Benedict Cumberbatch’s weird first meeting with Radiohead: “I was really nervous”
Never meet your heroes, they say, and while I can categorically prove that isn’t the case, having once bumped into the bloke who was inside Mr Blobby at a service station, even celebrities can get starstruck sometimes, even when they’re A-listers like Sherlock himself, Benedict Cumberbatch.
Marvel’s star of Dr Strange most recently appeared in one of the most depressing-sounding films imaginable in the shape of The Thing with Feathers, which is about a man whose wife dies suddenly, leaving him to raise two boys alone, at which point a crow, which is supposed to represent grief, starts haunting him. Fun!
And some cruel folk might well describe his main musical obsession as equally cheery, although honestly that would sell Radiohead way, way short given that they are probably the closest band the last couple of generations have to The Beatles.
Cumberbatch is fairly obsessed with the Oxfordshire quintet, who recently reunited for a sold-out European tour, and has often spoken not just about his love of the band but also about individual songs of theirs that mean the most to him.
Luckily for him, Thom Yorke and Co are equally admiring of his work; indeed, Cumberbatch interviewed Yorke himself back in 2017 when they discussed the actor’s then-upcoming film The Current War, and the band’s music. A couple of years previously to that, they had their first, incredibly awkward-sounding meeting, as Cumberbatch explained to the NME, saying: “(Radiohead producer) Nigel Godrich and (director) Edgar Wright came to see me in Hamlet; they came backstage afterwards and we had a nice, long chat. I said to Nigel: ‘I’m a massive Radiohead fan, I don’t suppose any of the boys would want to come and see some Shakespeare?’ So Jonny (Greenwood) and Thom came one night and afterwards we talked backstage.”
Then came what sounds like a puzzlingly reserved encounter, given that Radiohead had been playing to crowds in the tens of thousands for decades, and Cumberbatch had the same year received an Oscar nomination for his performance in The Imitation Game. These are pretty successful people we’re talking about.
He added: “I was really nervous because it hadn’t been a great performance, so I was looking at the ground all embarrassed. But so were they – and Thom was muttering: ‘Yeah, we’re really big Sherlock fans…’ There was all this shifting around, all looking at our shoelaces. It was so weird!”
Cumberbatch has some interesting projects on the way in the next year or so, all of which sound markedly more entertaining than sitting through two hours of a crow watching a widowed man cry. First up there’s Guy Ritchie’s Wife and Dog, also starring Rosamund Pike and Anothny Hopkins in the true life tale of a man who discovers the harmful effects of a major pesticide and goes up against the corporation that makes it.
Then there’s the latest from the Oscar-winning former Bond director Cary Joji Fukunugwa, called Blood on Snow, which involves a hit man falling for the wife of his client, who happens to be the woman he is supposed to assassinate. Finally there’s the intriguing-sounding Morning, which is about a society in which a pill is invented that does away entirely with the need to sleep and puts an artificial sun in the sky to simulate daylight. Jurassic Park’s Laura Dern co-stars.
