Benedict Cumberbatch (11 page)

Since Rathbone, the roll call of Sherlock Holmes actors has included Peter Cushing, Roger Moore, Stewart Granger, Ian Richardson, Tom Baker, Christopher Lee and Nicol Williamson. Peter Cook teamed up with Dudley Moore as Watson for a desultory
The Hound of the Baskervilles
remake in the late 1970s. Even John Cleese had been Sherlock – in the 1973 television one-off,
Elementary My Dear Watson
, written by the absurdist playwright N.F. Simpson. Most recently, there had been two TV Sherlocks: the Australian Richard Roxburgh (in the BBC’s 2002 remake of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
) and in 2004, Rupert Everett in
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking
.

Perhaps the boldest break with the traditional Holmes image came in 1988. The film
Without a Clue
assigned Dr Watson (played by Ben Kingsley) to solving the crimes, for which he dreamt up a literary creation: an inebriated unemployed actor called Holmes, played by Michael Caine. It wasn’t an incarnation the young Benedict Cumberbatch
had enjoyed. ‘There have been some pretty awful adaptations, some really, really painful ones. Michael Caine – let’s not go there.’

Cumberbatch’s personal favourite was Jeremy Brett, the star of ITV’s
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, whose decade-long stint in the lead role might have lasted still longer, had it not been for his untimely death in 1995. Even so, Brett – and for that matter, Rathbone – had inhabited period pieces. ‘Jeremy Brett was wonderful,’ said Cumberbatch, who had watched him avidly as a youngster, ‘but that doesn’t put me off at all. We’re moving away from a Victorian period so it’s a great scope for freedom and interpretation.’ Indeed, it wasn’t as if the intention of
Sherlock
was to eliminate all previous incarnations, but to add to them. ‘We’re setting out to do something new,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘Why should we serve up what people have already had so sublimely?’

Martin Freeman agreed that it was like starting afresh. ‘I think you can get into trouble if you try to hang your hat too much on what other people have done,’ he said. ‘Those people haven’t done this script. We’re not playing the novels, we’re not playing the films. We’re doing this script.’ Besides, it wasn’t as if reboots didn’t happen elsewhere in popular culture. ‘Steven [Moffat]’s rationale was that we update Ian Fleming with Bond all the time,’ said Freeman. ‘We’re not seeing Daniel Craig in the Fifties. Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories are certainly rich enough to do that with.’

Ultimately, Moffat promised that despite the setting,
Sherlock
would reflect the core values of the two central characters. ‘Everything that matters about Holmes and
Watson is the same. Other detectives have cases, Sherlock Holmes has adventures – that’s what matters.’

Because Holmes was not a policeman but a private detective, he was not bound by police procedures and doing everything by the book. He could be much more unconventional and shadowy in his working methods. The police had come to nickname him ‘The Freak’. He was also a man not just of thought but of action. ‘Holmes was a good shot and a martial arts expert,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘and although he’s very much of the thinking school rather than an action school, he is also supposed to be an athlete – which I enjoyed quite a bit.’

Cumberbatch regarded
Sherlock
as a mystery series set apart from most of the many detective and cop series on television. He put it down to the central character having a mind like a computer: ‘…this almost supernatural but achievable ability to tie in the amazing amount of detail from a crime into some kind of narrative and then he uses his sensory qualities with his database of knowledge in his hard drive to make sense of it. He can scan a situation through touch, taste, sight, smell and an incredible amount of acquired knowledge.’

The character of Sherlock Holmes is so enduring and vivid that some have assumed him to have been a real person. The fictional chat show host Alan Partridge (aka Steve Coogan) once insisted that he had lived, but he wasn’t alone in his delusion. In fact, some believe Holmes to be not just real but still alive, evidenced by the volume of correspondence which still reaches The Sherlock Holmes Museum in London’s Baker Street.

How much of Sherlock was in Cumberbatch? And how much of Cumberbatch was in Sherlock? Frequently entertaining and animated in conversation, he was careful to emphasise that
Sherlock
was a scripted series, and he was still just acting when on screen. ‘Because I talk a lot – probably because I’m nervous and can’t quite edit the thoughts into something a bit more pithy – I get pinned into the same mania bracket, or having the same level of energy.’ Far from it, he insisted. ‘I’m very lazy in comparison to Holmes and I operate at a far lower speed.’

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes is a talkative, pedantic sort. ‘He is one step ahead of the audience, and of anyone around him with normal intellect,’ he said. ‘There’s a great charge you get from playing him, because of the volume of words in your head and the speed of thought – you really have to make your connections incredibly fast.’ But this did not make him a superhero, more a highly observant human being capable of deducing something from the tiniest fragment of evidence.

Steven Moffat had always been fascinated by the character of Sherlock, precisely because his was a skill, not a superpower from the gods. There would always be an explanation. ‘Sherlock Holmes
explained
,’ said the
Doctor Who
writer. ‘Superman never told you how he flew, he just did. The Doctor never says a word about how the Tardis can be bigger on the inside, it just was. But Sherlock can’t wait to tell you how the trick is done – and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough to find out.’

What he sometimes lacks is a sense of empathy, and he has
a tendency to speak without thinking, like Gregory House or Basil Fawlty. Death and murder can be an emotive subject for many, but it can excite Sherlock Holmes.

The lack of empathy and unflinching eye for detail means that Sherlock can have a macabre attitude when finding a corpse. Watson has more of a conscience. ‘Sherlock likes the game of it,’ commented Martin Freeman, ‘whereas John is, at first, horrified by how Sherlock treats a dead body as a game.’ ‘Holmes needs grounding,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘He is too maverick for what he is trying to achieve. Watson is a reality check but, like a moth to the flame, needs the adventure. London is the battlefield.’

Freeman was in no doubt, even as the pilot was being made, that Cumberbatch was a dream of a co-star. ‘I’m fast learning Benedict is perfectly cast. He has a really strong and assured way with language, and he’s quick and able to play quick thinkers as a result, people who are mercurial.’ And to play Holmes, to be able to think quickly, is a must.

Even before
Sherlock
was given a chance to take flight, yet another Holmes would appear. This time, it was Robert Downey Jr. in Guy Ritchie’s film, with Jude Law as Watson. Having a big feature film reach the screen while a TV series based on the same characters was being made could have knocked everyone’s confidence on
Sherlock
. ‘I did feel threatened,’ Cumberbatch later admitted. ‘Robert Downey Jr. is amazing. They’ve crammed it into a Warner Brothers
type action role, which is terrific in its way, but I must admit I was horribly, schoolboyishly relieved when the press gave it a bit of a kicking.’ Still, Holmes is a tough character to gain full control over. ‘I don’t think we’re in competition with it. He’s the most-played fictional character, so who am I to be precious about it?’

The premiere of the
Sherlock Holmes
movie on Boxing Day 2009 might have meant that the Sherlock hour-long pilot would have been delayed until the following year, but in the event, that pilot would never be broadcast. Instead it would be remade and transmitted as the first of three
feature-length
stories.

When newspapers revealed that the Sherlock pilot (an embryonic version of ‘A Study in Pink’) had been ‘shelved’, in May 2010, some titles protested that £800,000 had been wasted on something the viewers would never see. The
Sun
even assumed that the pilot must have been sub-standard. However, the purpose of making a television pilot is to try something out. ‘As with the rest of the industry,’ explained a BBC statement, ‘we occasionally use pilots to experiment with the best ways of telling stories. As a result of this pilot we commissioned a series of three 90-minute episodes.’ So the series would go ahead, and for those who wanted to see the ‘lost’ pilot, it would be on the DVD release as a bonus. Making that pilot had not only convinced the BBC to go ahead with a series, but also persuaded international broadcasters to buy it. So much for it being a waste of money.

Knowing the story wouldn’t go away, Mark Gatiss went on to elaborate on what had really happened.

‘We were originally going to make six 60-minute episodes. Then the BBC said, “We want to make this more like event television, so we want three 90-minute episodes.”’ So the team set about remaking and expanding the pilot but having been happy with the efforts of director Coky Giedroyc, they decided to make the first version public. ‘We thought, “Well fuck it, we’re just going to show people the pilot.” It’s different, but we would have been very proud to put it out.’

Besides, the temporary burial of the pilot was necessary. The first version of ‘A Study in Pink’ had a similar plot, and mostly the same cast. But for the 90-minute version, it had been rewritten and extended substantially. It looked and sounded very different. The more devoted fans would welcome its presence as a bonus feature on the DVD, as an interesting comparison with the subsequent series, but for casual viewers, the major changes in style and content for the series were too dramatic and risked looking confusing. It was important when establishing a new series to be as clear and distinctive as possible.

As director for the series, Paul McGuigan was shown the scripts, and the unbroadcast pilot episode. He had a specific vision for how the series should look. ‘One of the first things he said,’ Steven Moffat told American radio station NPR, ‘was you want to think Sherlock Holmes is behind the camera too. You want to see the world as Sherlock Holmes sees it. And that informs an awful lot of his work on the show… to give you the Sherlock’s eye-view of the world all the time.’

The shooting of
Sherlock
’s first series was complete by the
late spring of 2010. Filming mostly went well, although after weeks of outdoor filming during a bitterly cold winter, Benedict Cumberbatch suffered a bout of pneumonia at one point. Missing a day of the shoot, he was prescribed some antibiotics from the doctor, but then on the next day had to film a key fight scene. ‘I think my opponent could have almost literally knocked me down with a feather,’ Cumberbatch told the
Daily Mirror
. ‘I certainly wasn’t landing any meaningful punches. I was feeling so spaced-out and flaked out.’

Cumberbatch had a reputation for working hard, and despite his determination to keep himself in trim (plenty of swimming, yoga and honey), sometimes this led to lapses in his health. Not only had glandular fever floored him back at university, but during the Royal Court double-header of
Rhinoceros
and
The Arsonists
of 2007, he had developed a stomach ulcer. The pneumonia on Sherlock came from overwork, as he admitted several months later. ‘I was in utter denial,’ he told
The Sunday Times
. ‘I was throwing myself into it with no rest, having fun because I love the character so much. Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett may be the ideal Victorian heroes, but I want to be the modern one.’

A Study in Scarlet
had been Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, way back in 1887. Over 120 years later, it had been retitled ‘A Study in Pink’, and would be the first of three feature-length episodes of
Sherlock
. Holmes and Watson would investigate a series of suspicious deaths triggered by a serial killer, whose murders had been contrived to look like the victims had taken their own lives.

Originally the series had been intended for BBC1’s autumn season of 2010, but the Corporation had a rethink and instead brought it forward to three Sunday nights over July and August. The series creators panicked; they did not feel ready. ‘We were sitting around with our heads in our hands,’ recalled Steven Moffat. ‘“There isn’t enough time to do this. It will broadcast to no one.”’

Summer is generally a poor time for a high-profile new series to launch. The media industry and the general public are either on holiday, or at least winding down. Major television series traditionally launch in autumn, winter and spring. Summer, with the extra hours of daylight, is the time for sporting events, repeats,
Big Brother
and experiments. The omens did not look good for
Sherlock
.

To spread the word, the production team took to the social networking site Twitter to try and drum up support for the new show. But they were not expecting mass appeal. They hoped for 4 million to tune in, if that, and maybe some decent reviews.

On the evening of Sunday, 25 July, Benedict Cumberbatch was racing on his motorbike to the home of Steven Moffat and Sue Vertue in South-West London to watch the episode premiere on BBC1 with them. Unfortunately, he was held up. As Moffat wrote on Twitter: ‘B. Cumberbatch coming to my house to watch Sherlock but he’s stuck in traffic. On Baker Street.’

Baker Street? Too much of a coincidence, surely? ‘I think he may have made that up, to be honest,’ said Mark Gatiss, much later. ‘But it’s a really good lie.’

W
hen Benedict Cumberbatch finally made it to Steven Moffat’s house that Sunday night, the party could begin in earnest. They would have to watch ‘A Study in Pink’ on delay. It wasn’t long before everyone present realised that the show and its stars were big news. A casual glance on Twitter found that just about everything about it was trending. ‘People were talking about it with this passion,’ said Moffat. ‘As if they were lifelong fans – when of course, they’d not seen it 90 minutes ago. Everything had changed in 90 minutes.’

Launching a new television series is stressful enough, especially when you’re reinventing well-loved fictional characters. And in an age when users of social media websites and online forums can make their opinions known immediately, it is even more unnerving. ‘I had a certain
amount of trepidation,’ said Mark Gatiss, ‘but we were always very confident [that] as soon as you saw a couple of minutes you’d get it. However the extent to which people got it took us all by surprise.’

Gatiss’s expectations towards the reception of
Sherlock
had already been boosted when members of The Sherlock Holmes Society had reacted approvingly to a preview showing. ‘They all loved it. You can imagine that there wouldn’t be any more ossified or reactionary group of fans. One of them thought it was the best on-screen depiction he’d ever seen.’

Cumberbatch too was amazed by all the praise, even if there was a grudging air to some of it. ‘If I had a penny for every time a fan of the originals had come up to me and said, “I didn’t want to like this, but I did”, I’d be rich.’ He admitted that some had wanted the show to crash and burn: ‘We silenced a lot of the doubters. Knives were sharpened. I think a lot of people thought, “That’ll never work.”’

Almost nothing new is a guaranteed hit in television. Before a frame of footage had been shot for
Sherlock
, the BBC had conducted some audience research into what sort of following the programme might get. Focus groups tend to be conservative in nature, and nervous about anything too different. The findings regarding
Sherlock
seemed to bear this out. ‘We were told it would not work,’ said Ben Stephenson, head of the BBC’s drama department, ‘that it would get an old audience, it would get a small audience.’

In fact, the first episode of
Sherlock
was watched by more people than anything else on TV that night. Rival channels
were dominated either by showings of oft-repeated films like Jim Carrey’s
The Mask
or by series into their umpteenth runs:
Coast, Taggart, Big Brother
. Next to these,
Sherlock
at least represented something brand new, and over 7.5 million viewers tuned in, almost double what the makers had been hoping for. Within days, it was being heralded specifically as a reason to preserve the BBC. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt made a statement that the programme was ‘a very good example of the BBC at its best, investing in new programming’, but maintained a cut to the BBC licence fee was still likely. Moffat hit back. Reducing or even freezing the licence fee would affect the quality of shows like
Sherlock
. ‘These shows are expensive and difficult,’ he said, ‘and require huge amounts of backing and huge amounts of nerve, particularly on the part of the commissioners.’

The first reviews had surpassed just about everyone’s expectations; the critics were smitten by
Sherlock
. ‘A triumph,’ announced the
Independent
’s Tom Sutcliffe, ‘witty and knowing without ever undercutting the flair and dazzle of the original. It understands that Holmes isn’t really about plot but about charisma.’ Elsewhere in the same paper, David Lister branded it as ‘the ultimate buddy movie’ and paid tribute to the decision to cast Cumberbatch and Freeman: ‘…whoever is responsible deserves a BAFTA.’ The
Daily Telegraph
paid special attention to the portrayal of Holmes: ‘Cumberbatch’s sleuth is just the right balance of
psychonerd
and winning eccentric, the sort of person you’d love to have as your flatmate, if you could stand the mess.’

Cumberbatch’s take on Sherlock Holmes was undoubtedly
compelling as a leading character, if an unlikely hero. Was he cool or simply cold? Flawed and spiky, he was often hard to like, but he had added a humane sheen to an obsessive, analytical being. He accepted that he could be driven when it came to work, ‘but I’m not asexual and I’m not veering towards wanting to achieve everything at the expense of everyone around me. It’s all healthy stuff to play and get out of your system but it’s not stuff I want to take with me into my own life.’ He still found it marvellously liberating to be rude in the skin of the character, ‘because you can’t be in real life. I think people love the idea of someone who’s that
hard-nosed
and purposeful.’

Rather than making the character an all-knowing one (which risked making him smug), it was important to make Holmes’s knowledge selective. He could be ignorant about things for which he had no passion or interest. The gaps in his knowledge helped make him believable. ‘If you don’t have those bits, he looks like a demi-god,’ argued Mark Gatiss. ‘It is so exciting to have a person that doesn’t know that the earth goes round the sun or the name of the Prime Minister, because why does it bother him?’

One of the most impressive feats of Cumberbatch’s performance on
Sherlock
was having to remember and deliver some fearsome and complicated monologues, uttered in a torrent at high speed. He was used to having to get the lines right, having worked in theatre so much, where the first take is your only take. But even so, Moffat and Gatiss’s speeches would test him to the limit. ‘I practise at home,’ he said of the line-learning marathons. ‘There is a lot of
midnight 
oil burned. Sometimes it feels like, rather than acting, you’re being a machine. I don’t mean that in a negative way. Holmes is just very … still. Still, but fast.’

He has revealed that he could not learn these speeches ‘parrot fashion’. Instead, he explained: ‘In rehearsals, repetition, “actioning” the script, a Stanislavski-based method of understanding the why, what and how of the part by applying transitive verbs to each line, association with that action, the cue line and any blocking all act as triggers to remember the line.’ Although he acknowledged that ‘a patient assistant director or girlfriend’ was helpful too.

A maverick and an outsider, then, Sherlock was no superhero. His skills were not otherworldly, or magical, but achievable through effort and wit. It was this drive, rather than inspiration or god-given talent, which was hard to match – and Cumberbatch admitted that his fascination for Holmes made him all the more curious in his spare time about human behaviour and motivation. He would silently analyse those around him in public; he might gaze at train passengers, at their clothing and baggage, and try and gain an insight into what their lives might be like. ‘You can’t help but go there in your mind,’ he said of this casual but compulsive quest into the human condition.

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes was an unorthodox romantic lead, but a romantic lead all the same, certainly in the eyes of many viewers. Certain co-stars agreed. ‘There’s nothing more unattractive,’ said Una Stubbs (aka landlady Mrs Hudson) in the
Radio Times
, ‘than a man who thinks he is attractive. I think the fact that Benedict doesn’t think he’s
attractive is so attractive to women. Discerning women.’ Some press commentators agreed. ‘He is notable as a heartthrob,’ wrote Zoe Williams in the
Guardian
, ‘for his very un-bestiality, his refinement, his piano player’s hands, his indoor complexion, his humming brain.’

Cumberbatch’s reaction was one of bemusement. ‘I look in a mirror and I see all the faults I’ve lived with for years. Yet people go nuts for certain things about me. It’s not me being humble. I just think it’s weird.’ Still, in terms of career progression, it had its good points. ‘It builds a momentum. I’ve got the most fantastic opportunities, and that attention has been a huge help. As long as it helps me find good roles, my response is, “Bring it on!”’

Nor was Sherlock a romantic icon. ‘He’s not some alpha male who always gets the girl,’ said Cumberbatch. ‘He’s a misfit who hacks people off.’ And he could be obstructive if anyone else might be lucky in love. For example, he gets in the way of John Watson’s dates with a fellow doctor in the second story, ‘The Blind Banker’. ‘Sherlock isn’t socialised, and John likes that about him,’ commented Martin Freeman. ‘But it also infuriates him!’

The enigmatic but profound friendship between Holmes and Watson in
Sherlock
was hard to explain or quantify. Mark Gatiss made an attempt at explaining it regardless. ‘They form a unit,’ he told
The Sunday Times
. ‘John Watson is gradually making Sherlock Holmes more human, and Sherlock Holmes has given John Watson his mojo back.’

There were viewers and Internet commenters who
interpreted
the relationship as going beyond friendship. The
Sherlock
scriptwriters would often nod teasingly towards these theories, but there was nothing substantial beyond that. ‘Much as Sherlock adores John, and he’s fond of him, there’s nothing sexual – all the jokes aside,’ said Cumberbatch, but said of the quips, ‘the problem is, they fuel the fantasy of the few into flames for the many. People presume that’s what it is, but it’s not.’ Some on the Internet have let their imaginations run riot, wildly and explicitly, on the matter. ‘There are a lot of people hoping that our characters and ourselves are rampantly at it most of the time,’ said Martin Freeman. He brushed aside the fantasies as ‘tongue-in-cheek’, but maintained that, ultimately, their strength as a twosome was the way they complemented each other, as in so many friendships and relationships: ‘They give something to the other that is lacking in their life.’

Besides, Cumberbatch denied there was much sex appeal in the character of Sherlock to begin with, or at least not consciously. He explained that Holmes had abstained from sexual activity because he is busy in other areas of life. ‘Not every man has a sex drive that needs to be attended to,’ he argued. ‘Like a lot of things in his life where he’s purposely dehumanised himself, it’s to do with not wanting the stuff that is time-wasting, that’s messy. To the Victorian eye he’s an eccentric, but I think he has purposely repressed those things.’

The affection and respect between Holmes and Watson, while it could be awkwardly expressed, was certainly there. ‘It is about the things that wind each other up and the things that they genuinely love about one another as well,’ said
Freeman. ‘We all certainly saw it as a love story. These two people do love and kind of need each other in a slightly dysfunctional way, but it is a relationship that works. They get results.’

Sales of Conan Doyle’s original novels trebled after the first
Sherlock
episode aired, but the series viewing figures dipped by around a million for the second story. In ‘The Blind Banker’, a terrible fate awaited anyone who saw mysterious ciphers on walls around the City of London. The drop in viewing figures was not in itself too much to worry about – most new shows lose a quarter or a third of the audience in the second week – but reviews were lukewarm towards aspects of the plot, especially the portrayal of a band of Chinese smugglers known as the Black Lotus. A warmer reception greeted ‘The Great Game’, the final episode, written by Mark Gatiss, and which found Holmes up against a devious bomber. Not before time, it unveiled Sherlock’s shadowy enemy, James Moriarty, played by Andrew Scott, who introduced an Irish accent to the character for the first time. In Steven Moffat’s view, Scott brought a terrifying coldness to the part: ‘He has this amazing ability to conjure up this sort of blank-eyed desolation of a man too clever. Too clever to exist, almost.’

Scott’s identity in the role of Moriarty was not revealed before broadcast. Gatiss delighted in keeping such secrets from the viewers, which was quite an achievement in an age
where news travels faster than ever, especially via social media. Indeed Gatiss had managed to keep his own role (as Holmes’s brother Mycroft) under wraps, and some had been misled into believing
he
would be Moriarty. Neither Scott nor Gatiss appeared in the publicity material cast lists, nor in the
Radio Times
billings. When so much television kept telling you what was going to happen next, he was a great believer in holding certain things back: ‘If every now and then you pull a fast one so that the moment of transmission still means something, it can be just wonderful.’

Many were surprised and disappointed that
Sherlock
’s first series was comprised of only three episodes, in an age where most American television series make 13 or even 24 episodes every year, and even high-profile high-concept British series like
Doctor Who
manage up to a dozen. But the prospect of making more
Sherlock
had the problem that Steven Moffat – as the showrunner and head writer on
Doctor Who
too – would have to accommodate those commitments. The BBC, delighted with the first series ratings for
Sherlock
, acknowledged that it wasn’t a question of ‘if’ more would be made, more ‘when’ and ‘how’.

There were two possible options for the second run of
Sherlock
. Either there would be another trio of 90-minute films, or a slightly longer series of hour-long episodes. BBC drama head Ben Stephenson believed that the 90-minute option would feel like ‘less of a detective show and more of an adventure show’.

Over the first three
Sherlock
episodes, viewing figures had peaked at 9 million in the UK. It would be a huge international
sales success for the BBC, which licensed the episodes to 180 territories worldwide. Viewers in the United States were treated to them from October 2010 on the non-commercial US network PBS. From August, teasers from the show had been included in a promotional campaign onscreen, which partially borrowed a slogan from Holmes himself: ‘The Game Is On This Fall’. Indeed it was. It would be pitted against another critical favourite: HBO’s gangster series
Boardwalk Empire
. But for American audiences, and to the great regret of the production team back in the UK, each 90-minute episode of
Sherlock
would be cut by eight minutes to accommodate sponsorship announcements. ‘We try to cut the bits which aren’t essential to the story,’ admitted Sue Vertue at Hartswood, ‘but they are often the lovely character scenes.’