who, who is on who’s side, and why, is very, very hard to do. But Shakespeare was writing for an audience that he had to keep the attention of - there had to be thrills and spills, but also just this slow development that obviously the Elizabethan ear could take.

“Modern TV audiences are hungry for that, too. We’ve seen it in every episodic domestic drama, whether it’s The Sopranos - talk about feuding families - or sagas like The Godfather. You could have spun these three films out to 14 episodes.”

The Henry films, he adds, feel politically relevant now more than ever. “Everything in the current politics is there in those plays. It is about power and all the things that are intermeshed with it. You have PR spin, backroom operations, true intents being shown, moments of utter vulnerability, grandstanding. You have xenophobia, you have jingoistic pride, you have more inclusive pro-European-style love. It chimes with everything that’s going on with America and everything that’s going on with the debates in this country about what our status is as a nation.”

Words tumble out of Cumberbatch - he’ll often catch himself and apologise for “rabbiting on”, or mention that he could “talk for hours”, but had better not. The energy you get from him on screen comes with a slight nervous tension in person - born, I suspect, of encounters with telephoto lenses like the one he mentioned before the Obama talk.

We meet at London’s Soho Hotel during a screening of his Richard III where he is the star turn for a group of “opinion-formers”, including MPs and Tony Hall, the director-general of the BBC. When his drink arrives - an elaborate cocktail that looks like a rockery in a glass - he notes the sprinkling of white powder on top and says: “That is icing sugar, I would like to stress.” Then he realises he’s made a joke of the sort that could have the comedy expunged in print and turned into a drug reference. “Oh dear. Next headline. Please don’t think of me like this.” He knows he is constantly under observation and, though he understands why, he’s still not all that comfortable with it.

Well, Ben, it’s not going away any time soon. Our meeting comes after he has hotfooted it to London from Wales, where he is currently shooting the new series of Sherlock. Before that, he was in the USA making Marvel’s Dr Strange, the first in what could be a pension-worthy never-ending superhero franchise. “Strange” seems apt - later, I ask Sam Mendes, the director whose company is producing the Hollow Crown series, why Cumberbatch is right for Richard.

“I think there’s - how can I say this? - a great intelligence, and what I would call a strange sex appeal. He’s not obviously sexy, Benedict, yet he is. I think you can say the same about Richard III. In fact, it’s necessary that he’s sexy - the play asks him to seduce not one but two women, and he talks openly about how much he considers himself to be an outsider physically, with his own appearance and how low his own self-esteem is. I thought he [Cumberbatch] would understand that.”

Among the current Brit pack laying siege to Hollywood, Cumberbatch is indeed the odd one out. He does not have the feline beauty of an Eddie Redmayne or the finesse of a Tom Hiddleston, even though he shares their good breeding. (It emerged last year that Cumberbatch is Richard III’s second cousin 16 times removed.) When you hear him talk of Richard as the black sheep in a family of perfect physical specimens, he could be talking about himself in the front row at the Oscars.

“I’ve had a career that’s not dependent on the way I look - but that is a great liberation for an actor, so I’m not really that vain about it. As myself, of course, I get a little bit of, like, ‘Oh God, I look like shit’, but as an actor, I’ve never, ever cared.” He is too smart not to see where the Richard III analogy is going. “Oh, I had a terrible childhood and I was desperately left out!” he quips.

“No, I’ve been very lucky. I think, like any teenager or adolescent, you have moments when you feel you don’t belong, but I can’t draw on a well of anxiety and difficulty. I have a great affinity for people who are struggling to find a voice in a harsh world, absolutely, but that’s not born of personal tragedy, I wouldn’t say. There’s nothing to reveal there!”

Nonetheless, he has played several outsiders in his career: asexual sociopaths, extreme intellectuals, artists and spies. “I’m not going to disown the fact that I’ve played a few outsiders, I’m not going to disown the fact that I’ve played a few intellectuals, but I’m also not going to disown the fact that I’ve played some guys next door, some pretty average Joes, people you would sit down and have a drink with in a pub. People want to do that nice neat thing of drawing a line to join up the dots. I’m just keen for that graph to bounce all over the place, so people start frowning.”

Dominic Cooke, the former artistic director of the Royal Court, who directs all three of these Hollow Crown films, says Cumberbatch’s theatre work is easily ignored: “He doesn’t just play outsiders. I saw Benedict play two shows back to back at the National. One was After the Dance, by Terence Rattigan - he was playing this quite damaged, but very formal, English man in 1939, in a play all about language and restraint. Then the next thing I saw him in was Frankenstein. For the first 20 minutes, he was butt naked, doing modern dance. Honestly, I don’t think there’s an actor in this country, or probably in the world, who could do both those things so well. That’s an amazing range of skills.”

Yet Cumberbatch wasn’t just cast as Richard III for his genius. He was cast because he is Benedict Cumberbatch, the guy from Sherlock who appears on Graham Norton; the guy adored by *Cumberbabes; the guy people compare to an otter in never-ending internet memes. He has become more than just a very good actor. The hope is that Cumberbatch might be enough of a lure to get a younger audience to watch Shakespeare. Because one criticism of The Hollow Crown has been that it spends a lot of BBC money for the delectation of a relatively small audience. It’s elitist art.

“I think that’s one of the wonderful things about casting somebody like Benedict - hopefully, he brings an audience with him,” Mendes says. “In addition to being a brilliant actor, he’s also quite well known, and he has a large television audience, along with Hiddleston and all the rest. You have to reach for that one person if you feel they’re out there, and hope that they find it. I was that person. I went to Stratford aged 14 and sat there grumbling about the school trip to The Merchant of Venice. By the time I left, I was in. I just hope that there are kids who will do the same here.”

He’s right. And if Cumberbatch, the man for whom all the world’s a stage, can’t get the kids watching Shakespeare, who can?

The Sunday Times 8.5.2016 (x)

Benedict Cumberbatch

Benedict Cumberbatch discussing 'brand' and social media at The Adobe Summit on the 30th of April 2015.