But did it overtake my life? Is that what I’m chiefly recognized for? I don’t think so anymore.” (Note to “Sherlock” devotees: Cumberbatch didn’t rule out future appearances in the role. “For a while it’s what I was known for and I’m grateful for it. “The fame thing was very acute afterwards,” he said. His first six months of professional life were jobless and “a little bit desperate,” he said, but he slowly began to get small parts in theater, television and film.īy 2010, when the first series of “Sherlock” was broadcast, Cumberbatch was a busy, established actor in Britain but hardly an international star. He acted through high school, “toyed with the idea of being a lawyer,” and studied drama at the University of Manchester, then acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. I want to understand it from the inside, not go, ‘Oh, I know what that feels like.’”Ĭumberbatch’s parents are actors, and he recounted the experience of being backstage when very young, watching his mother, Wanda Ventham, step onstage “and stop being my mum.” He was fascinated, he said, “that people were there in the darkness, listening to that storytelling.” “I am drawn to the otherness of these people, to the difference from my lived experience. “I fit a lot of very boring brackets in my personal description,” said Cumberbatch, 45, who is married with children. (He’s in the forthcoming “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”) Strange in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Turing won a BAFTA award for the role of an abused, drug-addicted wealthy Englishman in the Showtime mini-series “Patrick Melrose” has played Hamlet and Frankenstein onstage and is currently Dr. “I had a similar connection to him that I did to Alan Turing when I did ‘ The Imitation Game’: they were both quiet characters in a very loud world,” he said, adding that he had been moved by Wain’s mental health issues, “how that loud, mechanicalized, industrialized era could snuff someone out who was a real hero to so many people across generations.”Ĭumberbatch, who shot to fame around a decade ago as a grumpy, brilliant, emotionally disconnected Sherlock Holmes in the BBC series “Sherlock,” is no stranger to wildly idiosyncratic characters. Sharpe said the actor was “unafraid to put himself in any scenario,” adding in a phone interview that there was “some overlap between Louis and Benedict an overbusy diary, full of energy, full of ideas.”Ĭumberbatch said he had adored everything about Louis Wain. “Over time, as Louis’s life takes a number of dramatic turns, his cat love deepens and his art changes, and so do both the movie and Cumberbatch’s layered performance, with its openness, tenderness and performative control,” Manohla Dargis wrote in a New York Times review. If we don’t understand the monsters in our world, what motivates this behavior, if we can’t look at someone beyond being a baddie or a goody, then we’re in trouble.” “He behaves abhorrently, but there is a deep well of pain there, this life not lived, an arrested development that informs the way he behaves. With rather more exuberant hair than Phil and minus the character’s fearsome stare, he was relaxed and articulate as he discussed the role. “In her dry way, with that introduction, Jane gave me permission to be Phil,” Cumberbatch said in a video interview from his home in England. But slowly we begin to understand that Phil, who studied Greek and Latin at Yale, is also playing a role. Phil is an alpha-male cowboy, dark and dirty (literally). He dominates and insults his quiet, mild-mannered sibling, George ( Jesse Plemons), and his perpetually simmering hostility finds a soft target when George marries Rose ( Kirsten Dunst), a local widow with an effete teenage son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Phil, the clever, bullying, angry character played by Cumberbatch, is the elder of two brothers who run a thriving cattle ranch, and he isn’t nice at all. “Benedict is really nice and you’ll meet him at the end of the shoot.” “This is Phil Burbank,” she said as Benedict Cumberbatch stepped forward. After a Maori blessing, Campion began to introduce everyone. At the beginning of the shoot for “The Power of the Dog,” the ominous new psychodrama from Jane Campion, the director brought the actors and crew together on a remote and magnificent site on New Zealand’s South Island, which was standing in for the story’s Montana setting.
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