by Justin Lewis
To help him get this right, he had conducted plenty of background research. He felt the key to Assange partly lay in his difficult childhood: ‘To have been a child in a single-mother relationship, being pursued around the country by an abusive stepfather who was part of a cult – to be taken out of any context where he could discover who he was in relation to other people – well, to then become a teenage hacktivist, and evolve into a cyber-journalist, to me makes perfect sense. And he’s still a runaway today – he can’t form those human relationships that other organisations have.’
Assange continued to be unhappy with the concept of the film. Via videolink from his refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy, he detailed why to a gathering of students at the Oxford University Union.
‘It is a lie upon lie. The movie is a massive propaganda attack on WikiLeaks and the character of my staff.’
Cumberbatch persisted with the idea of a meeting in person. Assange refused, but the email correspondence continued. ‘I wanted to give a fair account of him,’ the actor told Time Out. ‘The moral responsibility was very much part of the job. He was having none of it as far as a meeting goes. He felt that a meeting would condone a film he felt was too poisonous an account. He got hold of an old script and all sorts of issues blew up when we were filming. We had a discussion, though, which was good. If Julian is feeling that way, politically he’s right not to let [a meeting] happen, because it would be like a blessing.’ All the same, when Assange eventually saw footage of Cumberbatch’s performance in the film, he was unimpressed with his attempt at an Australian drawl. ‘We’re all used to foreign actors trying to do Australian accents, and when you hear a Brit trying to do your own accent, I can’t tell you how grating it is.’
The filmmaker Oliver Stone, who did manage to secure a meeting with Assange at the Embassy, took a dim view of both the prospect of The Fifth Estate and a documentary called We Steal Secrets, made by Alex Gibney. He said that the film was likely to be ‘unfriendly’ and went on: ‘I don’t think most people realize how important WikiLeaks is and why Julian’s case needs support. Julian Assange did much for free speech and is now being victimised by the abusers of that concept.’
Later, Cumberbatch would tell New York Magazine a little more about his encounter with Assange. ‘He asked me not to do it, and I said to him, “Well, somebody is going to do it, wouldn’t you rather it’s someone who has your ear, who could steer the film to a place that’s more accurate or balanced?” The tabloid image of him, what he fears is going to be promoted – that weird, white-haired guy wanted for rape – is so far from what he did.’ To his mind, however you viewed the man, he had provided ‘a massive service, to wake us up to the zombie-like way we absorb our news’.
The issue of the sexual assaults allegation would be glossed over in the final cut of The Fifth Estate. The completed film was intended to be more of a general overview on the divide between the public and the confidential in the modern world, rather than a specific biography of Julian Assange.
Empathy was Cumberbatch’s watchword. He was striving to create as three-dimensional a portrait as possible. ‘I think to try to go into this realm of “thumbs up or thumbs down” is so limiting,’ he said. ‘You want to find what’s human about him.’ Director Bill Condon concurred with this way of thinking: ‘Watching the movie is the experience of being impressed and turned off by Assange every five minutes.’
In August 2013, Cumberbatch made his own oblique protest. Filming was nearing completion on the third series of Sherlock in London, and he had a message for some loitering paparazzi. He donned a hoodie and held up a message for the cameras. ‘Go photograph Egypt and show the world something important,’ it read. Two days later, he held up a series of messages referring to the detention of David Miranda, partner of the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald. It was an oblique reference to Schedule 7 of the UK’s Terrorism Act, which gives police the power over passengers to stop and search them at airports.
Cumberbatch had written the following in relation to David Miranda, highlighting his own concerns about the British government’s stance on civil liberties: ‘Hard drive smashed, journalists detained at airports… Democracy? Schedule 7 prior restraint. Is this erosion of civil liberties winning the war on terror? What do they not want you to know? And how did they get to know it? Does the exposure of their techniques cause a threat to our security or does it just cause them embarrassment?’
The Fifth Estate opened in British cinemas early in October 2013. One fan of his portrayal of Julian Assange was Prime Minister David Cameron, who viewed some of the film for an ITV discussion programme called The Agenda. Cameron described Cumberbatch’s take on Assange as a ‘brilliant fantastic piece of acting… The twitchiness and everything of Julian Assange is brilliantly portrayed.’ He was less convinced by how the film tackled the subject of confidentiality, though. ‘There is an interesting bit when he says some of these documents are confidential,’ he told The Agenda’s host, Tom Bradby. ‘People’s lives are at risk, and of course he is thinking of the people who have leaked them. Actually you also need to think about the people whose lives are at risk because they have been leaked.’
Cameron’s doubts about the film were not the only ones to be voiced. Some critics considered it inappropriate that the matter of the sexual assault allegations towards Assange was confined to a brief onscreen caption at the tail end of the picture. Others concluded the subject under discussion was too large and sprawling to be contained in a single two-hour story, especially for a saga that was ongoing and incomplete.
But the most common complaint about The Fifth Estate from critical circles came with how it dealt with the character of Assange. ‘The filmmakers haven’t made up their minds yet,’ wrote the Independent, ‘whether Assange is a visionary champion of free speech or an autocratic and “manipulative asshole” with a personality skirting on the autistic end of the spectrum.’ The tendency for the film to lean towards the latter may have contributed to Assange being dismissive of the released version.
The general feeling was that, while Cumberbatch gave a good performance in the central role, the film surrounding him was less formidable, and lacked substance. ‘Cumberbatch is brilliant,’ wrote Mark Kermode in the Observer, ‘getting the peculiar vocal and physical mannerisms of Assange just so, playing him as saint and sinner, perfectly capturing his shabby charisma. Yet the film never allows him to show his teeth, withholding not only judgment but also clear direction. The Fifth Estate feels strangely unfocused, uncertain of how to deal with its slippery enigma.’
Coolly received by critics, The Fifth Estate would fare even worse with the public, even with Benedict Cumberbatch in the starring role. In its opening weekend in US cinemas, it took around £1 million at the box office, barely one-tenth of the £16 million budget. Lagging well behind the fortunes of blockbusters like Captain Phillips (starring Tom Hanks) and the Sandra Bullock/George Clooney sci-fi thriller Gravity, it was a commercial flop, and did little better even in the UK. Then again, it was not a subject that lent itself naturally to a populist movie, and not all movies need to be populist ones. Even as an A-lister, Cumberbatch would continue to sign up for all kinds of film projects, not just guaranteed hits.
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In between zooming back and forth from the USA on projects like 12 Years a Slave, Star Trek Into Darkness and August: Osage County, Cumberbatch had been spending a fair bit of time out in New Zealand, where he had become an addition to the cast of Peter Jackson’s epic remake of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
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 televi
sion 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.’
CHAPTER 16
FUTURE CUMBERBATCH
As 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 lea
d 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.’