Benedict Cumberbatch

by Justin Lewis

  What to do next? He had considered law as a possible profession. For his parents, jittery about the insecurity of the acting profession, this would have been a relief. ‘A lot of people told me that barristers never knew where their next job was coming from, and that you had to trek all over the country, and it was very hard work. It sounded a bit like acting, so I stuck with that instead.’ It also occurred to him that his reasons for chasing the law as a career lay in acting anyway. He was a big fan of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey on television, starring Leo McKern. Had he just wanted to study law so he could become Horace Rumpole?

  He finally abandoned any aspirations to work in legal circles when he visited the law department at Manchester University. He changed his mind; other law students reminded him of ‘the living dead’, and above all he realised his attempts to change career had been to ‘show off to my parents that I was capable of that’. Pursuing an acting career would be precarious and unpredictable, but so could just about any other career. His five years inside ‘an incredibly privileged bubble’ at Harrow School had left him in no doubt about what he really wanted to do: he wanted to be an actor, just like his parents.

  CHAPTER 3

  BIG WIDE WORLD

  With Benedict at Harrow, Wanda and Tim had increased their stage work commitments. In 1991, for the first time in 20 years, they appeared together in a touring production of the Ray Cooney farce, Out of Order. In its West End run, the play won the Olivier Theatre Award for Best Comedy. The couple would also be regulars in three series of the BBC sitcom, Next of Kin, with Penelope Keith and William Gaunt. In 1997, having played Cassandra’s mum in Only Fools and Horses, Wanda would appear as the mum of Deborah (Leslie Ash) in another hit sitcom, Men Behaving Badly. But most of their work would be in the theatre now. Their son would come and watch them perform, often with increasing discomfort as his mum especially would play roles requiring her to be in some or other compromising position. ‘I had to say to her, sorry Mum, I just can’t bear to see that gag one more time. I was so sensitive to it, she must have wondered if I was gay.’

  After leaving Harrow in the summer of 1995, Benedict took a year out before university. He wanted to spend some time abroad, and in order to fund his trip spent around six months working in a London perfumier. The second half of his gap year found him in Darjeeling, West Bengal, India, where he taught English to Buddhist monks for an organisation appropriately called GAP. He was able to live with the monks, and witness all their daily rituals, including working and praying. ‘They taught me about the duplicity of human nature, but also the humanity of it, and the ridiculous sense of humour you need to live a full spiritual life.’

  The monks also taught him how to meditate, something that would prove an invaluable aid in his acting career. It gave him ‘an ability to focus and have a real sort of purity of purpose and attention, and not be too distracted. And to feel very alive to your environment, to know what you are part of, to understand what is going on in your peripheral vision and behind you, as well as what is in front of you. That definitely came from that.’

  There were sober moments. He would watch mourners carry corpses to the river to be burnt. ‘It’s not a charming ancient tradition,’ he pointed out. ‘You are inhaling the smoke of a burning body.’ But his experiences in Tibet were not without laughter either. On one occasion, his new friends were endlessly amused by the sight of two dogs having sex in a back yard. ‘The monks were on the floor laughing at these sentient beings’ pain and ridiculousness, these two dogs just stuck together. “Kodak moment, sir!” Brilliant!’

  Another time, his life was in danger, not for the last time. With four friends, he set off on an expedition to the mountains of Nepal. Bereft of guidance or sufficient protective clothing, the ill-equipped party soon ran into difficulties. ‘We got altitude sickness and then amoebic dysentery,’ Cumberbatch would recall. ‘We were lost for a day and a half, trekking at night and squeezing moss to get water. We slept in an animal hut that stank of dung and had hallucinogenic dreams because of altitude sickness.’ Salvation only came when they followed a trail of yak droppings and made it back to safety. ‘It was a pathetic expedition,’ he told journalist Caitlin Moran over 15 years later. ‘We were woefully under-prepared. I had simply an extra scarf my mother had knitted me and a piece of cheese.’

  Safely back in Britain, Cumberbatch began his three-year degree at Manchester University in the autumn of 1996. Despite Harrow School’s location – slap-bang in the middle of the town, and not that far from Central London – he had felt a little cosseted there, and yearned for something grittier. ‘I needed to be out of the danger of tying a cashmere jumper round my neck. I wanted something a bit more egalitarian. I didn’t want just an extension of my public school, I wanted less exclusivity.’

  He had considered Oxbridge for a time, but while both Oxford and Cambridge had drama societies and revue groups – most famously the Oxford Revue and the Cambridge Footlights – neither university offered a degree course in drama. He opted for Manchester University, as it had a long and respected connection with drama and performance. In the late 1970s, all three writers of The Young Ones – Rik Mayall, Lise Mayer and Ben Elton – had studied there, as had Mayall’s co-star Adrian Edmondson. The 1980s intake had included Doon Mackichan (The Day Today, Smack the Pony) and Goodness Gracious Me!’s Meera Syal, while from the 1990s onwards, Peep Show creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, The Thick of It’s Chris Addison, the Chemical Brothers, Professor Brian Cox and most recently, the comedian Jack Whitehall have all been Manchester graduates on various other courses. Several playwrights of excellence also attended the university, including Robert Bolt (perhaps most famous for the play A Man for All Seasons) and Our Friends in the North writer Peter Flannery.

  At Manchester, Cumberbatch’s contemporaries on his drama course included Olivia Poulet, who hailed from South-West London, and who was two years his junior. In their final year, 1999, they would begin a relationship which would last 12 years. Also in their year was a young Mathew Horne, future star of the BBC1 series Gavin & Stacey, who was training to be a stand-up and who was writing a dissertation about the performance styles of Steve Coogan.

  Cumberbatch’s own 30,000-word dissertation was on the output of film director Stanley Kubrick. His supervisor for the project was Michael Holt, who later remembered that the youth arrived at the university with some impeccable references from his previous school. ‘I remember one of his masters from Harrow calling me to tell me what a great talent was arriving. And indeed he was.’ Holt recalled someone who was extremely popular with fellow students, could be pleasant and thoughtful, but had visions of becoming a brilliant actor rather than a superstar. ‘He knew it was something you had to work at. He wasn’t starry-eyed. He had a professional attitude.’

  The drama course presented Cumberbatch with all sorts of new challenges. ‘We did a practical course in prisons and probation, which meant learning about the penal system and forms of rehabilitation, and then going in with a project for a month and a half to Strangeways, two other category C facilities and a probation centre. For a posh bloke with a silly name, to be in a world like that was extraordinary.’

  Off-duty, as it were, Cumberbatch had made all sorts of new friends (‘a thoroughly healthy – and unhealthy – mix’), and he could party hard, but was for a time floored by glandular fever. Even so, it was becoming apparent that he had been right to follow acting as a career of choice. His parents were becoming resigned to his decision, but in a positive way. The truth was, whenever they came to see a play he was in, whether it was Glengarry Glen Ross or Amadeus, he clearly had such striking potential. ‘My parents were sanguine about it in the end. My dad came up to me when I was in a production and said, “You’re better now than I’ve ever been.” From that moment, I thought, “OK, if I’ve got his blessing, I’m going to do it.”’

  Cumberbatch’s work during the late 1990s was rarely reviewed, but just after graduating from Manchest
er, he was spotted by a handful of press titles. On 18 August 1999, during that year’s Edinburgh Festival, he was cited as one to watch by the Daily Mail’s resident gossip columnist. Nigel Dempster wrote that he was ‘wowing audiences’ at the Greyfriars Kirk House venue in Edward Albee’s two-hander, The Zoo Story. He had a connection with Benedict’s family – he was quick to acknowledge that Tim Carlton was an ‘old school friend’ from their days at Sherborne School in Dorset in the early 1950s.

  The Zoo Story was being performed by a theatre company called Tunnelvision. It was about two characters and a park bench in New York’s Central Park. Peter is trying to read, but Jerry wants to talk about the lonely life he leads. The review of the play in The Scotsman – frequently the first port of call for anything to do with the Edinburgh Festival – celebrated Cumberbatch’s versatility. ‘Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as Jerry is imaginative and dynamic. He is the sort of actor who could sustain interest and variety in a one-man show in which he played 20 different parts.’ He was just one future name who was being bookmarked as one to watch that summer at Edinburgh, where Miranda Hart was in a duo called The Orange Girls, and Cambridge graduates David Mitchell and Robert Webb were establishing themselves as a comedy double act.

  Following Edinburgh, Manchester graduate Cumberbatch returned to London. While his girlfriend Olivia Poulet joined the National Youth Theatre, he embarked on one more year of education, this time at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art (LAMDA). He even gained his first agent, and for a time experimented with a name change. Just as his dad had done over 40 years earlier, he ditched ‘Cumberbatch’ in favour of ‘Carlton’. His reasoning, he later explained, was for simplification; Cumberbatch was ‘a bit bumbly and messy’, and he assumed there was no way he could use that name as a professional actor. He soon had second thoughts, though, especially when he changed agents. ‘I wasn’t getting very far and my new agent suggested I revert. Benedict Cumberbatch was a mouthful of a name, but an unforgettable mouthful. They said it’s a great name, it will get people talking about you.’

  At the end of January 2000, he made his first notable television appearance, in an episode of the nostalgic ITV Sunday night drama series set in 1960s northern England, Heartbeat. His parents had both appeared in the series: Tim played three different characters over the programme’s 18-year duration, while Wanda had played the same character in four episodes during the 1990s. Despite his many, much more prominent successes on television over the years, it is a curious statistic that Cumberbatch’s debut in Heartbeat attracted the biggest national TV audience of his entire career to date. Sandwiched in between Coronation Street and the firefighters’ drama series London’s Burning, nearly 15 million people watched that episode of Heartbeat. In fact, in that week only Coronation Street was watched by more of an audience.

  Yet it was a one-off. He would not appear on TV again for well over two years. After his one-year course finished at LAMDA, he found other work hard to come by. For six months or so, there was nothing. ‘It can be dispiriting when you’ve put your heart and soul into something and the results aren’t instantaneous.’

  There were a few visits back to his alma mater. On 6 May 2000, during his final term at LAMDA, he made a comeback appearance at Harrow School in The Taming of the Shrew, once again as Petruchio, ‘with an ingenious mania … an amiable arrogance which was simultaneously hilarious and sympathetic’. In September, he guested as Jack Worthing in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, with Peter O’Toole’s teenage son Lorcan featuring as Algernon. Cumberbatch was helpfully flagged once again in the pages of the Daily Mail by Nigel Dempster, but The Harrovian review also proudly highlighted the comeback kid. ‘An actor of whom we shall surely hear more,’ it remarked. ‘He portrayed all the signs of a natural professional.’

  A few months later, he was back at Harrow as part of CAMERA, a theatre group he had formed at university, to perform Kvetch, a drama by Steven Berkoff, in which he played George, a Jewish wholesaler. It was performed for staff and upper school ‘due to the content of the play’. It’s worth noting that Cumberbatch was by no means a name, but such was his reputation in drama at the school that his guest spot was so warmly received – and reviewed in the school magazine as ‘a genuine crowd-pleaser’.

  For the most part, though, actual acting jobs were scarce in the months after LAMDA. He scraped together a living as a waiter in restaurants, but there was little more than that. ‘I was on beans and toast. I had an actor friend who said we were enjoying the lemon rind years, meaning we’d eat the lemon rind in our drink if we could only afford one.’

  After an upward trajectory through his schooldays, and a high-octane life at university, Cumberbatch realised the real work was only just beginning. In the bubble of student drama, you’re encouraged all the way. Outside that in the wider world, it was harder to establish oneself. ‘You’re instilled with confidence from that,’ he would say many years later, ‘and then you get rejection.’ Fortunately, though, some proper stage work was not far away.

  CHAPTER 4

  PROFESSIONAL ACTOR

  In the spring of 2001, Benedict Cumberbatch could finally give up waiting tables. He was selected for two stage productions at the Open Air Theatre that summer in London’s Regent’s Park. Staging Shakespeare there was a summertime tradition that stretched back some 70 years. He would feature in the cast of two of the Bard’s comedies: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labour’s Lost.

  As we have established, Cumberbatch had already made his mark twice before in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Aged twelve, his take on the bumbling Nick Bottom the weaver had been a hit in the Brambletye Prep School production. A few years later, at Harrow, he was Demetrius. A decade on or so, with the comic performer Gary Wilmot playing Bottom, Cumberbatch would play Demetrius for a second time. Director Alan Strachan had revived the production the previous summer in Regent’s Park, transplanting it from the 1590s to the mid-nineteenth century.

  Most of the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream also spent the summer of 2001 on a second Shakespeare comedy, also directed by Strachan. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Cumberbatch played the King of Navarre in a Wodehousian style, as if he were Bertie Wooster. His masterly portrayal of bluster and insecurity was met with some excellent national press reviews. ‘Finds humour and silliness where none previously existed,’ said the Daily Mail. ‘A pleasant young blade,’ remarked The Sunday Times, and went on, ‘A bit of a wag, a bit of a lad, fancies himself, not entirely wrongly, as sophisticated.’ In a quirk of fate that was to become a habit over the years, he found himself in the cast alongside someone who knew at least one of his parents – in this case Christopher Godwin. ‘He’d worked with my father in [Michael Frayn’s] Noises Off. I love the continuity of acting. It’s really lovely to be acting with people from my parents’ generation.’

  Even though traditional theatre had been performed outside centuries before, contemporary audiences accustomed to ceilings would be taking a risk by watching plays outside. If weather conditions were idyllic, an evening of outdoor Shakespeare could hardly be bettered. In a dreary and damp British summer – and 2001 was one of far too many – it could be gruelling.

  On one Saturday night, when the Independent’s theatre critic was present, the downpours were so persistent that near the halfway point, the actors had little choice but to run for cover. Such were the risks of performing theatre outdoors. Legend has it that two elderly audience members were once overheard discussing a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream they had watched in similarly wretched conditions. ‘That was the best Dream I’ve ever seen,’ declared one. Her companion replied: ‘Yes, pity it had to be a wet one.’

  All the same, Cumberbatch’s King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost had made such a mark that it gained him a nomination in the 2001 Ian Charleson Awards, a prize given to the best performance in a classic play by an actor aged under thirty. Inaugurated in 1991, the Award – sponsored by
the National Theatre and The Sunday Times – had been named in honour of the highly acclaimed Scottish actor whose life had been cruelly cut short the previous year, at the age of just forty. Among the winners and nominees over the years have been Jude Law, Tom Hollander, Helen McCrory, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Dominic West, and Ben Whishaw.

  Cumberbatch would not feature among the top three prize winners in 2001 – Claire Price, Zoe Waites, James D’Arcy – but he would be shortlisted again in 2006, just months before his thirtieth birthday would have excluded him from the running. This time round, he was placed third for his performance as Tesman in Hedda Gabler. He was so affecting and convincing in the role that he persuaded the judging panel that ‘the play was as much his tragedy as Hedda’s’. To Cumberbatch’s enormous pride and satisfaction, he was congratulated at the ceremony by another actor who had excelled as Tesman when a young man – Sir Ian McKellen.

  In the summer of 2002, Cumberbatch returned to Regent’s Park for a further double-header of open-air Shakespeare (as well as a revival of Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War). If Romeo and Juliet was coolly received by the critics, his performance as Benvolio stood out for several of them, with one – the Guardian – arguing that he ‘seems to carry the whole weight of the tragedy on his frail shoulders’. The Stage praised ‘a commanding performance, making much from the comparatively small role to appear the stronger of the Montague rebels’.

  The more modernist setting of As You Like It, relocated to the Edwardian 1920s, was generally deemed more successful. Back at Harrow in the early 1990s, he had triumphed as Rosalind, but now he was playing opposite that character as the intense and impetuous Orlando. For some he was a little too intense in the part. ‘Cumberbatch once or twice falls to ranting,’ wrote the Sunday Telegraph, but went on, ‘he more than makes up for it with his ardour and openness.’ It was a convincing portrayal of a love affair in the view of several press pundits, who were most disappointed that the press night performance had to be stopped early, due to more heavy rain. The weather scarcely improved over the next few days, but the cast battled on, while the audience cowered under brollies. The Glasgow Herald commented that Cumberbatch and Rebecca Johnson ‘echo Andie MacDowell and Hugh Grant’s sodden Four Weddings climactic embrace, but this time entirely authentically.’ ‘Both these actors display exceptional promise,’ enthused The Stage.