Benedict Cumberbatch (19 page)

Cumberbatch’s co-star in
Sherlock
, Martin Freeman, had been cast in the role of Bilbo Baggins early in 2011, but feared that five months of work out in Wellington would clash with the second series of
Sherlock
, back in the UK. However, after the first seven weeks of
Hobbit
filming, Jackson allowed Freeman to fly back for Watson duties, concentrating for the time being on scenes which would not feature him. Even so, it was indicative of what a worldwide splash
Sherlock
had made, that a television series with a fraction of the budget of
The Hobbit
could borrow back its lead actor. For Jackson, they had no choice but to revise the schedule, simply because they had the Bilbo Baggins they wanted. ‘We stopped shooting for six weeks,’ he explained. ‘We didn’t have anyone else we wanted for Bilbo. If you don’t get that casting right, the film is simply not going to work, no matter how much you spend.’

It was at the BAFTA Television Awards of May 2011 when Freeman let slip that Benedict would be joining him in Middle Earth. Cumberbatch was initially slow to confirm the nature of his involvement, but eventually revealed that he would be the voice of Smaug the dragon. His addition to the vast cast list came at around the same time that the Australian comedian Barry Humphries, aka Dame Edna
Everage, was also signed up to play the Goblin King. Cumberbatch and Freeman had become firm friends on
Sherlock
. Now they would also be working together on the other side of the world, and it was in January 2012 that Cumberbatch made his first visit to the
Hobbit
set.

Working on
The Hobbit
was a great honour for Cumberbatch. The Tolkien book had been a childhood favourite, ‘the first imaginary landscape I had in my head’. His father Timothy had read the story to him when he was seven. ‘I’d say, “Just do Gollum, what would Gollum say now, Dad?” And he’d do the voice. He was brilliant at it.’

In
The Hobbit
, he would play two roles. One was a necromancer. The other was Smaug, a huge, sinister
fire-breathing
dragon, hundreds of years old. As Smaug, though, he would hardly encounter his fellow cast members, as this was one of the many sections of the film which would use Peter Jackson’s ingenious motion capture techniques. He would stand before a green screen, while wearing a suit covered in raised dots. ‘It’s a sort of grey all-in-one jumpsuit,’ he summarised, ‘with a skullcap, a Madonna headset and Aboriginal-like face paint. You feel like a tit in all that gear, but Peter is so lovely, you soon forget.’

It has often been assumed that, as with Andy Serkis (aka Gollum) in the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy and
The Hobbit
, Cumberbatch’s involvement in
The Hobbit
was simply to provide the voice for Smaug and the Necromancer. Not so. While his physical likeness would not be present onscreen, the physicality and body movements of his characters would
be. ‘My voice, my motions,’ he told
New York Magazine
. ‘I worked my ass off to create that dragon.’

Ahead of the motion-capture work on
The Hobbit
, he prepared for life as a dragon by researching animation, and by visiting the Komodo dragons housed at London Zoo to analyse their posture and movement. ‘They have some amazing ones. Snakes too. So I’ve been going there to see how the skeleton moves differently, what the head
movements
are like.’ Playing the Creature on stage in
Frankenstein
(‘very full-on and corporeal’) had helped him to inhabit an entity between man and beast but in the end, he found he just had to seek inspiration from inside his own mind, and discard any inhibitions. ‘It’s very freeing,’ he told
Total Film
magazine in 2012, ‘once you put the suit on, and the sensors. I’ve never felt less encumbered, actually. And you have to be. You have to be free. You just have to lose your shit on a carpeted floor, in a place that looks a little bit like a mundane government building. It was just me as well, with four static cameras, and all the sensors.’

After all that, the Weta workshop crew would ‘work their magic’ with special effects to develop his physical movements. But the spirit of the actor would remain. ‘As an actor, you can do weight loss, weight gain, put on silly noses, crazy accents, move like a dragon, inviting people to look at the fireworks and admire how different you’re being,’ said Cumberbatch in late 2011. ‘But with acting like that [i.e. Smaug], it’s all about look-at-me, when what you should be doing is helping the audience care about the person they’re watching.’

As
The Hobbit
film grew from one to two movies, and
finally to a trilogy, opening at consecutive Christmases from 2012–14, Benedict Cumberbatch would be needed more and more in New Zealand, and would fly back and forth for further motion capture sessions, and if time allowed, a spot of his latest passion of skydiving. Not that there was much spare time these days for one of the most in-demand actors in the business.

‘I’m playing a really big game now,’ said Cumberbatch of his move into blockbuster movies. ‘I’m going into studios to meet executives and heads of production, and asking: “What have you got on your slate?”. And they say, “This and this and this.” And you know there are five actors ahead of you who have first refusal, so there will be fallow periods now. But I can’t afford another five months in the theatre, or another big TV gig. I think it’s time. I don’t have any dependants. I’m interested in just playing the game a little bit, because it gives you a lot more choice. It gives you power. If you become indispensable to that machine it gives you a greater variety, which is what I always wanted.’

But then he always intended his career to last, rather than make a splash too early and then find the parts drying up – ‘I’ve never wanted to be an adolescent flash in the pan.’ He cited Brad Pitt, his co-star in
12 Years a Slave
, or George Clooney, as the kind of actors whose privileged position in film he aspired to: ‘They’re great people to emulate as a business model.’ Those who get film screen net – in other words, a share of the box-office receipts. ‘There are about five people in the world who can do that.’

A
s Benedict Cumberbatch headed out to Ibiza in July 2013 to officiate at the civil partnership of his friends, Seth Cummings and Rob Rinder, he prepared himself for an autumn in which several of his projects were ready and waiting to hit our screens. At the Toronto International Film Festival in early September, he would feature in no fewer than three pictures.
The Fifth Estate
would open in Britain a month later, with
12 Years a Slave
and
August: Osage Country
set to follow. November brought a short film called
Little Favour
(available through iTunes, and co-starring Colin Salmon and Nick Moran), while Christmas time would bring
The Desolation of Smaug
, the second part of Peter Jackson’s
Hobbit
trilogy. ‘I had a really busy year last year, and the beginning of this year,’ Cumberbatch said in autumn 2013, ‘and all of them are coming home to roost in
the same year, which is quite extraordinary.’ And as if that wasn’t enough Benedict Cumberbatch, there was still some unfinished business at St Bart’s Hospital …

After the double whammy of
Sherlock
’s second series and
Parade’s End
, Cumberbatch had been showered with accolades at awards ceremonies: the Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Actor in Los Angeles, Virgin Media Award for Best TV Actor, a Specsavers Crime Thriller Award for
Sherlock
, and the Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Actor (for
Parade’s End
, one of four gongs the series picked up at that ceremony). He seemed somewhat more bemused when the
Sun
’s readers voted him Sexiest Man, beating David Beckham and One Direction to the title two years running. ‘I am very flattered. I don’t know about being the sexiest man in the world. I am barely the sexiest man in my flat, and I’m only the guy living there.’

Even when he lost out on a prize, there was sometimes a feeling that he had been robbed. When Dominic West won a deserved BAFTA Award for the powerful television film
Appropriate Adult
(about the lives of murderers Fred and Rose West), he professed to feeling surprised. ‘Even my sister was rooting for Benedict,’ he announced from the stage. Other nominations of note for Cumberbatch’s acting included the National Television Awards, the Golden Globes, plus the 2012 Primetime Emmy Awards, for which his work on ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’ earned him an Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie nomination. The other esteemed nominees were Woody Harrelson (
Game Change
), Clive Owen (
Hemingway & Gelhorn
), Idris Elba (
Luther
)
and two of the leads of
Hatfields & McCoys
: Bill Paxton and Kevin Costner. Owen, Elba and Cumberbatch were far from being the only British nominees at the 2012 Emmys, though. Armando Iannucci and Simon Blackwell’s political sitcom
Veep
was much touted in the comedy category,
Homeland
’s Damian Lewis (Outstanding Lead Actor), and the inevitable nominations for Julian Fellowes’
Downton Abbey
and its lead actor, Hugh Bonneville.

It may have seemed that Cumberbatch should have won more of his categories, but because
Sherlock
and
Parade’s End
were not star vehicles but ambitious ensemble pieces where he was cast in a central role, it felt that the successes of the series were also significant. Both series received numerous prizes, both at home and internationally. In 2012,
Parade’s End
triumphed in four categories: Best Drama Series, Best Actor (Cumberbatch), Best Actress (Rebecca Hall), plus a Writer’s Award for Sir Tom Stoppard.

When
Sherlock
co-creator Steven Moffat won a Special Achievement Award at BAFTA in 2012 for his work both on that series and
Doctor Who
, Cumberbatch helped pay tribute to the man who allowed him to bring Sherlock to life. Moffat, in his view, was ‘a word machine. His name is a byword for quality family entertainment.’

Elsewhere, Cumberbatch had been involved in two consecutive victories of Best TV Drama at the South Bank Sky Arts Awards –
Sherlock
in 2012,
Parade’s End
the year after. Plus, at the end of 2012,
Sherlock
was voted the Television Show of the Year in a
Radio Times
poll, beating the likes of
Homeland, Twenty Twelve
and
The Thick of It
.
Such was his standing in the film and theatre fraternity that in early 2013, he was appointed as part of a jury alongside the likes of Kevin Macdonald and Sam Mendes in a vote for the BAFTA Rising Star Award. The shortlist comprised Juno Temple, Andrea Riseborough, Elizabeth Olsen, Alicia Vikander and (the only male nominee) Suraj Sharma.

When it came to his own attitude to awards, though, Cumberbatch insisted that while it was nice to be recognised, and undoubtedly nice to win, prizes could never be the main reason for entering his profession. Indeed, he denied that he was a competitive person. ‘You have to be a little bit, for acting roles, but you try to kid yourself they are not competition, otherwise it drives you mad.’

There was never really much mystery about whether there would be a third series of
Sherlock
. Within minutes of series two finishing in January 2012, Steven Moffat tweeted the following: ‘Of course there’s going to be a third series – it was commissioned at the same time as the second. Gotcha!’ But audiences faced an agonising two-year wait, partly down to the hectic work schedules of both stars and writers. The huge popularity of
Sherlock
in the first place had made Cumberbatch and Freeman bankable and sought-after performers in international cinema. As a result, it was a challenge for Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss (themselves busy men) to clear space in everyone’s diary in order to make series three. ‘It’s a problem by accident and design,’ Moffat
told the
Radio Times
. ‘We have two of the biggest film stars in the world playing the leads in our show. But they seem to like doing it and we hope we can hang on to them for a bit.’

Almost inevitably, some of the cast and crew would not be able to return. For a time, it looked as if Paul McGuigan, director of most of the first six episodes, would be back. ‘It feels like we all belong to it,’ he said. ‘As a small group we always challenge each other.’ But in March 2013, just before shooting was due to begin, it was announced that he had projects over in North America. One was an adaptation of
Frankenstein
, the other a new biopic about Brian Epstein, the original manager in the 1960s of the Beatles and Cilla Black, who died in 1967 at the age of just thirty-two. The film would be called
The Man Who
, and would be co-produced by Tom Hanks.

Nor would James Moriarty, aka Andrew Scott, be returning to
Sherlock
. He had bowed out in the final scenes of series two during the St Bart’s rooftop confrontation with Holmes. ‘I don’t think there could have been any better exit for a character like that,’ he said. He was well aware that the potency and terror with Moriarty lay in making his appearances sparing. To have him coming back again and again risked making the character stale or even a pantomime villain of a figure. There were only so many occasions a truly evil persona could re-appear and not become over-familiar. And so Scott moved on, soon gravitating to a Channel 4 drama called
Dates
.

So just how had Sherlock Holmes survived the fall from the roof of St Bart’s? All sorts of weird and wonderful
theories had been circulating. Maybe something or someone else had fallen off the roof – a dummy, by any chance? Perhaps when Holmes fell, he had somehow landed safely. Possibly there was a doppelgänger of Sherlock, or was Moriarty (already shot) disguised as him? Or was John Watson hallucinating, due to taking the Baskerville drug (a hangover from the previous story)?

It was, insisted a mischievous Steven Moffat, none of these possibilities. He said there was something else that no one seemed to have noticed: ‘It’s something Sherlock did that was out of character, but which nobody has picked up on.’ No trick, no cheat, it was a genuine solution to the mystery, but Moffat wondered if the millions of potential Sherlocks watching the show around the world might solve it ahead of the third series airing. ‘My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare’s day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today, you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.’ And by now, it was quite an audience. The BBC had sold the first two series to a staggering 234 territories around the world, from Australia and the US to Iran and Kazakhstan.

Certainly, no one on the production was giving very much away. Everyone was keeping mum about what would happen next. Not that they were much more clued-up anyway. ‘Even we are kept in the dark about the scripts now,’ explained Martin Freeman. ‘At the end of the last series, neither Benedict nor I knew what was going to happen afterwards.’ About all he would say was that
Sherlock
had obviously
faked his own death, and given the title of their continuing series, that was a given. The mystery was how he had done so. The fanbase was feverishly waiting for the answer. But that’s how it should be, argued Cumberbatch. The public didn’t really want to know the answer before the next episode. ‘It’s not paranoia, it’s not absurd control. It’s about giving the audience what they secretly want. Like a kid with a box of chocolates, once you’ve eaten them all you feel sick.’

What was promised for series three was a deepening of Sherlock’s character. If not quite maturing, he might be becoming more humane. ‘It’s about him coming to terms with the fact that he can do a better job if he has a little bit of morality, feeling and emotion,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘and to be able to play with those things without necessarily being taken over by them.’ But ultimately, Sherlock would still be driven by the attitude that his life was about a game. ‘It’s very apparent in the books that his glee and his joy comes at the beginning of the case and when he’s solved it. The game is on. He’s an animal on the scent.’

It was revealed that once again, the third series would consist of three feature-length episodes. It would open with ‘The Empty Hearse’, an appropriate choice as it referenced Conan Doyle’s
The Adventure of the Empty House
, the story that brought Sherlock back from the dead in 1903. But the Sherlock team would be mixing the traditional with the contemporary, as ever. The other two stories were announced as ‘The Sign of Three’, in which Watson would meet the love of his life, and ‘His Last Vow’, about which very little is known at the time of writing.

There would be new villains too. During the shoot, ardent fans spotted a new arch-enemy, Charles Augustus Magnussen. The actor playing him was Lars Mikkelsen, the lead in the cult Danish crime drama serial,
The Killing
.

Filming for the third series began in earnest in March 2013, with locations including Bristol, Cardiff and Cheltenham. Occasionally, slivers of information would enter the public domain, as in April when the production was back on the roof at St Bart’s Hospital to film the rest of the scene after Cumberbatch was seen to jump. Though the actor stood on a platform, a stunt double actually performed the jump.

The shoots in Bristol and Cheltenham had led some fans to turn up in the hope of getting to meet the stars, as well as surreptitiously taking photographs and uploading them to the Internet. Eventually, Sue Vertue had to beg them to stop. She wrote on the official Sherlock Tumblr.com blog: ‘Our London shooting schedule is punishing, and will really give us very little time to interact with you… Also… the majority of fans and indeed ourselves would REALLY appreciate it if you didn’t post pictures or spoilers or ideally our daily locations.’ By the end of the summer of 2013, the final scenes had been shot, with the finished episodes broadcast in January 2014.

As with any career, there are lots of what-ifs and curiosities in Cumberbatch’s past. He was apparently considered a strong contender for
Doctor Who
after David Tennant’s
departure from the role, but was happy enough for Matt Smith to take on the part of the Time Lord. ‘David and I talked about it, but I thought it would have to be radically different. And anyway, I didn’t really like the whole package – being on school lunchboxes.’ He soon dashed those rumours completely, in any case: he had never been offered the role, and in any case, would have turned it down. ‘Jumping on to school stages and giving out prizes, and saying, “I am the Doctor”,’ he sighed to
The Sunday Times
. ‘It’s not where I want to go.’ It was tricky enough having the feverish fanbase of
Sherlock
, although Steven Moffat liked the notion that Cumberbatch might yet play the Doctor’s arch-enemy, The Master. ‘Fans will love the idea of the man who plays Sherlock taking on the Doctor. Benedict is the perfect choice if schedules can work.’

In a curious way, as Sherlock, Cumberbatch had inherited exactly the kind of mystique that had always been the hallmark of classic
Doctor Who
. Waris Hussein, director of the very first
Doctor Who
story for the BBC, back in 1963, told BBC Radio 4’s
The Reunion
in 2013 that he was disappointed with the growing references to sexuality in
Doctor Who
. ‘Recently, the Doctor was actually snogged by his new companion. Once you have that on screen, people anticipate them getting together. The person who is mysterious and unavailable now is the new Sherlock. There’s been a strange transference, because Sherlock was the type of mysterious character I always wanted the Doctor to stay.’

Cumberbatch was again suggested as a possible
replacement 
for Matt Smith in
Doctor Who
before Peter Capaldi was selected as his successor. But it always seemed an improbable and impractical suggestion, especially with
Sherlock
still so popular. How could someone play both parts?