Benedict Cumberbatch (3 page)

Cumberbatch’s singing abilities have rarely been called upon since his schooldays, but from the reviews of the time, it sounds as if he already possessed burgeoning vocal skills. At a Swing Band Concert just before Christmas in 1994, his guest spot on ‘Minnie the ‘Moocher’ was such a hit with the audience that he was compelled to reprise it as an encore. Weeks earlier, he also did well in David Calhoun’s
City of Angels
, which marked the opening of Harrow School’s new Ryan Theatre in November 1994. ‘Cumberbatch perfected the character of Stone,’ wrote
The Harrovian
in its 8 December issue. ‘His whisky beaten, cigarette stained voice aptly captured the personality of the philandering private eye.’ It also noted his ability to make his singing voice be heard over the band, and even showed some promise as a dancer, a skill he had seemingly rarely used thus far. (Cumberbatch would later see a West End production with his parents, and at the time of writing, is likely to be involved in a big screen version, under the title
The Lost City of Z
.)

Whether in a starring or a supporting role, it’s evident that Cumberbatch was a superlative ensemble player. He did not act in a vacuum, he was not playing the big star, and he was co-operative with his fellow actors. But then, he was not drawn to acting because it was an opportunity to ‘show off’. Having both his parents in the business gave him a reality check about making acting a career choice. ‘Because I saw the working practices behind what they did, it didn’t carry a lot of mystique. I knew about the peripatetic nature, the uncertain income, what it can do to your social life … all of that.’

Benedict’s acting ambitions were not entirely supported by his parents to begin with, even though both were stalwarts of British stage and screen. ‘They were like, look at us, how out of control our lifestyle is, how money’s a huge ebb and flow.’ Indeed, part of the whole game plan of sending their son to Harrow in the first place was to wean him off the notion of wanting to be an actor. Ventham and Carlton were hopeful that a balanced education would push him towards an alternative, more secure career than the one they had both pursued. It seemed their ‘plan’ had not worked.

Cumberbatch later reflected that he lacked focus in his final year at Harrow (1994–95). He confessed that, now eighteen years old, he had preferred ‘pot and girls and music’ to studying. But there still seemed to be no let-up when it came to other extra-curricular activities. In sport, he had drifted from rugby and cricket to abseiling, and had become a mainstay of the school’s paragliding regiment. He was still fanatical about art – ‘My canvases were the walls of deserted squash courts. Where else would you be indulged like that?’
– and in February 1995, a ‘huge scissors sculpture in metal and string’ he had made helped The Park win a House Art Competition at the school.

But inevitably it was as a stage presence where Benedict Cumberbatch had made his greatest impact at Harrow. One of six departing pupils of 1995 to receive an Evelyn de Rothschild Leaving Scholarship, he was singled out for greatness in July of that year by the headmaster in an end-
of-term
speech. While Nicholas Bomford acknowledged that it was ‘invidious to pick out boys for special mention when so much has been achieved as a result of collective endeavour’, there was no escaping that even as a team player, Ben Cumberbatch was emerging as a star. His performances on stage, said Bomford, ‘will long be remembered by those lucky enough to have seen them.’ Drama tutor Martin Tyrell would later describe him as ‘the best schoolboy actor I’ve ever worked with’.

What to do next? He had considered law as a possible profession. For his parents, jittery about the insecurity of the acting profession, this would have been a relief. ‘A lot of people told me that barristers never knew where their next job was coming from, and that you had to trek all over the country, and it was very hard work. It sounded a bit like acting, so I stuck with that instead.’ It also occurred to him that his reasons for chasing the law as a career lay in acting anyway. He was a big fan of John Mortimer’s
Rumpole of the Bailey
on television, starring Leo McKern. Had he just wanted to study law so he could become Horace Rumpole?

He finally abandoned any aspirations to work in legal
circles when he visited the law department at Manchester University. He changed his mind; other law students reminded him of ‘the living dead’, and above all he realised his attempts to change career had been to ‘show off to my parents that I was capable of that’. Pursuing an acting career would be precarious and unpredictable, but so could just about any other career. His five years inside ‘an incredibly privileged bubble’ at Harrow School had left him in no doubt about what he really wanted to do: he wanted to be an actor, just like his parents.

W
ith Benedict at Harrow, Wanda and Tim had increased their stage work commitments. In 1991, for the first time in 20 years, they appeared together in a touring production of the Ray Cooney farce,
Out of Order
. In its West End run, the play won the Olivier Theatre Award for Best Comedy. The couple would also be regulars in three series of the BBC sitcom,
Next of Kin
, with Penelope Keith and William Gaunt. In 1997, having played Cassandra’s mum in
Only Fools and Horses
, Wanda would appear as the mum of Deborah (Leslie Ash) in another hit sitcom,
Men Behaving Badly
. But most of their work would be in the theatre now. Their son would come and watch them perform, often with increasing discomfort as his mum especially would play roles requiring her to be in some or other compromising position. ‘I had to say to her, sorry
Mum, I just can’t bear to see that gag one more time. I was so sensitive to it, she must have wondered if I was gay.’

After leaving Harrow in the summer of 1995, Benedict took a year out before university. He wanted to spend some time abroad, and in order to fund his trip spent around six months working in a London perfumier. The second half of his gap year found him in Darjeeling, West Bengal, India, where he taught English to Buddhist monks for an organisation appropriately called GAP. He was able to live with the monks, and witness all their daily rituals, including working and praying. ‘They taught me about the duplicity of human nature, but also the humanity of it, and the ridiculous sense of humour you need to live a full spiritual life.’

The monks also taught him how to meditate, something that would prove an invaluable aid in his acting career. It gave him ‘an ability to focus and have a real sort of purity of purpose and attention, and not be too distracted. And to feel very alive to your environment, to know what you are part of, to understand what is going on in your peripheral vision and behind you, as well as what is in front of you. That definitely came from that.’

There were sober moments. He would watch mourners carry corpses to the river to be burnt. ‘It’s not a charming ancient tradition,’ he pointed out. ‘You are inhaling the smoke of a burning body.’ But his experiences in Tibet were not without laughter either. On one occasion, his new friends were endlessly amused by the sight of two dogs having sex in a back yard. ‘The monks were on the floor laughing at these
sentient beings’ pain and ridiculousness, these two dogs just stuck together. “Kodak moment, sir!” Brilliant!’

Another time, his life was in danger, not for the last time. With four friends, he set off on an expedition to the mountains of Nepal. Bereft of guidance or sufficient protective clothing, the ill-equipped party soon ran into difficulties. ‘We got altitude sickness and then amoebic dysentery,’ Cumberbatch would recall. ‘We were lost for a day and a half, trekking at night and squeezing moss to get water. We slept in an animal hut that stank of dung and had hallucinogenic dreams because of altitude sickness.’ Salvation only came when they followed a trail of yak droppings and made it back to safety. ‘It was a pathetic expedition,’ he told journalist Caitlin Moran over 15 years later. ‘We were woefully under-prepared. I had simply an extra scarf my mother had knitted me and a piece of cheese.’

Safely back in Britain, Cumberbatch began his three-year degree at Manchester University in the autumn of 1996. Despite Harrow School’s location – slap-bang in the middle of the town, and not that far from Central London – he had felt a little cosseted there, and yearned for something grittier. ‘I needed to be out of the danger of tying a cashmere jumper round my neck. I wanted something a bit more egalitarian. I didn’t want just an extension of my public school, I wanted less exclusivity.’

He had considered Oxbridge for a time, but while both Oxford and Cambridge had drama societies and revue groups – most famously the Oxford Revue and the Cambridge Footlights – neither university offered a degree
course in drama. He opted for Manchester University, as it had a long and respected connection with drama and performance. In the late 1970s, all three writers of
The Young Ones
– Rik Mayall, Lise Mayer and Ben Elton – had studied there, as had Mayall’s co-star Adrian Edmondson. The 1980s intake had included Doon Mackichan (
The Day Today, Smack the Pony
) and
Goodness Gracious Me!
’s Meera Syal, while from the 1990s onwards,
Peep Show
creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain,
The Thick of It
’s Chris Addison, the Chemical Brothers, Professor Brian Cox and most recently, the comedian Jack Whitehall have all been Manchester graduates on various other courses. Several playwrights of excellence also attended the university, including Robert Bolt (perhaps most famous for the play
A Man for All Seasons
) and
Our Friends in the North
writer Peter Flannery.

At Manchester, Cumberbatch’s contemporaries on his drama course included Olivia Poulet, who hailed from South-West London, and who was two years his junior. In their final year, 1999, they would begin a relationship which would last 12 years. Also in their year was a young Mathew Horne, future star of the BBC1 series
Gavin & Stacey
, who was training to be a stand-up and who was writing a dissertation about the performance styles of Steve Coogan.

Cumberbatch’s own 30,000-word dissertation was on the output of film director Stanley Kubrick. His supervisor for the project was Michael Holt, who later remembered that the youth arrived at the university with some impeccable references from his previous school. ‘I remember one of his
masters from Harrow calling me to tell me what a great talent was arriving. And indeed he was.’ Holt recalled someone who was extremely popular with fellow students, could be pleasant and thoughtful, but had visions of becoming a brilliant actor rather than a superstar. ‘He knew it was something you had to work at. He wasn’t starry-eyed. He had a professional attitude.’

The drama course presented Cumberbatch with all sorts of new challenges. ‘We did a practical course in prisons and probation, which meant learning about the penal system and forms of rehabilitation, and then going in with a project for a month and a half to Strangeways, two other category C facilities and a probation centre. For a posh bloke with a silly name, to be in a world like that was extraordinary.’

Off-duty, as it were, Cumberbatch had made all sorts of new friends (‘a thoroughly healthy – and unhealthy – mix’), and he could party hard, but was for a time floored by glandular fever. Even so, it was becoming apparent that he had been right to follow acting as a career of choice. His parents were becoming resigned to his decision, but in a positive way. The truth was, whenever they came to see a play he was in, whether it was
Glengarry Glen Ross
or
Amadeus
, he clearly had such striking potential. ‘My parents were sanguine about it in the end. My dad came up to me when I was in a production and said, “You’re better now than I’ve ever been.” From that moment, I thought, “OK, if I’ve got his blessing, I’m going to do it.”’

Cumberbatch’s work during the late 1990s was rarely reviewed, but just after graduating from Manchester, he was
spotted by a handful of press titles. On 18 August 1999, during that year’s Edinburgh Festival, he was cited as one to watch by the
Daily Mail
’s resident gossip columnist. Nigel Dempster wrote that he was ‘wowing audiences’ at the Greyfriars Kirk House venue in Edward Albee’s two-hander,
The Zoo Story
. He had a connection with Benedict’s family – he was quick to acknowledge that Tim Carlton was an ‘old school friend’ from their days at Sherborne School in Dorset in the early 1950s.

The Zoo Story
was being performed by a theatre company called Tunnelvision. It was about two characters and a park bench in New York’s Central Park. Peter is trying to read, but Jerry wants to talk about the lonely life he leads. The review of the play in
The Scotsman
– frequently the first port of call for anything to do with the Edinburgh Festival – celebrated Cumberbatch’s versatility. ‘Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as Jerry is imaginative and dynamic. He is the sort of actor who could sustain interest and variety in a one-man show in which he played 20 different parts.’ He was just one future name who was being bookmarked as one to watch that summer at Edinburgh, where Miranda Hart was in a duo called The Orange Girls, and Cambridge graduates David Mitchell and Robert Webb were establishing themselves as a comedy double act.

Following Edinburgh, Manchester graduate Cumberbatch returned to London. While his girlfriend Olivia Poulet joined the National Youth Theatre, he embarked on one more year of education, this time at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art (LAMDA). He even gained his first agent, and
for a time experimented with a name change. Just as his dad had done over 40 years earlier, he ditched ‘Cumberbatch’ in favour of ‘Carlton’. His reasoning, he later explained, was for simplification; Cumberbatch was ‘a bit bumbly and messy’, and he assumed there was no way he could use that name as a professional actor. He soon had second thoughts, though, especially when he changed agents. ‘I wasn’t getting very far and my new agent suggested I revert. Benedict Cumberbatch was a mouthful of a name, but an unforgettable mouthful. They said it’s a great name, it will get people talking about you.’

At the end of January 2000, he made his first notable television appearance, in an episode of the nostalgic ITV Sunday night drama series set in 1960s northern England,
Heartbeat
. His parents had both appeared in the series: Tim played three different characters over the programme’s 18-year duration, while Wanda had played the same character in four episodes during the 1990s. Despite his many, much more prominent successes on television over the years, it is a curious statistic that Cumberbatch’s debut in
Heartbeat
attracted the biggest national TV audience of his entire career to date. Sandwiched in between
Coronation Street
and the firefighters’ drama series
London’s Burning
, nearly 15 million people watched that episode of
Heartbeat
. In fact, in that week only
Coronation Street
was watched by more of an audience.

Yet it was a one-off. He would not appear on TV again for well over two years. After his one-year course finished at LAMDA, he found other work hard to come by. For six
months or so, there was nothing. ‘It can be dispiriting when you’ve put your heart and soul into something and the results aren’t instantaneous.’

There were a few visits back to his alma mater. On 6 May 2000, during his final term at LAMDA, he made a comeback appearance at Harrow School in
The Taming of the Shrew
, once again as Petruchio, ‘with an ingenious mania … an amiable arrogance which was simultaneously hilarious and sympathetic’. In September, he guested as Jack Worthing in a production of Oscar Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest
, with Peter O’Toole’s teenage son Lorcan featuring as Algernon. Cumberbatch was helpfully flagged once again in the pages of the
Daily Mail
by Nigel Dempster, but
The Harrovian
review also proudly highlighted the comeback kid. ‘An actor of whom we shall surely hear more,’ it remarked. ‘He portrayed all the signs of a natural professional.’

A few months later, he was back at Harrow as part of CAMERA, a theatre group he had formed at university, to perform
Kvetch
, a drama by Steven Berkoff, in which he played George, a Jewish wholesaler. It was performed for staff and upper school ‘due to the content of the play’. It’s worth noting that Cumberbatch was by no means a name, but such was his reputation in drama at the school that his guest spot was so warmly received – and reviewed in the school magazine as ‘a genuine crowd-pleaser’.

For the most part, though, actual acting jobs were scarce in the months after LAMDA. He scraped together a living as a waiter in restaurants, but there was little more than that. ‘I was on beans and toast. I had an actor friend who said we
were enjoying the lemon rind years, meaning we’d eat the lemon rind in our drink if we could only afford one.’

After an upward trajectory through his schooldays, and a high-octane life at university, Cumberbatch realised the real work was only just beginning. In the bubble of student drama, you’re encouraged all the way. Outside that in the wider world, it was harder to establish oneself. ‘You’re instilled with confidence from that,’ he would say many years later, ‘and then you get rejection.’ Fortunately, though, some proper stage work was not far away.