Hi! I'm Yasmine, a 22 year old small town girl from Leuven, Belgium. I try to contribute a little something to the universe by writing and taking pictures. I'm studying for my master's degree in cultural studies. In my mind, I'm still living in Vancouver, Canada.
As many of you already know, I traveled down to the film festival in Gent on October 11th for the screening of Parade’s End. I had arranged for an interview with Benedict Cumberbatch the next day, thanks to my internship for a magazine/website. They only gave me 15 minutes with him but we had a very relaxed yet meaningful and interesting conversation about Sherlock and Parade’s End.
Many of you have been waiting anxiously for the final version of this interview, so here it is. I hope you enjoy it - I had an amazing time interviewing Benedict :)
So please do read on (press the “read more” button) and don’t be afraid to let me know what you think, I appreciate any kind of constructive criticism!
You’ve played Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, now Christopher Tietjens - all of these characters are based on novels. Does that make it easier to play them or harder because it limits your creative freedom as an actor?
It definitely makes it easier because you have the most fantastic templates by large, unless you are doing something radically different. You have wonderful literature as a – no pun intended – back story and characterization. In the case of Sherlock, everything is written from the point of view of John Watson; he is the audience and the audience always weighs in. The books contain such a detailed analysis of physicality and psychology. Sherlock’s mood changes, his temperament, the light in his eyes, the gleam, the troublesomeness about him… Everything, every quirk, every detail, every change of pace. And it is all there: the blueprint for every characterization of Sherlock Holmes. That is why I am very close to the books, even though we deviate from them a little bit. As opposed to Elementary, I guess we are much more focused on delivering a modern version of the stories. It still makes a lot of sense to bring a Victorian hero to the modern times. Because even in the books, Sherlock was always a modern man; he was always in his lab, just not with multi-media technology.
How was this specifically the case for Parade’s End?
The same goes for Parade’s End; the books are a huge insight. It is a non-linear, modernist novel, so there are quite some complexities that do not occur in Sir Conan Doyle’s work. I had to deal with streams of consciousness, with one scenario having multiple points of view, time jumps… But a stream of consciousness is a great way to look inside the soul of a human being, so it’s wonderful. Playing a character that is based on a book does not at all limit the creative liberty – it humanizes things. I think it is very good to read about a character; it all comes down to imagination when you are engaging with that fictional world and the words of that world. As a character, it’s always a challenge to convince people to go in with you and be part of that world. So the communication of that does not limit you, it just helps you.
If you compare Sherlock Holmes to Christopher Tietjens, do you believe there are certain similarities between these two characters or not?
Not at all. They are both intelligent, fast thinking, and they don’t suffer fools gladly. There is a sort of level of mediocrity they have to endure in the world and, in Parade’s End, Christopher is utterly crucified by this over time. I am wary of playing characters who are intelligent, slightly atypical, and antisocial. But Sherlock is not why I got the job for Parade’s End. Tom Stoppard and Susanna White wanted me to do this years before there was ever even talk of Sherlock. Apart from the limited palette – or whatever you would like to call it – I have as an actor, I don’t see too many similarities between Sherlock and Tietjens.
So according to you, Sherlock and Christopher are not at all the same?
You could draw some similarities but that would be stretching the point. Tietjens is a man who is out of his time and thoroughly modern, like Sherlock. But at the same time, he is a proto-liberal, even though he is ascribed to Toryism. Christopher’s version of Toryism never came about in the modern world. He was someone who believed in a pyramidal structure of a society and that the responsibility was as much to kick up as to trickle down. That is what modern Toryism is all about; it is an excuse for rampancy, for free-market capitalism, and for entrepreneurialism at the cost of everything else. Because “oh well, if the economy is strong and everything at the top is strong, i.e. bankers, businessmen, traders, property developers, then everybody else – small businesses, the middle workers, the white-collars and blue-collars – will be alright.” They will be taken care of because things are good and will trickle down. But that is exactly what is happening now and it is bullshit. There is a growing disparity between rich and poor, and Tietjens spots that. He sees where the world is heading. And his great care and love of his men, of animals, and his unsentimentality about those things as well… He’s a pragmatist, the same as Sherlock. Because Sherlock is not soulless; he doesn’t not care for people, as is proof by the strangle hold Moriarty thinks he has over him at the end of Reichenbach Fall. Moriarty knows where Sherlock’s Achilles heels are, and they lie in Sherlock’s affection and his for people. Just because he doesn’t go around giving out Christmas cards doesn’t mean he doesn’t love them. I think Tietjens is far more sentimental, far more heart-on-sleeve, which is why I think he is not comparable to Sherlock at all. Yeah, he is smart; he can come up with a scan of a sonnet. Christopher is just intelligent. But if characters could be compared like that, then we could lose very quickly any kind of ground of enriching cultural experiences. Because I think that all the best characters are intelligent. They all have a level of intelligence, anyway.
read more at: http://good-girl-gone-rad.tumblr.com/post/33645982683/the-great-cumberbatch-interview-full-and-unabridged
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