The two characters Benedict Cumberbatch connected with the most
From a floppy-haired, modern-day Sherlock Holmes to a spellcasting Marvel superhero to an adept and honoured character actor, Benedict Cumberbatch has had quite the ride. The son of actors Timothy Carlton and Wanda Ventham, he always stood a decent chance at making it in showbusiness, but few could have predicted how far his star would rise when he first played Professor Stephen Hawking in a 2004 TV movie.
The British heartthrob’s propensity for portraying real-life figures continued as his career took off. He played William Carey, husband of one of Henry VIII’s mistresses, in The Other Boleyn Girl and, in the 2019 TV movie Brexit: An Uncivil War, he provided an interesting take on controversial British political aide Dominic Cummings. He was also the original choice to play Pete Seeger in A Complete Unknown before the part went to Edward Norton instead.
In 2021, he played the title figure in the fantastically-named biopic The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. The movie, directed by The White Lotus star Will Sharpe, focused on Wain and his late 18th/early 19th-century artistic endeavours, mostly his surrealist paintings of anthropomorphised cats. According to Sharpe, via an article in The New York Times, Cumberbatch was perfect for the part. The director said his star was “unafraid to put himself in any scenario” and that there was “some overlap between Louis and Benedict; an overbusy diary, full of energy, full of ideas.”
In that same article, the actor himself expressed how much he’d enjoyed the role, particularly as it reminded him of a previous gig. “I had a similar connection to him that I did to Alan Turing when I did The Imitation Game,” he explained. “They were both quiet characters in a very loud world… how that loud, mechanicalized, industrialized era could snuff someone out who was a real hero to so many people across generations.”
Turing was a British codebreaker who, along with his team at Bletchley Park, cracked the seemingly unbreakable Enigma machine during World War II. His and his team’s efforts were vital in the Allies’ victory over the Axis powers and the eventual end of the conflict. Much like Wain, who suffered a serious head injury and lived his last 15 years in a mental hospital, Turing had a tragic final act. Upon the discovery of his homosexuality and his subsequent chemical castration, he took his own life in 1954, his life-saving work largely forgotten. For his portrayal of the unsung hero, Cumberbatch earned his first of two ‘Best Actor’ nominations at the Oscars.
When asked why he was drawn to characters with such unusual lives, the Doctor Strange star revealed that it was all to do with his own life behind the scenes. “I fit a lot of very boring brackets in my personal description,” he admitted. “I am drawn to the otherness of these people, to the difference from my lived experience. I want to understand it from the inside, not go, ‘Oh I know what that feels like.’”
Since the release of Louis Wain, Cumberbatch has stayed away from roles rooted in reality, instead spending most of his time on his Marvel obligations and collaborating with Wes Anderson. Who knows when he will return to this strand of acting or with whom that comeback shall be, but when it does happen, the chances are it’ll be good.
