Moranifesto

  But as you can already see, and as his mother has lamented, he is just an energy—he never stops. This is the force he plays into these huge, notably unusual characters: van Gogh and Turing and Holmes; Tietjens in Parade’s End with his genius; a dragon, Smaug, in The Hobbit; in the West End, in turn, Frankenstein, then his monster. And, soon, Hamlet, and Julian Assange, and Brian Epstein—manager of the Beatles.

  As we’re already late, Benedict tries to set out a schedule. He’s due on set in Bristol at seven thirty a.m. tomorrow, for the third season of Sherlock. At pains not to give away any plot, but keen to show what his workload is like, he picks up the script and flicks through it.

  “This scene is forty pages long. It’s a forty-page long deduction,” he says. “Basically a monologue. And I have to learn it before I go to bed.”

  Pointing at the clock on the wall, which has birds instead of numbers, he says, “So we have to stop at”—he stares—“half past chaffinch. Okay?”

  * * *

  As we’re already in the past—surrounded by photos—we stay there.

  The conversation at lunch got us as far as Harrow, where Benedict boarded—leaving his parents’ top-floor flat in Kensington, “when Kensington was run-down; smalls hanging out in the smog, riots in Notting Hill. A two-bedroom flat for two thousand pounds—the wallpaper the same now as it was then.”

  When he got to Harrow, did he find out he was clever?

  “Not that clever. Not ridiculously clever. Sharpish—I was a quick learner. A good impersonator.”

  Was he bullied?

  “No. Because . . .” He chooses his words carefully. “My parents loved the fucking life out of me. So I felt confident about the world. Not . . . entitled. Just like . . . I could step into the world. Investigate it.”

  He loved his school days—“I really did. Sports and outings . . . I made lifelong friends. In my letters home, I wrote ‘I am blissfully happy’ and I really meant it.”

  The first and only time someone tried to bully him, it felt so alien—“He made me feel insecure and shy, and all I wanted was to be confident and happy”—that Cumberbatch pinned him against the wall, in utter fury, and his assailant stuttered an apology.

  He continued being the class clown—not, as it is with almost all future performers, to prevent bullying, but, oddly and sweetly, to get the respect and attention of younger children, instead.

  “You could make younger kids go to bed and brush their teeth on time if you made them laugh,” he recalls, fondly.

  The only fly in Cumberbatch’s ointment was physical: “I was a very late developer,” he says. “Very late. Fifteen, sixteen—maybe even seventeen.” The worry was so great, he even went to the doctor. “I was a kid until I was eighteen, really. But the one grace of an all-boys boarding school . . . is that you could lie about what you’d done on your holidays. Not like a mixed school, where you had to parade your girlfriend around the playground. I was a bit Hugh Grant around women. ‘Good gosh, er, do you mind if I, erm, touch, ah, it? Gosh, I feel funny now.’ I don’t hold it against my parents at all, but that’s why I would never send my kids to a single-sex school. I would have killed for experience. Fuck the grades. I was all, ‘I understand what girls are now—where are they?’”

  He’d already had his first kiss: “Underwater. Mary. I was eleven. The wettest lips you could possibly kiss. I think that was definitely my first kiss. Unless I’d kissed a boy at school in a fucking play—which would ruin that very erotic Humbert Humbert–like memory I have of my first female obsession.”

  In his last year at Harrow he discovered “pot and girls and music,” “got a bit lazy,” and forfeited his chance of Oxbridge. He took a year out—working for six months in a perfumer’s to earn the money to teach English in Tibet. At the perfumer’s he learned to prefer “bright citruses—bergamot, vetiver.”

  Once, with a severe cold, he served Richard E. Grant and watched, with horror, as a drip from his nose “landed right on his Blenheim Bouquet as I gift wrapped it”—the most gently dandy thespian anecdote of 2013. A month later, he was in India, watching a parade of keening mourners take the dead down to the river, to be burned.

  “You taste it in the air. It’s not a charming ancient tradition. You are inhaling the smoke of a burning body. Palpable—in your mouth.”

  He nearly died in India: “I got mountain sickness. Lost on a mountain. It was a pathetic expedition—Hillary-like. We were woefully underprepared. I had simply . . . an extra scarf my mother had knitted me, and a . . . piece of cheese.”

  With water on his lungs, and his doctor friend warning him he was at risk of an aneurysm, Cumberbatch hallucinated wildly on his way back down the mountain: “I dreamed the stars turned to lightning.”

  He looks excited as he remembers this. Suddenly, violent birdsong fills the room.

  Cumberbatch looks across, to the clock on the wall.

  “Shit. Shit. It’s already half past chaffinch. If we get to barn owl, I am never getting to Bristol tonight.”

  “So you didn’t die,” I remind him, briskly, “because you are here. And here is pretty odd. Tell me a story about how unreal the last three years have been. How everything has changed since July 2010.”

  Benedict thinks—for nearly a minute. The longest he’s been silent all day.

  “The Golden Globes,” he says, eventually. “Meryl Streep coming up, going, ‘Oh my God, we’re such big fans, we love you as Sherlock. How do you fucking do that shit?’ And then Ted Danson, going, ‘Oh my God, it’s fucking Sherlock!’”

  Benedict mimes being trapped between Sam Malone from Cheers and Mrs. Kramer from Kramer vs. Kramer, both of them freaking out, with him in the middle, mind blown. “Getting advice from George Clooney, on how to handle all of . . . this.” He spans his hands out, to represent the last three years.

  As luck and Hollywood would have it, Benedict then spent autumn 2012 shooting the forthcoming August: Osage County with Streep—plus Julia Roberts, Juliette Lewis, and Sam Shepard.

  He describes acting opposite Streep—“Her character is suffering from esophageal cancer, smoking like a chimney, high on downers, behaving like the most monstrous matriarchal pterodactyl you can ever imagine. And none of us could act opposite her. None of us. We all, one at a time, went up to her and said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t act around you because . . . I can’t stop watching you. We all want to watch you.’”

  The American elections occurred while they were shooting. He gets his iPhone out and shows shots of Roberts and Streep posing for their own “Yes, We Can”–style election posters. As the results came in and Obama pulled ahead, they were all screaming at the television.

  Eventually, he and Streep were the last ones up, in a Marriott hotel in Oklahoma: “Bumping fists when he won.”

  He boggles for a minute.

  When the fan polarity is reversed, Cumberbatch is graceful with his fan base. He refuses to call them by their chosen name—“Cumberbitches”—mentioning, with aching courtesy, the “Cumberwomen” or “Cumbergirls,” instead.

  “It’s not even politeness. I won’t allow you to be my bitches. I think it sets feminism back so many notches. You are . . . Cumberpeople.”

  Recently, Cumberbatch websites have been alight with discussion over the next season of Sherlock—particularly since Cumberbatch was photographed, on set, making a mysterious triangular hand signal. The speculation over the meaning of this gesture has been intense. Here, Cumberbatch looks slightly guilty for a minute—then starts laughing.

  “You know what? I was just being silly. That sign is just something the lead singer of alt-J does when he plays ‘Tessellate.’ I love that band. But!” he says, springing to his own defense, “I remember Brett Anderson [from Suede] saying, back in the day, ‘Isn’t the point of art to deepen the mystery a bit?’ You know? If you start to unweave the jumper, it’s boring to look at a . . . ball of wool.”

  It’s time to go. I have one question left to ask. I have a brilliant ide
a. I want to look at the jumper.

  “Do some now,” I say.

  “What?” Benedict asks, confused.

  “Some acting,” I say. “Do some acting now.”

  Sportingly willing to be a big Cumberbatch jukebox, Benedict springs to his feet.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asks, with pleasing, if baffling, eagerness. It is, after all, his one day off from work.

  “Do the . . . baddie . . . in Star Trek,” I say, with unprofessional vagueness. “Whatever his incredibly normal and unintergalactic name is. Simon.”

  “John Harrison,” Benedict says, vaguely chidingly.

  And it really is the most amazing thing. We’re in a tiny, peach-colored room—the beams so low Benedict’s hair almost touches them. Through the window, you can see Benedict’s dad, on his knees, in the garden, as the wind moves the narcissi. This is the safest and most normal room in the world. The house still smells of Sunday lunch.

  But when Benedict starts his monologue, you see, again, what Spielberg and Streep and Stoppard see in him. You see what he does in Sherlock, and in Parade’s End, where he tore up the screen with only two days’ preparation. This big, brilliant, slightly space-cadet kid suddenly comes into focus—painful, superbright focus—and becomes absolutely other.

  In jeans and slippers and a knackered T-shirt, Cumberbatch now looks like someone who has been to the loneliest, outermost reaches of the galaxy, and become demented. The softness disappears from his face—the skin becomes tight. He is a terrorist who wants to destroy the earth. Even when he giggles, for a minute, in the middle of the monologue, he pulls it back immediately, comes in even harder—ending the speech full of cold, still hate. He is one of the universe’s unstoppable forces.

  There is a pause, during which I probably should have applauded.

  “Do another!” I say, waving my wineglass at him. “Do . . . the dragon.”

  Smaug, from The Hobbit. He doesn’t say anything. Just starts breathing. Breathing like a dragon. The sound of a dragon, breathing in its cave—his neck lengthens, his hands reach out for invisible things, palpable talons. I have it all on tape. I will play it you. It is amazing. It is the thing. It is the thing every actor hopes they will be, and almost never is. It is someone becoming utterly, brightly, incandescently gone.

  Thursday, May 2. Leicester Square.

  Premiere of Star Trek Into Darkness.

  On a perfect sunny evening, Leicester Square has essentially turned into a Star Trek Glastonbury. Music booms from the PA as the crowds mill. People have camped out overnight for a good view of the red carpet. Prosthetic Spock ears abound. One man has turned up in his own Starship Enterprise—a fiberglass shell bolted to an adult-sized tricycle. It is one of the most admirably demented items I have ever seen.

  The cast turn up, one by one, to roars from the crowd. Chris Pine as Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock. There is the usual rhythm of name howling, carefully rotated smiles, and flashbulbs.

  But when Cumberbatch arrives—last—the audience reaction is something other. The screams are another level entirely—the wild seagull ululation of One Direction gigs, and fainting. There is a surge that has security shouting, “All right, ladies, calm down,” in a slightly panicked manner.

  I am next to a woman from Bootle who has camped out all night with her beautifully painted portrait of the Star Trek crew, which she wishes to present to director J. J. Abrams. She is becoming increasingly crushed, and disillusioned. In the end, she turns and tries to fight her way out of the crowd.

  “These people aren’t here for Star Trek,” she says, casting a hateful eye over the gleefully calling fans. “They don’t even know what Star Trek is. They’re just here for him.” She jerks a disgusted thumb at Cumberbatch.

  On the red carpet, Cumberbatch is slightly flustered—in the hotel, there was an incident with cuff links, and then a tie—but is dealing with the crowds ebulliently. One girl is waving a poster that reads, “BENEDICT—I’M PREGNANT AND IT’S YOURS”—a bold new conversation-opening technique. His stylist keeps catching his eye, saying, “Benedict—your hair,” and urging him to smooth it out of his eyes. He doesn’t. The twenty-by-thirty-foot billboard above us, which says “Star Trek Into Darkness,” shows him, and no one else. And everyone is calling his name. Properly, too—and not “Bendybum Cumbycatch” for the lolz.

  “Well, this is insane,” he says, quite reasonably, as he signs an autograph for a girl dressed as Captain Kirk.

  Three a.m. After-show party in Chelsea. It has been a long night. Sean Penn is apparently in here somewhere. Benedict has been at the center of a constant circle of people telling him, in varied and increasingly slurry ways, that his life is about to change forever. He has taken all this lightly, joyfully, and with a series of vodkas. At three a.m., however, he calls it a day: “I’m going to become . . . nonverbal now,” he says, owlishly. He oils onto the dance floor, and busts a move to a series of eighties gay anthems, right under the glitterball.

  After our interview last week, I received a text from Benedict before the train had even pulled out of the station.

  “All the things we didn’t talk about!” he lamented. “The Simpsons, New York at New Year’s, Iceland . . . I’ve seen and swam and climbed and lived and driven and filmed . . . Should it all end tomorrow, I can definitely say there would be no regrets. I am very lucky, and I know it. I really have lived five thousand times over.”

  The Poor Are Clever

  I’m not chippy about my class, but I do think the working classes are (a) different and (b) well, better. I want to talk about what we bring to the table. If there is a table, of course. We were too poor for one in our house. Except for that one my dad made out of a door and some bits of wood, that time.

  Not to beat around the bush, but if you were to catch most people in an absent moment, and press them on the intelligence levels of “the poor,” they’d probably reply, “No offense, and it’s not their fault, but they’re generally a bit . . . thick. Yah. Sorry.”

  Modern peasants—welfare claimants, people on council estates, your classic Shameless—are slightly dim-eyed, bovine creatures, swaddled in shapeless leisure wear, stirring only to scream obscenities at Sky Sports when their football team loses.

  When you boil it right down, the dimness of the poor is indisputable, because there’s nothing more stupid than being poor. That’s just dim. Who wants to earn less than £60K per annum? Only stupid people—that’s who! Ipso facto = duh.

  However. I’ve been both poor—one Mars bar between ten people! You need a breadknife and the steady, reliable hands of a brain surgeon to make that an equitable feast—and I’ve been rich—I’ve got underfloor heating now. Yeah—and I know that I am now definitely more stupid than I used to be. Definitely. There are whole parts of my brain I haven’t had to use for years now. As soon as I went up an income bracket, I went down a small but noticeable intelligence level, because the first thing money does is take away problems—the million small practical problems every day brings up when you have limited financial resources but still desire to do things, and go places, and progress.

  Take, for instance, television. If my television breaks down now, and can’t be repaired, I simply order a new one, to be delivered from John Lewis. Total brain used: less than an eggcup full.

  But back when we were poor, the death of a television meant scouring the local small ads for a new one within our budget (£20), being first on the phone to buy it—“I’m sorry, love—it’s already gone to a fella in Coseley” was the end of so many dreams—and then working out a way to get a thirty-six-inch faux teak surround television from Cannock to Wolverhampton using only buses, as we had no car at the time.

  Similarly, being, say, invited to a wedding would mean a borderline military operation: calculating which cousins were of roughly similar build to each of my seven siblings, borrowing posh clothes off them in a daylong maneuver of visits and fervent guarantees of nonspillages or damage; asking a friend-of-a-fr
iend-of-a-friend for a lift, usually in exchange for the promise of helping them erect a flat-pack shed the following week—etc., etc., etc.

  The amount of collaboration, forward planning, charm, mental arithmetic, creativity, flexibility, and iron will involved means that every day, as a poor person, is like staging a small Opening Ceremony of the Olympics, but on a budget of £9.80. Or getting shut in the Aztec Zone on The Crystal Maze.

  It’s amusing how knotty little puzzles like crosswords, and sudokus, are the relaxing pastimes of the middle and upper classes—when the poor are engaged in real-life lateral brainteasers every day. That’s the intellectual equivalent of going to the gym to keep fit—instead of spending all day on a building site, or bed-bathing sixteen geriatric patients. It’s great that everyone’s getting good core strength—but some people are doing this out of necessity. Survival.

  One of the things I keep meaning to do is get a T-shirt made up with the slogan “The Working Classes Do It Differently” across the chest—because it is different being working class, but that difference is so often framed as simply an . . . absence. The working classes as merely the middle classes—but without money. A social evolutionary stage down. Nascent. Lacking.

  But I was brought up aware of all the good differences of being working class—the superiorities. The working-class parents of my generation all know how to mend a clutch, build a bookcase, grow marrow from seed, sort out the gears on a bicycle, brew beer, tend the dying, rewire stereos, install a bathroom, identify every single edible thing in a woodland. Go around the Black Country Working Museum and the curators—ex-miners—will tell you how the Industrial Revolution was powered by both the workers’ brawn and their intelligence: the terrifying, 50 percent mortality rate in the nineteenth century reduced by the miners themselves inventing new safety devices, welding innovative safety shackles in the evening, then sharing them for free. The same working-class creativity and collaboration that, two generations later, and fueled by the introduction of state education and art colleges, powered the astonishing cultural revolution of the sixties and terraformed most of the world we live in today.