With his wide forehead and high cheekbones, Benedict Cumberbatch has been compared, and not unreasonably (especially if you've seen him in August: Osage County), both to an otter and to Sid the Sloth from the animated movie Ice Age. He also has one of those rumbling, mellifluous British voices that are capable of revving up and whipping out dialogue, perfectly articulated, at breakneck speed. He can talk faster than most people think. Lately, all these gifts - the big brainpan, the quick tongue, the upper-class diction - have allowed him to make a reputation playing characters who are very bright but not quite normal.
Most famously, Cumberbatch is Sherlock Holmes in the BBC series Sherlock, a modern version of the legendary old sleuth, a bored, high-functioning sociopath, clueless about human emotion, who rattles off those famous Holmesian deductions at something like warp speed. He was also Khan, the genetically engineered alien, in Star Trek Into Darkness, in which his sepulchral voice and careful, rapid enunciation were themselves indication of unnatural villainy.
Seemingly twitching inside his own skin, Cumberbatch was Julian Assange, the WikiLeaker, in The Fifth Estate. (The accent here was Australian, not Brit, and Cumberbatch more nearly resembled David Bowie than Sid the Sloth.) And now in The Imitation Game, he is Alan Turing, the awkward, eccentric British genius who helped break the German Enigma code during World War II but was later persecuted by his own government, because he acknowledged his homosexuality, and forced to undergo chemical castration. His death, in 1954, may have been a suicide. Cumberbatch's Turing is not a fast talker - he stammers a little, as if his brain were whirring too fast - but a brilliant, sometimes acerbic one, and this portrayal is so poignant and affecting that it has earned him a Golden Globe best-actor nomination and put him on just about everyone's Oscar shortlist. "The thing about Benedict is that you can't really put him in a box," Morten Tyldum, the director of The Imitation Game," said recently. "He has so many layers, just like the character."
While filming Shakespeare's Richard III for the BBC, Cumberbatch took a couple of days off in November for the obligatory Imitation Game publicity tour - interviews, photo shoots, appearances on the Jon Stewart and Jimmy Fallon shows - and by the end he was visibly tired. At a downtown restaurant one afternoon, his voice occasionally slowed down and sank to an even lower pitch, as if his battery were running out. But Cumberbatch, in person witty and gracious in a way that most of his brainiacs are not, perked up when talking about Turing, a character he felt especially strongly about, and whose treatment at the hands of the British government still made him grimace. "People are always asking me, what's the most difficult job you've ever done," he said. "I always say it's the job I'm doing at the moment. But there are ones that really touch a nerve or connect with you, and with Turing there was such an urgency. That was one of the main reasons to do the part - for people to understand who this man was and what happened to him, and what he achieved and how important he is to us now. It's an extraordinary role, a great challenge for any actor, but at the same time you couldn't ask for a nobler enterprise."
About being typecast in brainy parts, Cumberbatch said, "Not such a bad fate if it's true, but I don't think it is." He pointed out that he had been William Pitt in Amazing Grace and a plantation owner in 12 Years a Slave. because they're extraordinary - because they breathe a slightly more rarefied air - that they're remarkable and therefore distinct. But they still seem to me empathetic and relatable and ultimately inspiring."
But for a long time, Cumberbatch flew under the radar a bit. Before hiring him, Steven Spielberg (who directed War Horse) had never seen Sherlock. John Wells, the director of August: Osage County, gave Cumberbatch the part of the needy, vulnerable Little Charles (the polar opposite, as it happens, of all those brainy eccentrics) after Cumberbatch sent him a selfie audition on his cellphone.
When the director Susanna White hired Cumberbatch for Parade's End, she hadn't seen Sherlock either. When she goes anywhere now with Cumberbatch, she said, they're mobbed. "He's not a matinee idol - he doesn't have those looks - but people adore him. Everyone does: My teenage daughter. My mum, who is in her 90s. Suddenly he became huge overnight."
© 2015 The New York Times
