Owner of the best Sherlock Holmes of recent memory, Cumberbatch has proven his talent in the past as Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) or as the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013). His portrayal of British mathematician Alan Turing, who cracked Nazi Germany’s Enigma military code during the Second World War, earned him a Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations, and this year, the performer was also nominated for an Oscar for Power of the Dog.
Invested in stories with substance, he has played Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking and Vincent Van Gogh, a superhero sorcerer, England's most famous detective, the Prince of Denmark, the last great dragon of Middle-earth and The Grinch. Cumberbatch yet again dons a new persona as Phil Burbank, a 1920s Montana rancher whose most repressed truths are surfaced upon the arrival of his new sister-in-law and her son. The performance earned him his second Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
Q: I read you are fascinated by books, you read them, review them, read them for audiobooks. Do you have a list of favorite authors?
A: There are many, from Nabokov to Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Paul Auster, William Boyd, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Nancy Mitford, AS Byatt, Beryl Bainbridge, Hilary Mantel, Andrea Levy…
Q: Don’t you have any Spanish authors on that list?
A: Don Quixote is one of my favorite books, I would add Bolaño, Borges. I love to stay in at night, light a fire, have a whiskey and watch a movie or read a good book. People forget about books. They’re always just turning on the television, but reading a good book is the most nourishing thing you can do. Reading is one of the joys of life and, once you begin, you can’t stop and you’ve got so many stories to look forward to.
Q: Speaking of movies inspired by books you have pretty much built a career out of them. Why do you like movies written before as a book?
A: If there is a vital message that keeps historical events relevant today it would be that everyone can play out a part however powerless we may feel. It may come at a time when we are asked to do something which would have a huge influence on the wellbeing of others and cost a lot of bravery to do that. My dad read The Hobbit to me originally when I was young. So, it was the first imaginary landscape I ever had in my head from the written word. It gave me a passion for reading, thanks to my dad's performance of the book.
Q: Do you speak Spanish, have you ever visited Spain?
A: I've been to Spain many times, Ibiza is one of my favorites places to go. Love the food, the fun, the culture, and the people. While my Spanish still needs a lot of work, I can manage to order and ask around when I’m in Spain.
Q: Your new movie Power of the Dog has a good message on these divided times.
A: I think so, but again you can argue it was so black and white. I had to learn how to be an asshole. I'm quite apologetic, uh, and I'm a bit of a people-pleaser in life. And I had to learn to not be those things for Phil Burbank. Um, and he's kind of filled to the brim with a ludicrous amount of pretty superlative skills, um, with his hands mainly. Some whistling as well. You know, I had to learn to whistle, to horse ride, to, uh, I didn't have to learn to do taxidermy. But I went there because he does in the book. The whole range of what goes on on a ranch, and the work that is involved with animals and people in that environment. I felt insecure about playing the banjo, about being an asshole.
Q: Why did you decide to make another movie based on a book?
A: I wanted to work with Jane Campion. To play the role I went to Montana because I wanted to walk the walk, walk the earth and smell the air and just see the landscape, and try and sense a little bit of the history that brought about this story based on Thomas Savage's life. And, I went there for a couple of weeks. I had the most profound and extraordinary experience with some amazing ranchers and, um, animals. And it was intense.
Q; How would you describe the character?
A: He's-he's a, he is a proper, proper old school cowboy. That's what he'd call himself, a poet and a singer and incredibly skilled. He taught me how to treat hide, how to cut it, how to bevel it, how to, um, soak it and dry it and then braid it. And, um, it, he was also an expert roper, the actual use of the hide, um, in the end when, once the rope's made. I had a lot of inspiration and-and time, which is such a precious thing.
Q: You had to shoot this movie during the Covid?
A: Yes. But everything was very well organized. I always feel like I'm building the wrong way as the plane's taking off. But this actually had some air to it before I got on set. And then we had a lovely, sort of, weird but wonderful two weeks of getting to know each other, which was bliss. But also, you know, going through different processes with Jane individually or in groups, or in sort of small con-configurations of the quarter. And that was great, and yeah. And then New Zealand just kind of fed into it, which was magic.
Q: Can you explain a little bit more about going method for this role?
A: I had to get used to not explaining myself, not being nice, not caring about my colleagues and not washing. That was anotherthing. A lot of celebrities talk at the moment about washing and not washing. This is purely character work, people. I'm not joining the elite non-washers. But then you go with your friends on set to a restaurant, and that's when it became really difficult. I was like, but these guys aren't in the film. And I can sort of feel my body odor just kind of pushing people away. But it, yeah. I couldn't sit comfortably then. But it was very helpful to do those things in rehearsal. I should say, you know, I've never worked on a character in parallel with a director so intimately.
Q: You lost 21 pounds for a previous role. But then clearly, you put all your muscle weight back on. How disciplined were you to get that done?
A: Putting the weight back on was hard. It actually took a while. Um, it's a horrible thing to lose weight, but nothing like the real man went through. So, you know, I felt obliged to actually just, to honor the story we were telling. But, um, yeah, it's pretty, it's a nasty place to be. Yeah, lots of eating and lots of exercising.
Q: What do you take away when you finish a movie?
A: Is a real gift because grown men and women having to pretend that you're something you're not is, um, it's a big ask. And then you have to take the layers off on the way home and wind the window down and have a beer, or something stronger. At home, immediately you strip back to who you are in a good way. And then at the end of the film, yeah, I did, I held a little shelf. Power of the Dog was such a profound experience. Not at least because of being interrupted with COVID and we, as a family, stayed there. We had a long way to go back, so we thought there might be danger in not being able to get back in. Anyway, for whatever reasons, we stayed. And it-it became an extraordinary experience from, uh, for us all around because of that. And I think that fed into the work that we ended in the studio. Um, I think all of us felt it sort of added layers. Well, how precious it is to be able to do what we do. Not that we ever take it for granted. But, under those circumstances where you're actually stopped by something that big, to be able to do it again felt very, uh, precious. And, uh, it, the stuff in the psyche that we all experienced, I think, kind of fed into the intensity of the work. So, that doesn't answer your question. Okay, yes, so yeah, at the end-at the end of the film, I-I did step away. But I kept a little weird trophy shelf of things to do with the filming of it, and a little bit of Phil. But, more so than any other character, in a weird way. Um, but I think that has as much to do with experiences as human beings.
By María Estévez
Correspondent writer
