Celebrating the release of Netflix’s Eric, Benedict Cumberbatch is the cover star of the summer edition of City A.M. The Magazine
I’m under strict instructions not to ask Benedict Cumberbatch anything personal. “He doesn’t do profiles,” I’m warned ahead of our interview. Arriving at the posh London hotel hosting the press interviews for his new six-part Netflix drama Eric, a publicist pulls me away from a pile of shiny pain au chocolats to whisper the rules once again, just to be sure.
It’s understandable. The 47-year-old had a stalker break into his garden last year, digging up plants and throwing them at his windows, while he was inside with his wife and three children. Relaxing on a cream sofa in one of the suites, Cumberbatch is nothing like the highly-engineered publicity machine that precedes him. An empty wrapper in front of him suggests he has just demolished a Twix. He’s spoken about feeling old, but today he’s dressed more Gen Z: baggy cargo pants, white tee and a bracelet bearing multicoloured flowers. We’re settling into the first beats of conversation when he almost immediately breaks the rules. “As a parent, it’s a very hard watch,” he says of Eric, the new Netflix drama in which he plays an alcoholic father who mentally unravels when his son goes missing.
Cumberbatch seems to specialise in playing messed up men. Doctor Strange propelled him to the A-List and Sherlock first put him front-and-centre in the nation’s minds. He was also nominated for Academy Awards for his turns in The Power of the Dog and The Imitation Game, both of which feature complex, psychologically scarred men. But when I suggest this, he baulks. “I don’t think I’m drawn necessarily to darkness,” he says. “I’m drawn to a lot of light as well. I’ve played 115 characters over 20 plus years, so I’m going to be, every now and again, treading on something familiar. That’s just unavoidable.”
Having a conversation with Benedict Cumberbatch is a slightly dizzying experience. He speaks in a spiralling stream of consciousness, thoughts spilling out, sometimes fully formed, other times in fragments. He’ll start a sentence on one subject and by the time he’s finished it he’ll have launched into a whole new topic, having touched upon several others in the interim. “But it’s important not to shy away from the darkness,” he continues. “Sometimes in culture we want to knock the edges off, or if there’s darkness it’s sort of cute and cool rather than speaking to the deeper well, the mass of grey, filling in the gaps between good and bad, likeable and unlikeable.”
In recent interviews Cumberbatch has deflected personal questions, but today he brings up home life multiple times, always unprompted. It’s late in the afternoon and he tells me he’s “sleep deprived,” so perhaps that’s it, but I suspect his openness is testament to him being a fine conversationalist, unwilling to swerve the necessary context if it can strengthen his answer. He feels he ought to set boundaries but when he gets into his flow, he struggles not to engage fully and earnestly. If anyone was born to deliver a sermon, it’s Benedict Cumberbatch.
Eric: Benedict Cumberbatch returns
He’s also a polymath, learning to play the banjo in The Power of the Dog and how to puppeteer in Eric. He executive produced Eric, as he did on The Power of the Dog, so when the acting stops, he doesn’t. If there’s a behind-the-camera issue he’ll try to “mull it over at the end of the day”. In Eric he plays Vincent, an alcoholic father dealing with his own sense of parental abandonment when his nine-year-old son goes missing. What follows is a gripping drama about the unwinding of a man. It’s interspersed with fantasy when Vincent hallucinates a giant monster from a fictional TV show, thinking it’s following him in real life.
It’s a brilliantly strange, unwieldy set-up; reading lines to a seven-foot-tall puppet is surely his oddest gig yet. “What a privilege for me to be able to have these deep dives into the very worst of it and hopefully come up with some kind of redemptive message,” he says. “In this case it’s about love. It’s about reconnecting and taking responsibility and moving away from the things that are damaging us, coming out of the darkness of that and into the light of a new beginning.” He circles back to the idea of never going back to a certain type of character, revising his answer: “That’s a story worth repeating a few times.”
Having three young children is a reminder that time goes by very, very quickly. When you’re constantly doing stuff you don’t notice the gradual change. But when you’re sitting in the make-up mirror after a six month break you’re going ‘Wow, grey hair! There’s lines!’
Vincent, dreamed up by Abi Morgan – the writer behind The Iron Lady, Shame and Suffragette – is quite unlike anyone else. “It’s rare to bring something this complex into life,” Cumberbatch says. “He’s a functioning alcoholic who’s already had a mental collapse, from this unloved childhood where he was sectioned off as an embarrassment and pumped full of pills and no love. It would be hard to dredge that up every single day if it wasn’t already so brilliantly realised on the page.”
He says of his creative process: “It’s really about charting a lot of complex things, giving as wide a variety as possible for the edit with people you trust. And that means a lot of work, and creating enough to fail and fail better. You’re fuelled by so much that you can really, really feel free to let go.”
Did he let go, surrendering to the role? “Yeah, wonderful moments of freedom.” Then Cumberbatch goes into one of his knotty thought trails that tackles five or six different subjects as if it were one thought, his mind jumping from one thread to the next non-sequitur. “Fighting with yourself in some weird, clammy chalk pit, throwing yourself onto floors trampled on by 1,000 extras. Then being on a dance floor and dancing in sync with a giant seven foot tall puppet, jerking twistedly like a crazed person.”
If it takes time away from family the role has to be “worthwhile,” he says, especially as Eric involved filming in Budapest. “My family came there, but it was time away from home. There are other things to consider as well, but you know, that’s the primary concern when taking a job really. Is this going to be interesting? He’s a hard character to lean into, but to play him was a source of joy.”
Cumberbatch lives in London with his wife, theatre director Sophie Hunter, and their three children, aged between four and eight. Born into a family of actors, his mother Wanda Ventham and father Timothy Charlton both had careers that began in the 1950s. He recalls growing up surrounded by the film and TV landscape and being backstage on sets. Charlton saved for Cumberbatch’s “ludicrously expensive education” at Harrow school in north London, and today the actor says he works to make them proud. It was there he made his acting debut in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Titania, Queen of the Fairies, aged 12. His professional debut came in 2000 on televised hospital drama Heartbeat; a year later he made his London stage debut. It was in 2004 that he first came to mass attention playing Stephen Hawking in the Stephen Moffat drama Hawking (Moffat went on to write Sherlock, the two remain close friends).
I think we have all experienced the damaging nature of an overbearing inner critic at some point in our lives. I’m 47 so I’ve lived a bit now, and it’s full on
Cumberbatch has spoken about crippling self-doubt, and finds watching his work back “horrible”. The idea of the inner critic, something Cumberbatch has spoken about in the past, is explored through the show’s puppet, the titular Eric, who is “reflective of the monster in all of us,” he says. “The damaging nature of an overbearing inner critic, slamming the blame and shame into someone to try and paralyse them. I think we have all experienced variants of that at some point in our lives. I’m 47 so I’ve lived a bit now, and it’s full on. Hopefully not as much as Vincent but it’s made real in this, it’s made external.”
More than once he circles back to the implication that, at 47, he is getting on. Does he feel old? “I think there are stages of your life when you really feel your age,” he says. “Having three young children is a reminder that time goes by very, very quickly. I haven’t been back to back [with work] – when you’re constantly doing stuff you don’t notice the gradual change. But when you’re sitting in the make-up mirror after a six month break you’re going ‘Wow, grey hair! There’s lines!’ It’s not, ‘Oh my god, I’m old,’ it’s ‘I’m old, that’s a fact’… I’m older, is what I should be saying. I’m not old, it’s fucking infuriating when people in their 30s say that. It’s just an acknowledgement that time is passing.”
It focuses the London-born actor on what’s truly important. “Leaving the work at work is so easy,” he says. “I’ve got three people at home who demand that immediate, present tense nowness and,” he pauses, slowing and softening his voice to a breathy whisper: “It’s heaven.” He goes into soft, quieter speech whenever he talks about his family: “It’s the greatest thing, and we have to give them a lot, we have to hold them and give them boundaries and all of the tenderness but let them be free to teach you. It’s an amazing, enthralling journey.”
“I only really pop out for these things,” he adds, referring to our interview, falling back into the sofa and hugging his left knee to his chest. “I’m not at every shoe store opening like I used to be as a young ‘un, when you have the energy and time and the curiosity.”
Before we go I get a glimpse of life behind the Benedict Cumberbatch curtain. He’s mid-sentence but rises up from the sofa and spins around to where his rep has already positioned his coat at the exact height of his outstretched hand. We say our thank yous, then he marches down the corridor. No one is prepared for him to leave but he’s got somewhere to go. Exec producer hat back on, he bowls over to a publicist for confirmation all the interviews have gone well, then he’s out of sight; it was too quick to tell whether it was the stairs or the lift. Benedict Cumberbatch was in control.
Eric is streaming on Netflix now
