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It was so weird!”Ĭumberbatch, it turns out, is quite good at name-dropping. But so were they – and Thom was muttering: ‘Yeah, we’re really big Sherlock fans…’ There was all this shifting around, all looking at our shoelaces. I was really nervous because it hadn’t been a great performance, so I was looking at the ground all embarrassed. “I said to Nigel: ‘I’m a massive Radiohead fan, I don’t suppose any of the boys would want to come and see some Shakespeare?’ So Jonny and Thom came one night and afterwards we talked backstage. “They came backstage afterwards and we had a nice, long chat. “ Nigel Godrich and Edgar Wright came to see me in Hamlet,” remembers Cumberbatch of his celebrated stage run at the Barbican in 2015. He’s friends with Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, who scored The Power Of The Dog, and recounts their awkward first meeting. Kind of like Clarkson’s Farm, but without the jokes.īenedict Cumberbatch is no stranger to rock stars. Though in this case, he’s not writing indie songs with depressed lyrics, but hay-stacking, whittling wooden figures and braiding thick rope from real horsehair. Incredibly skilled yet emotionally crippled, Phil is played like a tortured rock star who suffers for his art. The result of this mutually agreed nastiness is a much meaner Cumberbatch than we’ve seen before.
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We were the negative to each other’s positive. “I didn’t want to be really mean to Kirsten, but I needed to stay in character,” Cumberbatch says of their relationship. Memories of a traumatic event from his past resurface, so he cruelly taunts Rose until she is driven to alcoholism. CREDIT: NetflixĪt one point in the film, Phil’s brother brings home a new wife (Rose, played by Kirsten Dunst), and his fragile peace is fractured. His reward for putting himself through the ringer? Nicotine poisoning – on three occasions.īenedict Cumberbatch in ‘The Power Of The Dog’. Other tasks included swimming naked in the river, covering his body with mud and smoking filter-less rollies all day. He didn’t wash, he stayed in character permanently on-set, and he refused to answer if someone called him Benedict. When they eventually arrived in rural New Zealand and started shooting, things got quite intense. “It’d be brilliant if I could play covers – stuff like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – but I’m not that good sadly.” “It took me a long time to master half a piece,” Cumberbatch confesses, before detailing a difficult pre-production in which he juggled lockdown child-care duties with regular online lessons from the world’s “third-best” banjo player. He rides, he fights, he lassos cattle – he even rocks out on the banjo. Far from the refined subjects of Hawking and Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, Jane Campion’s gritty adaptation of the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage has Cumberbatch playing Phil Burbank, a rugged 1920s cowboy who runs a ranch in Montana with his brother George (Jesse Plemons). Definitely cooler than Bono.įor starters, there’s his new film The Power Of The Dog. Benedict Cumberbatch is actually very cool. And yet, by the end of our lengthy chat about motorbikes, music and Manchester’s best techno clubs, we’re left in no doubt.
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It’s a very Milhouse move, starting an interview talking about your glasses. Wrapped up in a navy scarf and green quilted jacket, he looks like he has a cold (he doesn’t, there’s just a chilly anti-COVID draft coming from a nearby window.) He’s also wearing blue-tinted, prescription sunglasses, which he seems embarrassed about. When we meet him, at a lavish hotel suite in central London, he isn’t particularly impressive either. And he is best-known for playing cerebral, slightly nerdy characters like Sherlock and Marvel’s Doctor Strange. He is seen as incredibly English at a time when that is most definitely out. Born in west London, he is an ex-public schoolboy whose parents are both fusty stage actors. At first, there is not much about Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch that seems very cool.