7 Benedict Cumberbatch performances you haven't seen but should

TELEGRAPH
By Guy Kelly8:00AM GMT
01 Nov 2014



He may be one of the most famous actors on the planet, with scores of fervent Cumberpeople in every port, but even Benedict Cumberbatch didn't get to where he is today without a significant amount of hard work.

Long before Sherlock, Star Trek, The Hobbit and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy made him a household name, Cumberbatch built an incredibly varied CV in film and television, playing an impressive variety of characters.

From prime ministers and physicists to policemen and parents (and that's without leaving the Ps), here are seven of the roles that made him the phenomenon he is today.

STUART: A LIFE LIVED BACKWARDS

An adaptation of Alex Masters’ 2005 biography of his friend, Stuart Shorter, Cumberbatch starred with Tom Hardy in this join production by the BBC and HBO. Cumberbatch plays writer Masters in the film, with Hardy as Shorter, a career criminal.

Hardy’s explosive performance was an early example of the muscular intensity he has become known for and earned him a BAFTA nomination in the process, while Cumberbatch was similarly lauded for a moving, restrained portrayal opposite.

STARTER FOR 10

Shining in an impressive cast of British up-and-coming talent of the time, Cumberbatch appears in this 2006 Tom Hanks-produced romantic comedy as Patrick, the captain of Bristol’s University Challenge team.

In the film Patrick is a fiercely stubborn intellectual - a market Cumberbatch has since cornered with some aplomb over the last decade - and provides many of the laughs. It also features a host of future Cumberbatch collaborators, among them James McAvoy (whose character in Atonement is framed for a crime Cumberbatch’s commits), Rebecca Hall (his wife in Parade’s End), Mark Gatiss (the writer of Sherlock, as well as playing Mycroft in the series) and Charles Dance (who appears in The Imitation Game).

HAWKING

Despite being made over ten years ago, the 2004 BBC television film Hawking is arguably still Cumberbatch’s most critically acclaimed role.

That isn’t to say his work since has been in any way a disappointment – he remains one of a small group of actors who consistently manage to please audiences and critics alike – but illustrates just how highly regarded his performance was.

The film, which charts Stephen Hawking’s early years as a PhD student at Cambridge University and was the first portrayal of the physicist’s life, was nominated for two BAFTA awards and illustrated Cumberbatch’s impressive range. Curiously, one of his biggest rivals come this awards season could be Eddie Redmayne, who has received tremendous reviews for his own portrayal of Hawking in A Theory of Everything.

FORTYSOMETHING

Looking back, it seems a more than a little absurd that Benedict Cumberbatch once played the son of Hugh Laurie and Anna Chancellor on television (his real parents are over twenty years older than either) but in 2003 he did, and somehow pulled it off.

Laurie also directed this ITV comedy drama series which saw him play Paul Slippery, a doctor hitting a mid-life crisis as his wife begins a new job as a head-hunter. Together they have three sons, the eldest of which is the precocious student Rory, played by a fresh-faced Cumberbatch.

The series hardly set ratings alight, but gave Cumberbatch a valuable chance to act in a major series with established stars, after several years of attempting to break through.

TO SEE THE OTHERS:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/11201192/7-Benedict-Cumberbatch-performances-you-havent-seen-but-should.html

Rebecca Hall, Alan Rickman and Richard Madden in new A Promise trailer

FAN SHARE
PUBLISHED: DECEMBER 31, 2013 00:34
By Jon Galt

December has been anything if not consistent, especially when it comes to the release of movie trailers. We have already had a whole host of different and interesting movie trailers this month and today is no different. Here, we give you the new A Promise trailer, starring Alan Rickman, Richard Madden and Rebecca Hall.

A Promise is a romantic drama, which is set just before WWI in Germany. The film centres around a married couple who take in the husbands young protegé. This leads to the wife falling for the younger man and, before long, they are pledging their love and devotion to one another.

As well as starring Richard Madden, Alan Rickman and Rebecca Hall, the A Promise cast also includes Maggie Steed, Toby Murray, Christelle Cornil, Shannon Tarbet, Jonathan Sawdon and Jean-Louis Sbille. A Promise is directed by Patrice Leconte, from the screenplay developed with Jérôme Tonnerre.


READ MORE HERE:http://www.fansshare.com/news/rebecca-hall-alan-rickman-richard-madden-in-new-promise-trailer/

'Sherlock' Star Benedict Cumberbatch Collects Broadcasting Press Guild Award For 'Parade's End', Rebecca Hall Also Honoured (HUFF POST)

Cumberbatch with 'Parade's End' adaptor Sir Tom Stoppard

Benedict Cumberbatch has picked up another award for his starring role in 'Sherlock' and said he was looking forward to getting his teeth back into the part of the scruffy sleuth.

The actor, who was named best actor at the Broadcasting Press Guild for his performance in 'Sherlock' and the period drama Parade's End, said he was looking forward to starting filming next week.

He said: "Playing Sherlock means a great deal to me. It's lovely to be back and have the hair in place. We're getting our teeth into the first episode of the new series next week so it feels like a treat. It's just wonderful to be back."

Benedict's 'Parade's End' co-star, Rebecca Hall, also walked away with a trophy after she was named best actress for her performance as his on-screen wife in the drama.

'Parade's End', which was shown on BBC Two in five episodes last year, picked up four prizes and was named best drama series, while dramatist Sir Tom Stoppard won the BPG writer's award for his work adapting the original novels by Ford Madox Ford.

READ MORE: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/03/14/sherlock-benedict-cumberbatch-parades-end-rebecca-hall_n_2877196.html#slide=2222544

Benedict Cumberbatch: 'Parade's End': A Plum Role for Benedict Cumberbatch

By Ross Langager 26 February 2013
Quavers and Hesitations

A moment in the premiere hour of Parade’s End explains the title in one deft stroke. In the midst of a luncheon with a friend and colleague, the brilliant but conventional government statistician Christopher Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch) receives a letter from his free-spirited wife Sylvia (Rebecca Hall). In blunt terms, she asks his leave to come home to Britain after deserting him for a fling with another man on the Continent. As Tietjens details a grimly rational plan for reestablishing a semblance of domestic stability upon her return, his more impulsive Scottish colleague McMaster (Stephen Graham) bluntly wonders why Tietjens does not simply divorce his wife for her serial infidelity. “For a gentleman,” replies Tietjens haltingly, “there is such a thing as… call it, ‘parade’.”

The BBC/HBO miniseries, adapted from Ford Madox Ford’s epochal tetralogy of 1920s novels, goes on to depict a long “parade” of failing conventional propriety. Tom Stoppard’s teleplay amplifies the frosted, caustic wit of the British upper class while maintaining the original’s core themes. The trajectory veers towards the titular expression of finality, as the inherited privilege of the Gilded Age and vestigial Victorian behavioral codes are eclipsed by the slaughter of the First World War and the profound social changes it engendered. Tietjens embodies initially the imperial establishment’s standard of gentlemanly self-possession, gradually becoming a harbinger of its agonizing downfall.

What a plum role for Cumberbatch this Tietjens is. Launched to prominence as a beloved 21st-century Sherlock Holmes, the fantastically named English actor here slips into the skin of another furiously logical genius who struggles to connect emotionally with those closest to him. Though the role is not wholly outside of his comfort zone, Cumberbatch rarely makes the obvious choice with the character, especially when Tietjens sees action at the Front and returns with acute shell shock (very literally expressed, in one haunted monologue about the varieties of explosives used in artillery bombardment). Quavers and hesitations in his Received Pronunciation utterances bespeak a considered intellect before the trenches, afterwards suggest mental trauma, and Cumberbatch gestures to the shift without ever telegraphing it.


READ MORE: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/168728-parades-end-a-plum-role-for-benedict-cumberbatch/

Benedict Cumberbatch : Parade's End, the New Downton Abbey? (WALL STREET JOURNAL VIDEO)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJT_WvTAM5s

Move over, Downton Abbey: Parade’s End is moving in Stellar writing and cast make British period piece a winner By Bill Brownstein, Montreal Gazette February 20, 2013 (CALGARY HERALD)

MONTREAL - Great news for those going through the initial stages of Downton Abbey withdrawal: another sterling British period piece is set to make its North American debut.

The five-part miniseries Parade’s End begins Tuesday on HBO Canada. But unlike Downton Abbey, viewers won’t have to wait endless weeks for it to wrap. This Parade comes to an end on Feb. 28; the entire series airs over three nights.

Saving the best for last: Not to detract from Downton Abbey, but Parade’s End packs even more of a punch. Yet it, too, has epic sweep, replete with lavish costumes, tony castles and manicured gardens.

Not that time-honoured servitude doesn’t come into the fray, but Parade’s End is much more upstairs than downstairs-oriented. There is also more passion and more mirth at play here than in Downton Abbey. The tension builds dramatically in this bittersweet tale of love and valour. And the “whiff of sex permeates like a vapour,” as one character so accurately assesses.

Not to detract from the work of Maggie Smith et al at the Abbey, but Parade’s End stars Benedict Cumberbatch (yes, the same guy somewhat slumming in the Sherlock TV series), Rebecca Hall, Adelaide Clemens, Rupert Everett, Stephen Graham, Janet McTeer, Miranda Richardson and many more give the equivalent of a master class in acting. Even the late Sir Larry Olivier would be dazzled.

And not to detract from Downton Abbey creator/writer Julian Fellowes, but it’s hard to top scripts penned by playwright Tom Stoppard, who has adapted this series from the acclaimed four novels of Ford Madox Ford. The dialogue, be it tongue-in-cheek droll or deliciously treacherous, is brilliant. To wit: “He’s not dead. He’s in Glasgow.” Or, “He’s a great lump of wood … (I want) to kill him to see if he has any blood in him.”



Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Move+over+Downton+Abbey+Parade+moving/7990821/story.html#ixzz2La6W2suT

Benedict Cumberbatch leads TV award nominees (BBC NEWS)

Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall are among the nominees for the 39th annual Broadcasting Press Guild Awards.

The pair are up for best actor and actress for their roles in BBC Two drama Parade's End, which leads the field with five nominations.

Parade's End also features in the best drama series category, where it will compete with Last Tango in Halifax, Line of Duty and Sherlock.

The awards will be presented at a ceremony in London next month.

Cumberbatch, whose nomination also recognises his performance in Sherlock, faces competition his from Parade's End co-star Roger Allam; Ben Whishaw for his roles in Richard II and The Hour; and Peter Capaldi, for The Thick Of It and The Hour.

Hall is up against Sienna Miller, for The Girl; Anna Chancellor, who starred in Pramface and The Hour; Olivia Colman, for Accused and Twenty Twelve; and Maxine Peake, from Silk and Room At The Top).

READ MORE: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21360595

THANKS AGAIN TO SCOOP IT! BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Watch: Teaser Trailer For 'Parade's End' Starring Benedict Cumberbatch & Rebecca Hall

BY KEVIN JAGERNAUTH, The Playlist
JANUARY 4, 2013 5:29 PM

Well, that was fast. Just a few hours after HBO announced that they'll be bringing the U.K. miniseries "Parade's End" starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall to American shores next month, they've gone ahead and dropped the first teaser trailer. And yes, it's look pretty damn good.



READ MORE: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/watch-teaser-trailer-for-parades-end-starring-benedict-cumberbatch-rebecca-hall-20130104?_tmc=D_o9I06a_8slt4iX8bOKsxgr0J-7w4uFjdcWMyPb4kY

Parade's End, final episode, BBC Two, review Serena Davies reviews the final episode of Tom Stoppard’s BBC Two adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's Edwardian novels Parade's End. (TELEGRAPH)

So what, finally, did Parade’s End amount to? The last episode of Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s doorstopper has aired on BBC Two. Half its scenes were of war and gory wounds; the other half of society chat, which came with its own form of lacerations, in the cutting remarks of the witchy Sylvia Tietjens (Rebecca Hall).

The BBC has thrown a lot at this drama: huge amounts of cash (American moneybags HBO helped out), two leads (Hall and Benedict Cumberbatch) with burgeoning Hollywood careers, and a script by Britain’s Greatest Living Playwright (arguably).

Stoppard duly delivered a screenplay that was ever astute, often funny and nearly always lucid – a feat considering the source material is frequently impenetrable. The script was also that remarkable thing in this Downton-saturated age: never sentimental.

In the final episode, noble, unglamorous hero Christopher Tietjens (Cumberbatch) finally got to the Front. There he met a shell-shocked CO who liked to summon pot shots from the Germans by careering across No Man’s Land. In Steven Robertson’s mercurial performance he had a whiff of Brideshead’s Sebastian Flyte about him: destroyed by hateful circumstances, but a bit of an immature fool to begin with.

The CO was spared the snipers (that would have been too obviously sad) but Sylvia’s twerp of a lover, Potty Perowne, was buried up to his neck by a shell, a fixed grin turned heavenwards. This moment elicited the evening’s funniest line. Sylvia, after defending her affair with him to her mother by saying it was an act of charity – “as Jesus would have done” then added: “They say he died with a smile on his face. Potty, that is.”

READ MORE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9558694/Parades-End-final-episode-BBC-Two-review.html

Benedict Cumberbatch: Great scene from Episode 4, Parade's End

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujSogzSbwxI

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Benedict Cumberbatch: Parade's End, episode four, BBC Two, review Episode four of Parade's End, Tom Stoppard's lush adaptaion of Ford Madox Ford's Edwardian tetralogy, was darkly humorous in tone, writes Patrick Smith. (TELEGRAPH)

By Patrick Smith
10:30PM BST 14 Sep 2012

There were shades of Evelyn Waugh in tonight's penultimate instalment of Parade's End (BBC Two), Tom Stoppard's lush, languorous adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's Edwardian tetralogy. Darkly humorous in tone, it found the putty-mouthed aristocrat Christopher Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch) stationed in a base depot near Rouen, fed up with the monotony and harebrained bureaucracy of life on the Western Front.

Though within range of German artillery, this was supposedly a safe posting; his day-to-day duties involved ordering fire extinguishers and dreaming of his would-be lover Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens).

There was a problem, however, in the form of his wife, Sylvia (the wonderful Rebecca Hall). Determined to get written approval from her husband to move into his family estate, Groby, Sylvia decided that she wanted to pay him a visit – despite General Campion (Roger Allam) being vehemently against the idea. “I’ve never known a woman like her," he fumed. "On no account is Mrs Tietjens to be allowed within 50 miles of Rouen, understood? I will not have skirts around my HQ."

Nevertheless, we watched as she charmed her way through France to show up at the General's camp. Indeed, Sylvia remained the most compelling thing about Parade's End: alluring, insouciant and deliciously duplicitous. We also saw her display a rare moment of vulnerability. “I haven’t had a man for five years," she said to her husband, sorrowfully. "I haven't let myself be kissed or touched. Not once. Not since Perowne (Tom Mison). Potty Perowne. Can you see how I must have been feeling to go with a fool like Perowne?" It made for affecting television.


READ MORE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9544475/Parades-End-episode-four-BBC-Two-review.html

Sherlock Star Benedict Cumberbatch's Curious Incident In The Night-Time, During 'Parade's End' Filming (HUFF POST)

Caroline Frost
Caroline.Frost@huffingtonpost.com

Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch has revealed some supernatural happenings that occurred filming for his current BBC drama Parade’s End.

The actor had to visit the battlefields of the First World War as part of his role of Christopher Tietjens in Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of the Ford Madox Ford novels, and reported that he was convinced he was visited by an other-worldly spectre when he was later asleep in a hotel.

"I was asleep and my then girlfriend woke up," remembers Cumberbatch. "I woke up to her saying ‘Are you all right’ and she screamed. She told me, ‘You were sitting on the end of the bed, and then I turned to where your voice was and you were lying down. You turned round where you were sitting and half your face was missing, you seemed to be in some sort of uniform, and just sort of vanished… and I looked back to you, and it looked like the image had vanished into you.'

"At the time I said, 'you need to sleep.'"

"The next day, we were filming a battle scene and this German with half a face missing was catapulted on top of me, half-alive. This becomes an obsession for one of the officers near me, the idea of losing one’s beauty, will one’s love be able to live with that?"

It gets weirder.


"The next day I was doing a dream sequence where I'm turning in slow motion to (Tietjen's lover) Valentine, she’s having this dream that turns to a nightmare. I turn to her, this explosion goes off and I’m flung back with smoke and fire, with half my face missing, spooled out on the barbed wire," Cumberbatch continues.

"The first two explosions weren’t that great, but the third one went off in my face. I was engulfed in flame, my tin helmet was blown off twenty feet behind me, the main unit were terrified, thinking I was a goner. I was extremely lucky, I just got singed eyebrows and hair.

"That all happened post this moment she’d had in the night, seeing this person at the end of the bed but somehow weirdly attached to me, so it really got under my skin. It was a profound experience."


READ MORE: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/09/12/sherlock-benedict-cumberbatch-parades-end_n_1877725.html?ir=UK+Entertainment

Benedict Cumberbatch: Parade’s End – Episode 3 Review September 8, 2012 8:46 am Oscar Harding (WHATCULTURE)

If you haven’t been watching Parade’s End, the five-part adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy of novels starring Benedict Cumberbatch, then I seriously suggest you do. As it stands at the start of the episode, the somewhat conservative and brilliant Christopher Tietjens (Cumberbatch), has resigned from the imperial office of statistics, and away from both his bitterly frustrated wife Sylvia (Rebecca Hall) and his potential saviour-cum-hopelessly smitten suffragette Valentine (Adelaide Clemens). So far, so Downton. But this episode was a reward for patiently enjoying the foundations set in the first two episodes- whilst we see less of the levity of Tietjens’ friend MacMaster (Stephen Graham) and his affair with Edith Duchemin (Anne-Marie Duff), we instead shift focus to three different themes- 1. What Titetjens really means to the women who love him, 2. The Tietjens dynasty and Christopher’s place in it, and 3. The effects of the war on society

First off, we discover that in actual fact Sylvia does love Christopher. Rebecca Hall is given more of an opportunity to show she is completely frustrated with Christopher, desperate for him to be more human, and more flawed. He is on a pedestal she wants to knock down, because she wants to love this man, but knows her wish will never come true. Her character became someone I really empathised with, rather than just an acid-tongued delight and the token villain. Clemens’ Valentine became less simpering and showed a little more depth- her sheer disappointment when her brother (Freddie Fox, playing the one character in the mini-series I have no time for) shows up and she can’t be Christopher’s mistress for the night makes her more than just a token suffragette. I am beginning to warm to her a lot more, and as Rupert Everett says as Christopher’s brother, “You’re good for him”, and she is. As both women develop, so does Christopher- he is not uptight, merely trapped. He does not know what to do as everyone of worth in London discredits him, spreading rumours, which are the catalyst for Sylvia realising how much she cares for him. Christopher is forgetting things, and he looks set to rebuild himself as a more modern man, and realising what is in front of him- a real chance for happiness, and a chance to rebuild his marriage. What happens next will be very interesting.

READ MORE: http://whatculture.com/tv/tv-review-parades-end-episode-3-review.php

Parade's End, episode three, BBC Two, review Parade's End's brilliance continues, although the tone is darker. (TELEGRAPH)

By Ben Lawrence10:35PM BST 07 Sep 2012

“The war has turned decent people into beasts,” said Valentine Wannop at the beginning of this third episode. The phrase was later repeated by Sylvia, and by the end, Christopher confirmed: “We are all barbarians now”.

Nobody behaved terribly well as the lights went out all over Europe. Mrs Wannop twittered on about moving to London to be near the critics as her novel was published. Edith Duchemin shed crocodile tears following the suicide of her mad husband. And nobody, of course, behaved more badly than Sylvia who sent plovers’ eggs, strong cheddar and a tin of toffees to German acquaintances.

It was all too much for Christopher’s father. Knocked by the scandal that his grandson was, in fact, “a papist child from the wrong side of the blanket”, he did himself in on one of his beloved grouse shoots. “He wasn’t the sort of man to leave a wounded rabbit on the wrong side of the hedge,” said Christopher gravely. It really felt like the end of an era.

So what about Christopher? Surely this 18th-century man, the last decent man in England, so at odds with the eternal Edwardian summer, would come into his own in wartime? In fact, Christopher’s war was as bloody and confusing as the next man’s, and his experiences allowed us to be treated to some of the most beautiful dialogue yet. Describing the horrors of life on the Western Front to his wife Sylvia, the bombs were variously described as “a crescendo, like an express train”, “tearing calico, louder and louder”, “wet canvas being shaken out by a giant.” Amid such poetry came the more prosaic news that Christopher would now report to a tin hut on Ealing Common. Sylvia barely contained her amusement.


READ MORE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/9528206/Parades-End-episode-three-BBC-Two-review.html

Parade's End loved by critics - but viewers switch off Parade's End lost almost one third of its viewers when the acclaimed period drama returned for its second episode. (TELEGRAPH)

By Laura Donnelly7:20AM BST 02 Sep 2012

The first episode scored one of the highest BBC2 drama viewing figures in recent years, with 3.1 million viewers and 15 per cent of all viewers - double the channel’s usual share.

However, ratings figures show that when the series returned on Friday, almost one million people stayed away, with 2.2 million viewers in total.

On social networking sites there were complaints that the plot - which centres on a love triangle - left them confused, and that mumbling dialogue could not be understood.

White, best-known in Britain for Bleak House, the BBC’s Bafta-winning 2005 adaptation of Dickens’s novel, had warned that viewers might struggle to follow the plot, while promising that complex strands would fall into place.

Speaking before the first episode was shown, she said: “This is like Downton Abbey meets The Wire in some ways,” referring to the American television series set in the Baltimore drug world.

“There are bits of dialogue that at first sight you won’t understand at all,” she said. “But you’ll have to trust that it’s going to pay off. The effect is cumulative.”

A spokesman for the BBC said the figures for the latest episode were above the average audience for the time slot, and that the BBC was “incredibly proud” of the drama.

READ MORE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9514309/Parades-End-loved-by-critics-but-viewers-switch-off.html

Benedict Cumberbatch embarrassed by love scene (BELFAST TELEGRAPH)

Benedict Cumberbatch cringes when he thinks about his co-star going home to tell her partner about their sex scenes.

The actor stars alongside Rebecca Hall in the small screen drama Parade's End. The series revolves around a love triangle between a conservative English aristocrat, his cruel socialite wife and a young suffragette.

Benedict is glad he's friends with Rebecca as they are able to take the risqué scenes a little less seriously, but still winces when he thinks about her partner, director Sam Mendes, knowing about them frolicking on screen.



Read more:  http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/news/benedict-cumberbatch-embarrassed-by-love-scene-16204349.html

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH Interview with Short List

To the visible dismay of a nearby hotel employee, Benedict Cumberbatch has climbed on to the sofa while ShortList helplessly looks on. It’s not an elaborate Tom Cruise impression. Instead, he’s waging war on a bluebottle that had been buzzing by his ear, and now, with the third precise swing of a cushion, he’s whacked it against the window and sent it tumbling to the floor.

“Sorry about that,” he says, settling into his chair with a satisfied grin. “It had to be done. But that was pretty brutal. As you can see, Mr Miyagi was my trainer on Star Trek [2].” It won’t please animal welfare groups, but the Sherlock star’s insect-slaying sets the scene for a fiery 45 minutes in his company. As he machine-guns opinions on everything from copycat Holmes drama Elementary and sex scenes to camera phone-wielding fans and cracking Hollywood, it’s clear he’s more determined than ever. So spare a thought for that fly. It never stood a chance...

You’re starring in sweeping new BBC drama Parade’s End. We couldn’t help but notice you’re playing another tortured, hyper-intelligent aristocrat...

[Laughs] Ah, but it’s a fat one this time. That’s the difference. Seriously though, despite people’s opinions, I haven’t played that many aristocrats and landed gentry. Admittedly I do talk fast because I’m a public schoolboy, but I haven’t even done many period dramas. I’ve oscillated between the First World War and the Georgian period. That’s my niche.

What was it that lured you to the role?

Tom [Stoppard] came and had tea with me at the National Theatre, which is always quite seductive. As soon as he asked me if I wanted a biscuit with my tea, I knew what was going on. Rebecca [Hall], who’s a really good friend, sort of talked me around too. But really it’s the book [by Ford Madox Ford]. It’s the first modernist novel and it takes in consumerism, the First World War and the death throes of the upper classes through the prism of this love triangle. It’s incredible.

Did your friendship with Rebecca Hall make the first episode’s sex scene easier?

No, I mean we laughed our arses off – there was a lot of wasted film that day. But [it’s good to] giggle at the silliness rather than get uptight. I’m really good friends with her other half as well, which must have been odd. “How was your day, darling?” “Well, I was just riding Benedict in a train carriage...” [laughs].

Was it a fun shoot generally, then?

We had some fun times when we were filming in Belgium. I was desperately trying to put on weight, so there was a lot of [eating] rubbish food and drinking alcohol without worrying about it. With Sherlock, it’s lots of seeds, juices, swimming and running, but on this I was doing lots of beer, wine, chips and the most f*cking amazing proper steaks and goulashes. I still didn’t put on enough, though. But for Star Trek, I went up about three suit sizes.

Would you ever like to really bulk up for a role like your Tinker Tailor... co-star Tom Hardy did for Warrior?

I actually used Tom’s trainer Patrick [‘P-Nut’ Monroe] for Star Trek. But I’ve always been a bit po-faced about [the idea] that all you need to do to be put in the hallowed halls of method acting with Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro is put on sh*tloads of weight. Come on! I think Tom would discredit it too. The effort involved deserves some credit, but it doesn’t make a performance.

Have you noticed a leap in your fame recently? Do you get noticed more?

A little bit yeah, you just instantly lose that ability to be private in public. If I’m wearing a shirt and a suit I look very Sherlock and highly recognisable, but I try not to consciously downgrade my look. Having said that, as much as I try to resist them, hoodies and baseball caps work a treat. But the only cap I’ve got that fits my weird head has War Horse on it [laughs].

Not the best disguise…

No, it’d look like self-promotion. I think David Tennant has a hat with bits of hair stuck on it. That’s ridiculous, but it does show how odd it can be. People think we just walk from chauffeur driven cars to red carpets and basically have people wiping our arses for us, but sometimes you need to do normal things. So it’s a bit weird when people see you in the frozen pea section and start flipping out.

Are you surprised by the stir Sherlock’s ‘death’ caused at the end of the last series?

The level of obsession with it was nuts. When I read that in the script I got the biggest kick of my life. I remember ringing Martin and going, “Oh my f*cking God. Have you read this?”

Will we find out how Holmes did it?

Of course you’ll find out. But not now....

Can we run some theories by you?

You can, but it will be such a waste of your breath.

LOTS MORE - READ HERE: http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/tv/benedict-cumberbatch

Benedict Cumberbatch: Parade's End Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7bPTQsdFPc&feature=player_embedded

Lulumrh

AGAIN, FROM SCOOP IT! BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH
http://www.scoop.it/t/benedict-cumberbatch

Benedict Cumberbatch returns in Parade's End By Benjamin Secher7:00AM BST 11 Aug 2012 (THE TELEGRAPH)

A world away from Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch's latest television role sees him playing a repressed civil servant

Benedict Cumberbatch has fallen in love with an overweight civil servant called Christopher. 'I am enamoured of his principles, his virtue and the goodness he stands for,' he says, grinning the wonky grin of the hopelessly smitten. 'I love him. I really do think that Christopher Tietjens is the character I'm most fond of ever having played.'

Tietjens needs all the love he can get. The anti-hero of Parade's End – a tetralogy of novels written by Ford Madox Ford in the 1920s, about the life and relationships of Tietjens before and during the First World War, and now adapted by Tom Stoppard into a five-part television drama – may be intellectually sharp, but he's physically cumbersome and all but incapable of articulating the emotion buried beneath his ungainly exterior. 'As Tietjens saw the world, you didn't "talk",' Ford writes. 'Perhaps you didn't even think about how you felt.'

Cumberbatch's performance, in an ambitious series co-produced by the BBC with the American network HBO, is mesmerising; it is further proof of his knack for making even the most peculiar characters seem overwhelmingly human. While his Sherlock Holmes, the character that made him a household name and bona fide heart-throb, may share a certain cruel wit with his Tietjens, in other ways the two figures could hardly be more different. If Sherlock zips breakneck across the screen like a jet ski, Tietjens glides, with the stately movement of an ocean liner. Where Sherlock arrives at the truth by employing what Cumberbatch calls his 'sociopathic, motormouth deducting genius', Tietjens seems to carry it within him.

His Tietjens is the kind of man who will pore over the Encyclopaedia Britannica, scribbling corrections in the margin, while the nation stands on the brink of war, and his wife (Rebecca Hall) – a volatile beauty who is openly cheating on him with another man – hurls insults at him across the breakfast table. 'He tries to kill her with kindness,' Cumberbatch says. 'But what she really wants from him is to be told to stop f***ing around, not be mollycoddled and treated as damaged goods.'

READ MORE:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9459441/Benedict-Cumberbatch-returns-in-Parades-End.html

Benedict Cumberbatch: Parade's End: A series to challenge Downton (THE INDEPENDENT)

With Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role and Tom Stoppard in charge of the script, the BBC's adaptation of Parade's End will threaten ITV's all-conquering drama. They talk to Gerard Gilbert

Benedict Cumberbatch is furiously scrolling through his iPhone, the actor trying to locate a quote that he believes summarises his character, Christopher Tietjens, in BBC2's upcoming period drama Parade's End. Ford Madox Ford's quartet of novels, written between 1924 and 1928, has been adapted for television by Sir Tom Stoppard.

"I've got every single script I'm sent on my mobile," says Cumberbatch distractedly, pausing briefly in order to shake hands. "There is this amazing moment in episode two when Valentine (his lover in the story) asks, 'Why do you hate your country?' and he says, 'I don't. I love every field, every hedgerow. I just hate what's been done to this country; it's been taken over by moneylenders.' And basically he goes on to define his version of Toryism, which is feudalism really."

All this is delivered in a torrent familiar to anyone who knows Cumberbatch and his restless, super-charged mind – although comparisons to his most famous creation, BBC1's Sherlock Holmes, are unwelcome. "Because I talk a lot, probably because I'm nervous, I get pinned into the same mania bracket," he says.

Parade's End follows Tietjens, "the last Tory", a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy Edwardian landowning family married to a flippant, adulterous socialite, Sylvia (Rebecca Hall). Despite public humiliation, he refuses to divorce her because of what he terms his "parade" – an outmoded code of ethics that is tested by the mass slaughter of the First World War, and then by Tietjens' growing love for a young suffragette, Valentine (played by Australian newcomer Adelaide Clemens). It's a journey, says Cumberbatch, from romanticism to modernism.


Tom Stoppard, who last wrote for the BBC way back in 1979, began work on his adaptation four years ago, long before Downton Abbey seduced the world, and what Stoppard calls "the current festival of toffery". "I was well into the thing before I'd even heard of Downton Abbey and decided not to watch it," he says, before adding that "great minds sometimes think alike".

"I remembered a friend telling me about going to dinner in a stately home and saying to his host, 'Your butler is very impressive.' The host replied: 'Not really – he buys in his chutney.' I put that into Parade's End, and then somebody said to me that Maggie Smith says something like that in Downton Abbey (it was actually in Julian Fellowes's script for Robert Altman's Gosford Park – where Maggie Smith's character dismisses 'bought marmalade… how feeble'). Anyway, I called Julian Fellowes up and he said, 'Oh, just carry on, don't worry about it' – so I took it out and then put it back in. In the end, the things that are similar between these different dramas are much, much less significant than the things that are dissimilar."


READ MORE: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/parades-end-a-series-to-challenge-downton-8026636.html