Benedict Cumberbatch and ‘The Imitation Game’, Benedict Cumberbatch, known to fans as Sherlock Holmes and Richard III, takes on another complex character, math genius Alan Turing, in “The Imitation Game,” a film about cracking Germany’s Enigma code during World War II.
Benedict Cumberbatch has been ricocheting between the U.K. and the U.S. promoting a movie about one doomed tragic figure, in “The Imitation Game.” But he can’t help talking about another—Shakespeare’s Richard III for the BBC and PBS.
His movie role is Alan Turing, the mathematician largely responsible for breaking the German Enigma code during World War II. Turing was convicted on charges of homosexuality in the 1950s and chemically castrated as an alternative to prison. He died an apparent suicide. “He should be celebrated as a war hero and the father of computer science and a gay icon,” Mr. Cumberbatch says. “He should be on bank notes.”
Mr. Cumberbatch’s heart may be with Turing, but his head is clearly in his current role. When he settles down for a one-on-one conversation, he begins to talk—sometimes so fast it’s a wonder he can breathe—about “Richard III,” delving into his process and research in great detail, intensely reciting lines from the play.
A photograph of him as Richard—Shakespeare’s black-hearted king, often depicted as a wizened hunchback—shows Mr. Cumberbatch sitting tall on a horse, his hump inconspicuous under a cloak flung glamorously over one shoulder.
We figured there would be a certain amount of disguise going on in order for him to function as a luminary in the court and to be a figure of power,” he said.
That idea leads to his take on Richard’s psychology. “When you start talking about the entitlement that his family, the Plantagenets, are heir to—this beautiful, Adonis, athletic family, this sort of English Kennedy family—Richard is this dark embarrassment in the corner that everyone wants to quietly ignore or patronize, this disabled child. Being an outsider festers, and fosters the sociopathic, the anger and sense of entitlement to seize the crown.”
He eventually says, “I’m waffling on,” and gets to Turing, a character who also demanded voluminous research. Although there are flashbacks to his boyhood and flash-forwards to his last years, the film focuses on his time at Bletchley Park—Britain’s code-breaking headquarters—during World War II. Mr. Cumberbatch studied and tried to duplicate Turing’s drawings to play the man who was both a genius and often socially inept. “In a way it’s an actor’s trick—how he holds himself, his body, his pen, what sounds are distracting to him.”
Depicting internal elements was equally precise. “For all the extraordinarily complex ideas and mathematics and science, this was a man who was incredibly sensitive to his environment. It could be as simple as a particular use of language.” He cites Turing’s paper on computable numbers, which led to the Turing machine, the prototype of today’s computers. “That entire thought process was triggered by hearing the words ‘mechanical process.’ ”
He says of his time as Turing, “It was rather wonderful, and very distressing by the end of our story.” The film’s big emotional conclusion, set shortly before his death, plays intimately as a tête-à-tête between Turing, his mind and body weakened from the estrogen the government forced him to take, and his Platonic love and Bletchley colleague Joan Clarke ( Keira Knightley ). “It had to be contained, the emotion I felt in the last scenes, because it was near the end of the schedule of shooting. I couldn’t control my grief, and I realized it wasn’t me in the role being upset as Turing. It was me outside of the role grieving for the loss of this extraordinary man that I had this great sympathy for.”
Mr. Cumberbatch, who is 38 years old, has become known for playing brainy characters, such as a 21st-century Sherlock Holmes in the television series that created his breakout fame. “People may think, ‘Oh, he’s playing another difficult genius,’ but they’re very different,” he says of Sherlock and Turing. “Sherlock is an extrovert, who uses people. He’s asexual and sociopathic. Alan is just slightly awkward, he’s more guileless in his behavior.”
“Sherlock” made him a heartthrob whose fans at first called themselves Cumberbitches. At his urging the term morphed to more genteel labels, like the Cumbercollective. When asked why the asexual sociopathic character inspired such passion, his first response is to list qualities that don’t begin to explain adolescent-style crushes. “He’s iconic. He’s a man of the digital age. He’s incredibly intelligent.” Push harder and he offers a more nuanced analysis.
“The asexuality is interesting. He’s unobtainable and that drives people kind of crazy. I think you can take ownership of someone who’s not a predatory heterosexual, as a lot of heroes can be, whether it’s a kind of Bond character or what else. He’s not a threat and that I think makes him a safe fascination you can own in a fan world, because in reality it would be very messy and very different.”
His fans almost weren’t Cumber-anythings. He is the son of actors, who play Sherlock’s parents on the show, and his father dropped the family name to became Timothy Carlton professionally. “I was going to be Benedict Carlton,” Mr. Cumberbatch said. He wasn’t getting work, and when his agents suggested using his catchier original name, he resisted. “I said, ‘It sounds a bit like a fart in the bath. It’s clumsy. Dad doesn’t use it.’” The agents argued that people would remember it, if only to wonder, Cumber-what? “When people started suggesting I’d made it up, I was like, ‘Well thank you for crediting me with that much imagination. I don’t think I could possibly make up a name as stupid as the one I was born with.’”
When it was announced that Mr. Cumberbatch would play Hamlet in the West End next year, the 12-week run sold out in hours. That outsize level of fame is bound to settle down one day. “I’ve got so much that’s fortunate going on in my life right now,” he says, referring to his recent engagement to Sophie Hunter, a theater director. “I was very happy in this world as a working actor before any furor kicked off and I will continue to be that person. The work is wonderful and I’m in it for the long game. People say, ‘This is your moment.’ Well, I hate to say it, but I don’t believe in moments. I don’t believe in one-offs. I believe in something continuing and continuing, and I want to be doing this job for the next 50 years if I live that long.”
