Friday, August 29, 2014

Benedict Cumberbatch: Sherlock takes his Hamlet to the big screen

MAIL ON LINE
By BAZ BAMIGBOYE
PUBLISHED: 17:06 EST, 28 August 2014 | UPDATED: 17:21 EST, 28 August 2014

From stage to film: Benedict Cumberbatch (left), who will star as Hamlet at London's Barbican and pictured above wiith Keira Knightley  in The Imitation Game - he plays Alan Turing, the man who cracked the Nazi Enigma
From stage to film: Benedict Cumberbatch (left), who will star as Hamlet at London's Barbican and pictured above with Keira Knightley in The Imitation Game - he plays Alan Turing, the man who cracked the Nazi Enigma

Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch is in talks to bring his stage Hamlet to the screen. The play begins performances at the Barbican next year, and negotiations for it to be filmed live and shown in cinemas through National Theatre Live for one night are well advanced.

The actor, along with the production’s director Lyndsey Turner and producer Sonia Friedman, has spent more than a year ensuring that this will be a ‘people’s Hamlet’.

‘I felt very strongly that as wide an audience as possible should have access to it,’ Cumberbatch told me.

The Barbican’s allocation of seats for the entire 12-week run, which starts on August 5 next year, have been snapped up already.



But there will be 100 seats available per performance. ‘They will be sprinkled throughout the house . . . they’re not behind pillars,’ the 38-year-old joked.

He said that he and Ms Turner were eager to make their Hamlet as ‘fresh’ as possible, ‘like a new play that just landed as a pdf in someone’s computer inbox at the Royal Court’, as he described it.

‘We want to escape the idea that it has been done before, and we’re looking at the whole play — not just the eponymous hero.’

Benedict is a thespian polymath. There’s no role he cannot take on.

We had met to discuss another of his projects: a towering portrait — one of the great performances of the year — of Alan Turing, the man who helped break the Nazi’s Enigma code, in the film The Imitation Game.

Watching the movie, I was struck by his approach to Turing: the way he grasped and captured the man, not just the cliched genius. The film is all the more heartbreaking because of it.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2737177/BAZ-BAMIGBOYE-Sherlock-takes-Hamlet-big-screen.html#ixzz3Bq0bg1BD 
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