Benedict Cumberbatch (5 page)

For now, though, in these early years as a professional, and as uncertain as his career could be, he was satisfied with his lot: stage and screen work gathering pace. ‘You can’t predict how it’s going to turn out,’ he said of this uncertain time. ‘What happens is you do your bit, you settle, and see where you are in the grand picture of where everyone else is. You go, “Ooh, I’d like a bit of what that person’s doing, and I think I can get up to that standard, and I think I could be taken seriously enough to do that.’ Just as
Fortysomething
was demoted into virtual obscurity by ITV, Benedict Cumberbatch was about to play a part which would make him – if not a star – a name.

I
n September 2003, filming began in Cambridge and London on a new film for television about Professor Stephen Hawking. Its director, Philip Martin, had excelled as a documentary filmmaker for TV, with credits including a full six-part series for the BBC in 1997 called
Stephen Hawking’s Universe
, in which the scientist’s theories on the evolution of the cosmos, black holes and time travel were explored.

Stephen Hawking became famous outside scientific circles with the publication of
A Brief History of Time
in 1988, which detailed his studies and explorations into the Big Bang Theory – the theory stating that the creation of the universe occurred 15 billion years ago via a gargantuan explosion. The book became a best-seller, but Hawking had long been confined to a wheelchair for many years after the onset of motor neurone disease.

The new BBC film, simply titled
Hawking
, concentrated on the period between 1963 and 1965, when he was studying for his doctorate at Cambridge University, but against the growing shadow of his illness. ‘It’s about the nature of time on both a deeply personal and a universal scale,’ commented the film’s producer, Jessica Pope. ‘At the moment when his intellect was striving to grow to its full potential, his physical self was cruelly closing down.’

At the outset of
Hawking
, Stephen is celebrating his twenty-first birthday in his hometown of St Albans, Hertfordshire. Lying on the grass beside his future wife, Jane Wilde, and stargazing, he finds he is unable to get up and soon discovers that he has only two years to live, due to the onset of his illness.

The film’s screenwriter, Peter Moffat, had written
Cambridge Spies
for broadcast in 2003, a four-part drama about Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, in which Cumberbatch and fellow
ex-Harrovian
Patrick Kennedy briefly featured. The lead roles were taken by a new generation of promising young actors: Samuel West, Toby Stephens, Rupert Penry-Jones and Tom Hollander.

A year later,
Hawking
marked Cumberbatch’s debut as a lead on television. He confessed that while the prospect of playing Stephen was a thrill, it was daunting too. ‘That initial elation of getting the job passed over very quickly, because I thought, “I’ve got a lot of work to do”.’ Even so, he would discover that those pressures would lead to some rewarding moments during the making of the film, and
would call it ‘the most satisfying job I’ve done’ in his career up to this point.

The task of portraying on screen someone who is still alive can be fraught with difficulties. Hawking himself had
co-operated
with the filmmakers, but had questioned an early draft of the script where, in one scene, his character was seen to have discussed his illness. He wondered if this was too ‘soap opera’. ‘I think what Stephen thinks is a soap opera is rather different from what the rest of us think,’ commented director Philip Martin just before the film received its TV premiere. The affair was written up in the press as if there had been big arguments, but Cumberbatch denied it. ‘The fact that he didn’t like the first draft of the script is par for the course,’ he said. ‘We made changes to accommodate his views, and he remained continually in conference with the production team. He’s been integral to the film.’

Stephen Hawking met Cumberbatch twice during the making of the film – first at a script meeting, and at a subsequent day of shooting at Caius College in Cambridge, the city in which the Professor (by now in his sixties) was still living. ‘We got a call that Stephen might pop in and see it being filmed,’ said Philip Martin. ‘So Stephen as he is now met Stephen as he was then, in his old college quad. It must have been strange for him to see himself portrayed. He said it was really great to be played by someone much
better-looking
than himself.’

The young actor was nervous about meeting the scientist, especially on set. ‘There he was – this incredibly intelligent, forceful presence – and there was I, a dopey actor feeling
anything but intelligent.’ But any anxieties soon fell away. ‘There was lots of joking. He watched a bit and then said, “Very good, very realistic – but you’re much too handsome.”’ He was a lively presence during the shoot, even if communication could be an arduous process. ‘He is very keen to beat you to making the first joke,’ said Philip Martin. ‘The business of communicating is so difficult, he gets down to what he wants very quickly, so you have very productive meetings and he tells you exactly what he thinks.’

Someone else who visited the set was the real-life Hawking’s son, Tim. ‘Tim looked quite shell-shocked,’ Cumberbatch told the
Radio Times
. ‘He told me that he had only ever spoken to his dad through his voice synthesiser, and had only ever seen him in a wheelchair, so it was very spooky seeing me as his father, walking and talking.’

Because of Hawking’s condition, casual conversation could be an involved process, and Cumberbatch longed to have more time with him to ask questions. ‘You want to sit down and have a pint and ask, “Are you left-handed or right-handed? What do you look for in a girlfriend?” I couldn’t because having a conversation with him is such tortuous hard work.’ But he came to understand the slight awkwardness between them. ‘Every now and again our eyes would catch and I’d look away and then I held his gaze for a little bit and he looked back up again and I smiled at him and he smiled back and it was fine. I suddenly realised he must be uncomfortable with this whole thing.’ In 2007, he elaborated further: ‘It was a bit frustrating because you’re not allowed to ask him any questions. Perhaps he
feels that everything you might want to know is already available in his work.’

The real-life Jane Wilde, Hawking’s first wife, visited another university location shoot, this time at Trinity Hall, and was moved to tears watching Lisa Dillon and Cumberbatch playing her and Stephen as they had been 40 years earlier. ‘It reminded me of how idealistic we felt then. That is one of the most difficult things to cope with, to see how it’s all gone so horribly wrong,’ she told the
Daily Mail
in 2004. ‘But people will see how things were, and make a comparison with the present, and in that sense the timing is fortuitous.’

Confining the story mostly to just a two-year period in the distant past did mean that the team working on the film had greater freedom than they would have done had they tackled a biopic of Hawking’s entire life. ‘With this period of his life,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘we almost had carte blanche because not many people know that much about it.’ This was long before
A Brief History of Time
, and long before Hawking became famous. ‘Unusually in playing a real person, I had pretty much a blank canvas. There isn’t even any film from those days.’ There was, however, some footage of Stephen’s mother, and further inspiration came from friends of Hawking’s, and from Jane Wilde.

The aim was to give a performance somewhere between an impersonation and his own interpretation of the man. But Cumberbatch was determined to make the character a realistic one. ‘It’s very important to portray Stephen as a human being rather than as a kind of superhero icon, which
of course he is. We wanted the audience to engage with this person beyond what he was struggling through with his body, so that his character and the great joy of scientific discovery and finding true love were at the forefront.’

As part of his preparation, Cumberbatch enlisted the help of a movement teacher and consulted with two men who actually had motor neurone disease. To act the role, it was essential to examine how the disease affects the body’s gravity. His findings made him feel grateful for his physical condition, and every night after filming, rigorous exercise was a must. ‘Every night after filming, I’d do stretching exercises to expand my limbs in a way that I couldn’t during the day, while playing someone who’s losing the use of his muscles.’

Emulating Hawking’s declining speech patterns was also hard work, although Cumberbatch was said to have come close even during his audition. ‘It was quite clearly written in the script,’ he told
The Times
. ‘It’s slightly like the atonal palate of a deaf person because the soft palate goes, the tonal variation goes, the tongue loses its elasticity, so it’s very vowelly, the consonants go. It’s like me when I’m very, very hungover, really.’

The real-life Hawking had eventually lost the power of speech, although not until the mid-1980s when he contracted pneumonia during a scientific conference, and had to undergo an emergency tracheostomy. With the help of an American voice synthesiser, Hawking could now communicate – albeit slowly – by selecting highlighted words from a computer screen, which he then arranged into sentences. But he never switched the setting of the voicebox
from an American accent to an English one. Cumberbatch discovered the reason why during the shooting of the film. Hawking had told him: ‘I find that American and Scandinavian accents work better with women.’

Great care had to be taken so that the behaviours of someone with severe illness were not overplayed. How to display increasing severity of symptoms without acting in dubious taste? ‘I thought I’d give it five stages,’ explained Cumberbatch, ‘so that the viewer would know where we were through the walk and talk. We specifically chose certain symptoms to emphasise, which does actually happen; one day the speech would be a lot worse than the fine motor skills.’

Cumberbatch felt strong responsibility for the portrayal, as he knew that for many, he was representing motor neurone disease on screen. ‘There will be thousands of people with motor neurone disease who will have that interest in the film.’ It was essential to get his portrayal right.

It wasn’t just Hawking’s worsening physical condition which was a challenge to dramatise. How can a narrative bring to life the subject of theoretical physics, which does not lend itself easily to visual representation in a drama? The scientist had hoped that the film might find room for his work on black holes in the 1970s and 80s, but Philip Martin – whose own background was in making science documentaries – worried it would have alienated the public. ‘By the time you get to Stephen’s work on black holes, the cosmology gets so complicated it’s very difficult to explain.’ Yet the final cut would satisfy the scientist, by then 62 years
of age and a twice-married father of three. He would say of the film, simply: ‘It captured the spirit of the time.’

Hawking
was broadcast by BBC2 on Tuesday, 13 April 2004, opposite several middling reality TV series on rival channels:
A Life of Grime
,
The Games
,
Neighbours from Hell
. It was a much more interesting proposition. A few press critics were guarded about how effective the mix of science, romance and illness actually was, and pointed out that some of the material was factually different to the content of a documentary screened immediately afterwards on BBC4. For instance, it was stated in the latter that Hawking’s first collapse had not occurred at his twenty-first, as suggested in the drama, but several months earlier while ice-skating with his parents.

But is the function of the biopic to document a life story as accurately as possible, or to encapsulate the heart and soul of its subject? Anyone’s life story poured into a 90-minute drama would be reductive. What seemed to be most important here was to access the essence of Stephen Hawking in the 1960s, and the critics were unanimous that Benedict Cumberbatch had achieved just that.

If reviews of the film itself, then, were relatively guarded about the mix of science, romance and illness, one thing that united critics was the brilliance of Cumberbatch in the title role. The
Guardian
’s Nancy Banks-Smith marvelled, ‘There was a gawkiness, arrogance and charm about Cumberbatch, which reminded you of a child taking a watch apart. And putting it together better.’ Over at
The Times
, Joe Joseph was also impressed at how Cumberbatch balanced the
failings of Hawking’s body – ‘conveying Hawking’s humour, his passion, his lack of self-pity, and giving the gist of Hawking’s features, his melting posture, those inquisitive eyes, that sloping gash of a smile, without overstepping the mark into parody.’

In the summer of 2005,
Hawking
would win Cumberbatch his first major award: the Best Performance by an Actor at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival. He lost out at the BAFTA Television Awards when Rhys Ifans triumphed for his portrayal of Peter Cook in the single drama
Not Only But Always
, but he was delighted to be in the running for Best Actor in the first place. He insisted that he was simply delighted to be able to attend the ceremony with his mother and father, and to be able to show off the Jil Sander suit he had bought specially. He later revealed that he had often been up against fellow nominee Michael Sheen in auditions, for parts Sheen gained and he hadn’t.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Hawking rarely connected again after the making of
Hawking
, but their worlds would occasionally collide. In 2010, the pair would share narration duties on a three-part documentary series for the Discovery Channel called
Stephen Hawking’s Universe
(unrelated to the Philip Martin series of the 1990s), for which Hawking wrote the scripts, on subjects including time travel, alien life forms and the life and death of the universe itself. In late 2012, both attended an informal ‘summit’ about the nature of existence in a Central London bar with other science enthusiasts including the author Will Self and the comedian Dara O Briain.

Cumberbatch’s connections with scientists were to continue. In early 2013 he played the quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg in a radio dramatisation of Michael Frayn’s
Copenhagen
. Set in World War Two Denmark, when the country was under Nazi occupation, it explored how scientific research between Heisenberg and fellow scientist Bohr (Simon Russell Beale) was under threat, due to their political disagreements. ‘These are such extraordinary people,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘with so much on their shoulders. So much of what they did affected so many people. It’s a ripe topic for drama.’