The film is going to air on Channel 4 in January. And here is a very impressive account of Benedict turning into his subject:
Benedict Cumberbatch on playing my husband, Dominic Cummings
By Mary Wakefield for “The Spectator”
The visit was back in early June when the evenings were long and warm and the cabinet had not yet betrayed their promises to respect the referendum. Dom’s terrible at passing on information. (‘Might come round — think he’s vegan.’) So I wasn’t really expecting Benedict Cumberbatch to turn up at ours. It seemed too surreal a prospect. Nonetheless, I set the scene: flowers; vegan pie. All I knew about Cumberbatch politically was that he’d campaigned for Remain. I assumed, I’m afraid, that he had taken the part of Dom for the same reasons Ralph Fiennes took on Voldemort, or Christopher Lee, Dracula.
He arrived at the door, slight, polite and oddly familiar in the way famous people are. I led him downstairs into our kitchen, into the happy scene I’d laid on for him and quickly realised my mistake. He was friendly, curious — but he hadn’t come to judge Dom. The script was done and dusted. He’d come to become him.
‘I took the role because of the script,’ Cumberbatch tells me now. He’s not doing press for the Brexit movie, but he kindly agreed to talk to me about the strange business of transforming into someone else.
‘I’ve been a big fan of James Graham from This House onwards and I thought how extraordinary that I’m reading a script that reads like a thriller when I know the outcome. I’m being sucked into it — these characters, their intelligence, the wit of it, the emotional power of the drama. I realised this is what drama can do at its best.’
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It was a hell of a thing watching Benedict Cumberbatch prepare to play my husband. He sat down opposite Dom at about 8.30 p.m. that summer evening in what I imagine is a very Cumberbatchian pose: legs folded beneath him, alert, leaning forward, head up. ‘Just water please, I don’t really drink.’ By 10.30 he was leaning back, just like Dom, glass of red in hand. By 1 a.m. he was a mirror image of his subject. It was a Rorschach blot of a scene. Both men reclining, each with an arm behind their head.
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"To fake the death of one sibling may be regarded as a misfortune; to fake the death of both looks like carelessness." Oscar Wilde about Mycroft Holmes"It is what it is says love." (Erich Fried)“Enjoy the journey of life and not just the endgame. I’m also a great believer in treating others as you would like to be treated.” (Benedict Cumberbatch)
Liberty wrote:
