by Justin Lewis
Dominic Cooke had wanted to move the Royal Court’s productions away from social-realist drama, a decision not popular with everyone, but his choice of Cumberbatch in the agitated lead role of Bérenger was applauded by several newspapers. ‘Cooke is a great actors’ director,’ wrote the Independent after press night, ‘and he releases something in Cumberbatch we have not seen before. Here, he surpasses himself.’
Many of those in Rhinoceros, Cumberbatch included, would form the cast of The Arsonists, another relatively unknown play from the late 1950s, which is about appeasement. ‘It’s wonderful being in an ensemble,’ Cumberbatch said. ‘There’s a fluid approach to work. You play to each other’s strengths. I think Dominic hopes the plays will feed off each other.’ The Arsonists by the Swiss dramatist Max Frisch, written in 1958, succeeded Rhinoceros at the Royal Court from November.
Written in 1958, The Arsonists had last been performed in London in 1961 as The Fire Raisers. Then, its director was Lindsay Anderson, later to direct If… and O Lucky Man for the cinema. Radio 3 had revived the production in early 2005 as a radio drama, with Phil Daniels as Eisenring. In the 2007 revamp, Cumberbatch played Eisenring, an icy and imposing member of a group of terrorists which moves into the house of Biedermann (Will Keen), a respected pillar of the community. Biedermann refuses to acknowledge or accept what is going on in his own home, even when ‘petrol drums pile up in the corner’.
The Arsonists had been given a contemporary sheen, although to Cumberbatch’s relief, not in a clumsy way. ‘We are not walking around with mobiles and laptops like they always fucking do with Shakespeare,’ he sighed to The Times. The change in British society was archly addressed at the very outset of the play. One character prepared to light a cigarette, something that would have been commonplace in theatre once upon a time, but the smoking ban in public places (then just introduced) had put paid to that, and so a group of firefighters pointed hoses at the cigarette.
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With two plays at the Royal Court and the release of two feature films, all within the space of a few months, Benedict Cumberbatch’s name was suddenly everywhere. The man himself knew it and called 2007’s closing months ‘the autumn of Cumberbatch’, before immediately retracting on the grounds that it sounded a bit ominous. He was right though, and those four projects weren’t the sum total of his autumn.
There was also a one-off film for television. It was a dramatisation of Alexander Masters’ unconventional biography Stuart – A Life Backwards. Masters was an academic in physics at Cambridge University, and had met Stuart Shorter in the city in 1998 when he found him in the doorway of a shop. Stuart was a very different man to Masters – he was homeless and variously described as a ‘thief, hostage taker, psycho and sociopathic street raconteur’ – but the two bonded and became the unlikeliest of friends. After Shorter fatally collided with a high-speed train in 2002, Masters agonised over whether to write about their friendship, wondering if Shorter’s eventful but often harrowing and violent story might only reach a select readership. ‘I suppose I realised that Stuart was not classic biography material,’ he told the Sunday Telegraph in 2007. ‘As one critic put it, his was hardly the Life of Great Achievement.’ Yet in print the result sold well over 100,000 copies, and inspired Sam Mendes (one of Starter for 10’s executive producers) and his production company to arrange a screen adaptation.
‘It’s a bizarre buddy relationship,’ commented Cumberbatch, who was cast to play Masters. ‘They’re an odd couple thrown together by circumstance.’ Certainly, the distance between the pair resulted in some grim but compelling humour, although the American cable network which co-funded the film persuaded Cumberbatch not to use too much of Masters’ Cornish burr. ‘HBO in their wisdom said, “We don’t know if it’ll play in Salt Lake City.”’
Tom Hardy played Stuart Shorter to Cumberbatch’s Masters, a casting choice that amused the real-life author. The two looked nothing like each other. How the actor dressed was a different matter, though. ‘His wardrobe is very real – whenever I see him on set, I think he must have stolen my clothes.’
Stuart – A Life Backwards was not easy viewing, nor was it without levity. ‘Humour was almost the key thing,’ said director David Attwood. ‘There have been many films about the homeless and they’re generally worthy, and – that horrible word – “gritty”. The best way to tell this story is not by lecturing them, it’s by entertaining them.’
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The Last Enemy was Benedict Cumberbatch’s last television series prior to Sherlock. A political thriller in five parts, it predicted the effects of surveillance technology on society and relationships in Britain in the near future. After a terrorist attack at Victoria Station in London, which kills over 200 people, the British government places restrictions on civil liberties, and armed police take over the streets.
Surveillance technology had become a controversial subject in the UK, where the average citizen could be captured on CCTV camera as often as 300 times every day, and where the nation had more surveillance cameras per head than anywhere else on the planet.
Filming began in mid-February of 2007, and lasted six gruelling months. ‘I reached that point of exhaustion,’ said Cumberbatch, who starred as Stephen Ezard, ‘when you’re too tired even to sleep. It was supposed to be set in the winter in North London, whereas we were filming in a studio in Budapest at the height of summer. We were all melting in the heat of 500 lamps.’
It also brought back some of the horror of 7 July 2005 in London. ‘Everyone on my bus was in a state of panic,’ Cumberbatch told the Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine in 2013. ‘They had heard about the bomb on the other bus across London in Tavistock Square and started running over each other. There were kids, there were women – it was a real fight to get them down the stairs. I staggered out into the street. I was on my way to help a friend with a workshop at the Young Vic theatre and I couldn’t get through to him. The phones were jammed. Everyone around me was also talking about massive explosions on the Underground.’
Ironically, writer Peter Berry had had to swiftly change tack in the early drafts of The Last Enemy because of the 7/7 attacks. He had begun the series in 2005, and had managed to anticipate aspects of the calamity. ‘I wrote the first episode in which bombs went off on the London Underground about a month before 7 July 2005,’ Berry told the Radio Times. ‘So I had to take those out.’ It was an early example of how dystopian fantasy could be overtaken by horrific real-life events.
Despite bringing back unpleasant memories of 7/7 from time to time, Cumberbatch was excited by the concept and the execution of The Last Enemy. Months before the series aired, he exuberantly told one reporter about how ‘I got to run around with guns and dodge explosions, which I loved, because I’ve always wanted to do some of that kick-ass stuff.’ He was comparing it to the 1980s series Edge of Darkness, ‘a kind of personal liberty versus state security thriller … It’s about ID cards, iris-scanning and the extremes that surveillance can be taken to, which are terrifying.’
Peter Berry, formerly a writer on Prime Suspect, felt similarly strongly about the notion of ID cards being introduced into British society. ‘The idea of having to account for yourself to someone who has power over you is so appalling. You may not have to carry it, but if you don’t, you will have to report to a police station within 24 to 48 hours. I don’t want to live like that.’
Cumberbatch’s character Stephen Ezard is a mathematician just back from China, who becomes embroiled in a global conspiracy after he tries to establish what has happened to his brother Michael (played by Max Beesley), who was killed by a landmine while working for a charitable organisation in Afghanistan. ‘He is complicit with the government,’ Cumberbatch said of Stephen, ‘becoming a puppet for it and not realising what he is getting involved in.’ Ezard has obsessive-compulsive disorder which he could relate to, even if he wasn’t technically a sufferer. ‘I have been known to check my temperature and worry too much about symptoms. And I d
o have threshold anxiety. I have this thing where I have to check the gas is off two or three times.’
Ezard’s obsessive sense of detail, in some ways a dry run for the character of Sherlock Holmes a few years later, was exploited with some extremely long and complicated speeches for Cumberbatch to learn. ‘It’s a bit of a stretch. The other day, I had a vast tract of dialogue and Peter had written quite complex lists into it.’ Line-learning did not come naturally to him in the first place. ‘I struggle to learn by rote. When I was younger I had to spend double the amount of time learning French vocabulary.’
Another very different challenge came when Ezard embarked on an affair with Michael’s wife Yasim (played by Anamaria Marinca) and Cumberbatch faced another sex scene. ‘Sex scenes are never easy and shouldn’t be easy,’ he shrugged. ‘Even if you were single and fancied the pants off them, it would be hard because it’s such an unnatural thing to do in front of a film crew.’
The role of Stephen Ezard proved a rich one for Cumberbatch, a mix of the dynamic and the intellectual.
‘Stephen is an awkward, accidental hero, but there’s a vitality to him. He is running around handling guns, coming across bodies, escaping bullets and policemen, living underground, being tortured, being driven around in the boot of a car …’ It was quite a role.
The Last Enemy reached the screen in early 2008, as part of a BBC1 drama schedule that also included The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, the Life on Mars spin-off Ashes to Ashes and Lark Rise to Candleford. In the next couple of years, Benedict Cumberbatch appeared in a variety of guises in TV drama. His first work for ITV in nearly five years was as ex-policeman Luke Fitzwilliam in Agatha Christie’s Marple, starring Julia McKenzie, in which he shared the screen with Jemma Redgrave, Sylvia Syms, Shirley Henderson, David Haig, Hugo Speer, Tim Brooke-Taylor and others. Fitzwilliam would team up with Miss Marple to solve the mystery of a spate of deaths shortly after a glamorous young American woman arrives in the village of Wychwood-under-Ashe.
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Having played a politician (William Pitt the Younger), a botanist (Joseph Hooker) and a biographer (Alexander Masters), the next of Cumberbatch’s real-life roles was as a legendary painter. In 2010, he was the tortured nineteenth-century Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh, in a TV drama-documentary to coincide with an exhibition at London’s Royal Academy celebrating his life and works. Presented and co-written by Alan Yentob, the host of the arts series Imagine, Vincent Van Gogh: Painted with Words was based around excerpts from a series of letters exchanged between Vincent and his younger brother Theo (Jamie Parker). The correspondence documented every stage of Van Gogh’s adult life, right up to his early demise in 1890, aged only thirty-seven. But the film was careful to also include many of his canvasses, featuring works less commonly seen than ‘Starry Night’ or ‘Sunflowers’. As would be expected by now, Cumberbatch brought a dimension of humanity and sensitivity to Vincent, rather than the popular image of a man out of control.
Painted with Words came a few months after a two-part television film called Small Island, in which he was cast as a ‘little Englander’. Bernard is a dull banker-turned-landlord in the London of the 1940s, who is suddenly called up for World War II. After his departure, his wife Queenie (Ruth Wilson) takes in lodgers who have sailed on the SS Empire Windrush from Jamaica to Britain. Gilbert (David Oyelowo) and Michael (Ashley Walters) have faced an uneasy and hostile reception in London, while struggling with low-paid jobs and casual bigotry. When Bernard returns home several years later, having been missing presumed dead, he discovers the strong feelings Queenie has for Michael. For his contribution as Bernard, Cumberbatch received a nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category at the 2010 British Academy Television Awards, while Oyelowo’s starring role was shortlisted for Best Actor.
The BBC drama department had announced earlier in 2009 that it intended to try to make more period productions based in the more recent past, and not simply keep remaking Dickens or Austen favourites. Small Island was a compelling example of the success of this strategy, moving and well-acted from all sides, and ultimately led to other post-war period drama productions such as Call the Midwife and The Hour. For Benedict Cumberbatch, though, sudden fame would arrive in 2010 via an evergreen favourite brought bang up to date.
CHAPTER 9
OUT OF THE FOG
On 19 December 2008, the BBC announced that it would be producing a new contemporary take on the Sherlock Holmes character and stories, originally created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the late nineteenth century, but remade in countless stage plays, films and television series over the decades.
The two men responsible for the reinterpretation had been creative giants in British television for some time. The Scottish writer Steven Moffat, formerly an English teacher, had taken over from Russell T. Davies as the showrunner of Doctor Who in 2009, but his writing career went all the way back to the imaginative and amusing children’s series Press Gang at the end of the 1980s, which made stars of Julia Sawalha and Dexter Fletcher. The sitcoms Joking Apart, Chalk and Coupling had established him with grown-ups, before he had modernised Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for James Nesbitt in 2007’s Jekyll. He was first exposed to the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the age of ten, when his parents considered a film version of The Hound of the Baskervilles on TV to be ‘too frightening’, and sent him to bed. Soon after, though, they gave him a copy of A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes story. He was immediately hooked.
‘It’s not too much of a stretch to say that Arthur Conan Doyle invented the TV series,’ Moffat would reflect. ‘He looked to all the fiction magazines and they were all serialised novels or short stories. He thought to himself, the short stories are great but they don’t bring you back next week or next month. What about a continual series of short stories featuring the same character? You’ll always have a reason to come back next month. Now, that is the TV series.’
Moffat’s co-creator on Sherlock, Mark Gatiss, also had a background in comedy. He was one-quarter of the League of Gentlemen, whose macabre humour had gravitated from fringe productions, to radio and then television, but he also had a serious interest in film history, particularly horror cinema. He was a devotee of Conan Doyle’s work. ‘I retreated into Sherlock Holmes,’ Gatiss said of his boyhood in County Durham. ‘I wanted to live like an 1895 detective, not in a grim post-industrial town.’ He immersed himself in the purple-covered Penguin editions of the stories, and marvelled at them. ‘The Holmes stories are all dialogue and you can read them in 20 minutes. Whenever I meet someone who hasn’t read them, I always think they have got so much fun to come.’
The two men knew exactly who they wanted for Sherlock Holmes. There was only one man for the job – and Mark Gatiss had worked with him three years earlier, on the film Starter for 10. ‘It was vital to nail the casting,’ said Gatiss. ‘Benedict was the only person we saw for Sherlock. It’s very difficult to get someone with that amount of command, which he really has.’
Their Sherlock of choice had thoroughly enjoyed several past interpretations of Conan Doyle’s enduring icon, most notably Jeremy Brett’s reading for ITV’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the 1980s and early 90s. But as someone who liked to be surprised by his career and do all sorts of acting jobs, Cumberbatch was not one to speculate about long-term ambitions or dream roles, and the prospect of Sherlock was no different. ‘I didn’t really have a dream to play this character,’ he said. ‘That’s the one question that I never have an answer for: what jobs do you really want to play? I came to this role very flattered that they were very seriously considering me for it.’
Finding the right person to play Holmes’s companion took longer. An early possibility was a young actor called Matt Smith, who came to audition for Dr John Watson. ‘Matt gave a very good audition,’ Steven Moffat later revealed, ‘but he was clearly more of a Sherlock Holmes than a Dr Watson. There was also something a bit barmy about him – and you don’t actually want t
hat for Dr Watson.’ Only a few days later, Smith auditioned for the part of Doctor Who, a show Moffat had recently taken over. Enormous acclaim would follow, and as the set of Sherlock was next door to that of Doctor Who in Cardiff, it wasn’t long before Matt and Benedict were constantly bumping into each other. ‘We have lovely mornings,’ said Smith, just appointed the new Doctor, ‘where we go, “Hi Sherlock!” “Hi Doctor!” I think they should do an episode [with Sherlock Holmes]; these two great minds going, “Ding-ding-ding! Whatcha got?”’
Soon after seeing Matt Smith, the Sherlock producers tested Martin Freeman, who had featured in Richard Curtis’s 2003 romantic comedy Love Actually and revived Arthur Dent for the movie of Douglas Adams’ Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005), but was perhaps still most famous for his role as the lovelorn Tim Canterbury in the original BBC2 TV series of The Office. At his audition, it was obvious that he was the perfect Watson to Cumberbatch’s Holmes. ‘When Martin left the room after reading with Benedict,’ recalled Gatiss, ‘Steve said, “Well, there’s the series before our eyes!”’
‘Once Benedict was there,’ said Steven Moffat’s wife, the producer Sue Vertue, ‘it was really just making sure we got the chemistry for John – and I think you get it as soon as they come into the room. You can see that they work together.’
Vertue had met Moffat a decade earlier when they worked together on his sitcom Coupling. Her mother was Beryl Vertue, a pioneering independent force in entertainment for nearly five decades. In the 1960s, as agent to comedy giants like Spike Milligan, Tony Hancock, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, Vertue recognised the potential in international television sales. She sold the formats of hit British sitcoms like Steptoe and Son and Till Death Us Do Part to American TV networks. After a spell as a film producer, she returned to television in the early 1990s and started up the production company Hartswood Films, which enjoyed a string of hit shows: Men Behaving Badly, Is It Legal?, and the aforementioned Coupling and Jekyll.