Benedict Cumberbatch (6 page)

Not necessarily accessible topics, but such was the brilliance and sensitivity and intelligence of Frayn’s writing that he managed to make potentially difficult material into compelling drama. ‘You can’t betray the intelligence of the characters for the sake of simplifying the story,’ declared Cumberbatch. ‘At the same time, you can’t leave the audience in the dust. I’ve struggled with science in things I’ve played before, but it’s important to understand what’s in front of you, given the speed at which Bohr and Heisenberg deliver it, because they are that smart.’

By then, he had also portrayed a botanist (in the 2009 film
Creation
) and both Victor Frankenstein and the monster he created – of which, much more later – and had a personal passion for the power and importance of science. To this end, in March 2013, he was appointed guest director of the Cambridge Science Festival. ‘My link to a science festival may seem a little tenuous, yet as an actor who has researched playing Stephen Hawking, Joseph Hooker, Werner
Heisenberg, and both Frankenstein and his creation, I’ve long had a passion for all fields of science. Our engagement with it has reached a crucial crossroads.’

Ten years before this appointment at the Cambridge Science Festival, Benedict Cumberbatch had been in the city filming
Hawking
. Not only had he learnt about performance from Stephen Hawking, he had also concluded something about the value of life itself: ‘Life’s very precious. You’ve got to give it 120 per cent. Just celebrate the fact that we’re alive and enjoy it.’ And for him the best review came from its subject: Hawking himself. Even though the Professor was in poor health at the time, suffering from pneumonia, he was said to have enjoyed the result, and the portrayal of him. ‘He’s said he likes the film,’ Cumberbatch reported back. ‘For a man of few words those are potent ones.’

T
he success of
Hawking
meant that Benedict Cumberbatch was in demand for television work. Small roles came and went, from a second instalment of
Heartbeat
, to Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker’s satire on London hipsters,
Nathan Barley
. But for his biggest project of 2004, he was off to South Africa to film a mini-series for BBC2, which, at a cost of £5 million, was one of the channel’s most expensive productions yet.

To the Ends of the Earth
conflated into three parts a trilogy of novels written by William Golding: 1980’s
prize-winning
Rites of Passage
, and its two successors,
Close Quarters
and
Fire Down Below
. It was set in 1812 and was about the passengers and crew sailing from England to Australia squeezed on to a vessel which had once been a robust warship, but was now in sorrier, ropier condition.
The story was told almost entirely from the perspective of Edmund Talbot, a young aristocrat travelling to Sydney to take up a government post arranged for him by his godfather in his native England. Edmund documented the voyage in a journal, which would be sent back to his godfather.

William Golding had died in 1993, but his daughter, Judy Carver, agreed to share some of his private journals with the BBC, as a way of showing the estate’s support and trust in their making the series. She revealed that her father had intended making the first novel a stand-alone affair, but could not resist extending the story. ‘I think he said at one point, “I’ve left all these people sitting around in the middle of the ocean, and I keep thinking of things that Edmund would say.” I think he did walk around imagining himself in the world he had created. His imagination was very strong, to the extent that he could actually feel things. He could feel the texture of the wood on the boat.’

The unpredictable climate in Britain would have made for a difficult filming schedule, and other locations like Australia and Malta were considered too costly. So it was decided to shoot the entire production in South Africa, making it the biggest television project ever made in that country. Cumberbatch (as Edmund) and a supporting cast including Sam Neill, Jared Harris (son of Richard), Victoria Hamilton and Daniel Evans made it to Richard’s Bay Harbour, a few hours away from Durban, just as the BBC crew were completing months of work on constructing sections of the boat. ‘We had this really brilliant mixed crew,’ commented Cumberbatch, ‘though it was possibly a bit colonial, because
we had these Zulu boys who were literally employed to rock the boat.’ Even there, the weather was often influencing the shoot. Heavy rain could come without warning, and the tides wouldn’t necessarily swell at the right moments of filming.

There were other uncomfortable aspects to the shoot. Heat was one. ‘The set was housed in what was basically a massive corrugated iron shed: a giant oven,’ Cumberbatch told the
Radio Times
. ‘The temperature was incredible. The sweat was just running off you, especially in those old, thick velvet costumes. It made it virtually impossible to do any make-up because nothing would stick to your face. No matter how much water you drank, no matter how much rest you had, some days we just had to give up and stop filming.’

One of the producers, Lynn Horsford, compared
To the Ends of the Earth
to Golding’s most famous work,
Lord of the Flies
. ‘It has similar themes of what happens in a closed society. There’s a very strong sense of class structure – it’s like Britain in miniature. It has looked incredibly intimate, like
Big Brother
on a boat.’

In fact, the gestation of
To the Ends of the Earth
had already taken five years, pre-dating
Big Brother
. The adaptation’s genesis dated as far back as 1999, but the project had collapsed after the death of its original screenwriter, Leigh Jackson. Finally, Tony Basgallop was hired to complete the script when the Russell Crowe
sea-based
film
Master and Commander
(directed by Peter Weir) had been commercially successful, making
To the Ends of the Earth
financially viable.

As Edmund Talbot, the central character, narrator and
guide for the entire voyage, Cumberbatch represented the story’s voice and conscience, the figure the viewers were asked to relate to. Over the course of the three 90-minute episodes, he was hardly off the screen. He described it as ‘a nineteenth-century rock’n’roll gap year’: ‘It has all the same ingredients – drug-taking, casual sex and a journey of self-discovery.’ Hopefully, unlike his experiences in Tibet in 1996, this would be a gap year where he would be in no danger.

Edmund was a poor sailor, but at least Cumberbatch only needed to
act
being seasick. ‘He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth,’ he said, ‘and this is a pioneering trip, but he thinks it’s going to be all plain sailing.’ Among those joining Talbot aboard the craft were the anti-royalist Mr Prettiman (Sam Neill), the no-nonsense and irascible Captain Anderson (Jared Harris), a strict governess by the name of Miss Granham (Victoria Hamilton), and a well-oiled artist called Brocklebank (Richard McCabe).

The ambitious, priggish and often arrogant Edmund Talbot was not an easy narrator to empathise with, but Cumberbatch brought plenty of humanity to the part, recognising that under the bumptiousness, there was vulnerability and curiosity. ‘He’s always open to learning. He’s a product of his time.’ If Talbot’s voyage began with what was described to him as ‘the objectivity of ignorance’, he was assured that he would be completing it, ‘with the subjectivity of knowledge, pain and the hope of indulgence.’ To try and empathise with Talbot’s limitless self-confidence, Cumberbatch drew on his experiences back at Harrow in the
early 1990s, and recalled how some of his wealthy contemporaries had already assumed a sense of authority and position, having been born into a privileged existence.

To the Ends of the Earth
marked Cumberbatch’s first-ever screen sex scene, with Paula Jennings in the role of Zenobia. ‘We were both terribly terrified,’ he said of the experience. ‘You’re doing it all in front of a bunch of strangers. There was a large group in a small cabin.’ The character would have been sexually very confident, and in any case, because of his point of view, he would have been keen to paint himself as a sexually experienced figure. ‘In the book, Edmund knows what he’s doing. But I imagine that, rather like others of his ilk, his father had probably given him a chambermaid or prostitute to initiate him.’

Although a great deal of the budget (which would eventually double to £10 million) was spent on constructing the ship sets to look as authentic as possible, many of the most memorable scenes came with the more intimate moments: the tensions between characters in tiny rooms. ‘We had to build all that,’ said David Attwood, the director, ‘just for one character to look another in the eye. But that’s what it’s about, I think.’

Attwood had been especially keen for the adaptation to look gritty and uncomfortable, rather than a glamorous travelogue. ‘David wanted [it] to be an accurate representation of what it was like to pull off a trip on the sea in those days,’ said Jared Harris, playing Captain Anderson. ‘He was eager to deglamorise the idea of the beautiful high seas. He wanted to make
To the Ends of the 
Earth
as frightening as it must have been. Back then, it was lethal. Everyone was taking a huge risk just by setting foot on a boat.’ Sea travel was no fun, it could be rough, tedious and dangerous.

As he was on screen for just about the whole of the series, Cumberbatch was busy as could be, but said, ‘Each day was a new challenge. I loved hurling around that boat on ropes, with bits of rigging falling around me in flames.’ With any spare time when the cameras weren’t rolling, he – like many of his co-stars – couldn’t wait for the chance to let his hair down. The surroundings of South Africa offered safaris on horseback, and he spent time skydiving and learning to scuba dive.

But there were also dramas off set. Future
Gavin & Stacey
star Joanna Page (Marion Chumley, another of Edmund’s potential love interests) had a narrow escape. One day, she hailed a taxi and had an alarming experience. ‘The driver refused to take me back to my hotel. He drove me around for ages and said that he would only take me back if I let him take nude photos of me. I politely refused.’ Page managed to get back to base unharmed but after she had returned to the UK, something even more worrying happened on the South African highways to three of her fellow cast members.

One evening, Benedict Cumberbatch, Denise Black and Theo Landey were in a car on the highway to Santa Lucia, near the South African border with Mozambique. The soundtrack to their journey was a Radiohead song, ‘How To Disappear Completely’, and Cumberbatch had felt about as relaxed as could be. ‘It was one of the best times in my life.
Then bang! Every time I’m feeling really good, a bit of me is waiting for that bang.’

The bang began with a tyre blowing. They had no choice but to stop. Stranded in the dark, they now found themselves surrounded by six armed men, who had crept out from a eucalyptus plantation. ‘They frisked each of us for weapons and valuables,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘then bundled us back into the car and drove us into the bush.’

Once there, the men stopped the car, the three actors were hauled out, and they were told to put their hands on their heads. The men swiftly tied the victims’ hands behind their backs, ordered them to kneel down, and were put in ‘the execution position’ with a duvet over their heads in order to silence the shots. When Cumberbatch tried to stand up, the robbers told him to get in the boot of the car. ‘I heard Denise saying, “Please don’t kill him.”’

It was in the car boot that Cumberbatch quickly hatched a plan: he pretended to be severely claustrophobic and thought in the panic he might die. ‘There’s a problem with my heart and my brain,’ he told their captors. ‘If you leave me in here, I will die, possibly have a fit, and it will be a problem for you. I will be a dead Englishman in your car.’ After a few minutes, the men agreed to let him out. They took him up the hill on his own, and tied his hands behind his back once again. Then the men disappeared. After a time, the three actors made a run for it, and contacted the police. They had no money, transport or debit cards but at least they were alive, and pretty much unharmed (although Cumberbatch still has a scar from being tied up).

‘I thank God I had the presence of mind to give them the idea that it would be better to keep me alive,’ he would later say. Their ordeal had lasted around three hours, and for much of that time they had not known if they would survive it. ‘I knew my mother was going to get a call, either from me or someone else,’ Cumberbatch would recall, ‘and the difference would change her life.’

Maybe what saved their lives was to remain polite and helpful at all times. That was the advice offered in an email that, by happy coincidence, Theo Landey had received only days before filming started, about to how to react in the event of a car-jacking or maybe it was because they were accustomed to being directed, even if it was usually by someone infinitely friendlier. ‘It was only because we were actors,’ believed Denise Black, speaking in 2011, ‘and so used to taking instruction and being able to keep yapping, that we were able to talk our way out of it.’ Indeed their performances were so persuasive that they had been spared.

To the Ends of the Earth
was broadcast in July 2005. Like
Sherlock
’s first series five years later, it surprised some people by premiering in high summer. Surely, given all the money spent on it, it would have been better to launch in the autumn when TV viewing figures are traditionally much higher? But rather than pack the peak-time schedules with repeats, the BBC had crammed summertime with new series.

While some critics reduced
To the Ends of the Earth
to the
status of a period drama
Big Brother
at sea, Nancy
Banks-Smith
at the
Guardian
compared it with a maritime BBC favourite of the past, which in 1974 had guest starred one Tim Carlton. ‘To those with warm memories of
The Onedin Line
,’ she wrote, ‘it will all come as something of a cold shower. This is the Navy of rum, bum and the lash. We are spared the lash.’ This was no luxury liner, but a decrepit shell of a ship.

The making of
To the Ends of the Earth
was an adventure both onscreen and off. As a ‘nineteenth-century gap year’ for Benedict Cumberbatch, it had been a little too eventful, but by giving the performance of his life, he had probably helped to save the lives of both himself and two of his co-stars. In the aftermath of the car-jacking, he embarked on what he later described as an ‘adrenaline junkie drive’ – a lot of skydiving and hot air ballooning and ‘looking over the precipice’. If he learnt anything from the experience, it was a determination to live life to the full. ‘There is a sense of impatience and a yearning for a life less ordinary,’ he told the
Guardian
in 2010, ‘which is destructive, as it leads you away from harnessing the true value of things. But it also gives you fantastic knowledge. I know I am going to die on my own, which is something you don’t realise until you are faced with that. A sobering but profound thought to realise early in life.’

In co-operating with his co-stars, he knew he had to be self-sufficient in life. It was a lesson learnt in his younger days in Harrow (to be both co-operative and independent), but this particular experience had shaken him out of any complacency. ‘When you’ve been forced to look into the idea
that you die on your own,’ he told
The Times
newspaper, ‘you go, “Oh, OK, well if I’ve got my own company at the beginning and the end of this life, I might as well do a few crazy things with it under my own steam”.’