Sherlock really is the whole key to the Cumberbitches, and he thinks, over time, he’s figured out the appeal of the character to women (and gay men—the internet is crawling with slash fiction imagining Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes and *Martin Freeman’s John Watson blowing off steam back at the flat after a hard day of detecting, usually with Watson as the top). “Sherlock’s a sociopath,” Cumberbatch says of his Holmes, whose default mode in interacting with a member of the opposite sex is to intuit in seconds the thing that will destroy her most at her core, then tell her, in the most withering way possible. But in the BBC series he’s also an extremely intelligent and competent modern man, adept with technology in a way that speaks to audiences who are tweeting as they watch. “It’s like, ‘Ah, one of us, great!’ ” says Cumberbatch. “Someone who is tech-savvy, who is fed up with mediocrity and wants to carve his way through the world and be purposeful and asexual and just get on with things and is sort of a little bit cruel, which is kind of sexy, but adorable because he’s not really complete as a human being.” Contrast that onscreen acerbity with the immediate warmth and playfulness Cumberbatch emanates in person, and it’s enough to rip all the world’s knickers asunder, including those of a lesbian who claims on the Cumberbitches Reddit forum to be “straight for BMFC (Benedict Mother ****ing Cumberbatch).”
His acting is the gateway drug. Each ’b*tch on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr has her own story of having discovered Cumberbatch via some role—the earlier the discovery the greater the pride and sense of ownership—and having gone into a hole of binge-watching everything he’d ever done (yes, he was that slightly familiar face in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and War Horse). It comes down to character, writes Jana Prikryl, a senior editor of the New York Review of Books, who published a long free-verse poem about him in the London Review of Books imagining the two of them leaving a party together and praising “his quips and winning / earnest wish to answer / every question, / and be very very nice.” When he speaks, it’s with passion, one Reddit user wrote; “that’s when you notice the bright twinkle in his eyes, the huge grin, the crinkles that span his cheeks.” Another Reddit user, who first attached the phrase “the thinking women’s crumpet” to Cumberbatch, wrote: “You could simply watch any one of his many performances where he could make your jaw (and panties) drop with a simple look or gesture.” They also talk about his arms, his torso (there’s a six-pack under there, albeit a pale one), his adorable difficulty saying the word penguin (he called them “pengwings” and “penglings” in an unearthed nature documentary), and his ability to be “both masculine and sensitive at the same time, beautiful without being the least bit effeminate.” And of course there’s his voice—“the best remedy when you’re having a bad day or you just want to close your eyes and relax,” one Cumberbitch tells me. Says another, “The raw power behind it leaves you in awe and you wish he could read a book to you.” Cumberbatch is the boyfriend you want to wake up next to while Holmes is the man you hope will ravage you.
“The sex appeal of Benedict’s Sherlock is something I’ve discussed greatly with a couple of friends,” says Zadie O’Neill, a cute redheaded Australian I found on Facebook. It comes down to Sherlock’s single-minded focus on crime “to the exclusion of everything else,” she’s concluded. “What makes him sexy is the idea that if you could harness that intensity and focus on sex instead … well …”
That fan reaction “bemuses me still,” Cumberbatch says. “It’s utterly the most inept superpower you could possibly imagine: ‘You’re really famous, and you’re a sex symbol. Go!’ ” He pretends to puzzle his way through it. “ ‘So, uh, everyone—no, not everyone finds me attractive. So certain people find me attractive? Well, certain people are obsessed with my work. But I’m not all about my work, so what do I do with that? Are they trustworthy?’ I mean, what would you do with that?’ There’s nothing you can do with that, other than be amused. Which I am. It makes me giggle.” He goes on. “It’s fun, but I’m old enough to realize it’s not to be taken seriously. But it does make me twinkle.”
Nooooooooooo.” “the worst day of my life has arrived.” “#brokenhearted #feellikecrying.” “Wait what Benedict cumberbatch is engaged I have a lump in my throat this is terrible terrible news I hate everything im so sad.” “BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH IS ENGAGED AND MY LIFE IS OVER.”
What you heard this November 5 was the sound of hundreds of thousands of hearts breaking, as “Mr. B. I. Cumberbatch” thwarted the tabloids and his internet girlfriends alike by announcing his engagement to actress and acclaimed avant-garde theater and opera director Sophie Hunter in the classiest way possible: a one-*sentence blurb in the Times of London. The couple’s courtship had been equally discreet. They’d met while working opposite one another in the 2009 thriller Burlesque Fairytales and, admirably and miraculously, have been *photographed together exactly once, in the stands of this summer’s French Open. Cumberbatch reportedly flew to Edinburgh to ask her mother’s permission to propose. It was all, to quote a Cumberbitches Reddit poster, “smooth as ****.” His fan base seems to be moving on by preparing to be obsessed with his Cumberwedding and Cumberbabies.
If you gaze deep into his résumé, though, you’ll discover that Cumberbatch has broken few, if any, hearts onscreen. And that certainly won’t change with Turing, who lived his life in secrecy about both who he was and what he did—who in his lifetime never received recognition for his invaluable work breaking an “unbreakable” Nazi code to help bring an early end to the war and who invented the machine we now know as the computer before
the government essentially tortured him to death, at 41, for being gay. “It’s sickeningly ironic that the man who brought about victory for a democracy and a government that defeated Fascism was then rewarded by that government in a time of *McCarthyist paranoia and intolerance by being killed basically slowly for what his sexual orientation was,” says Cumberbatch. Turing was caught soliciting sex and sentenced to chemical castration before committing suicide. “I mean, it’s just disastrous.”
The closest he’s come to playing a romantic lead, Cumberbatch jokes, was as a wolf in this year’s Penguins of Madagascar, when he danced with another animal “and seduced them and brought out all their kind of worst Bond minds.” (The scene wound up on the cutting-room floor.) This is a man who has yet to prove he can open a movie, and while the art-house Imitation Game might not be the best test of whether that can change, this year could still be a meme-to-superstardom turning point for Cumberbatch. In what is both a massive leap of faith and a testament to his talent and appeal, he is rumored to have landed his first lead in a Marvel movie. Fittingly, it’s as Dr. Strange.
“I’ve never had a Gosling moment as a character. I’ve never been the kind of guy who’s made all the girls go gooey,” he says, then puffs up his chest, mockingly. “I think it’s about time I did.” Instead, Cumberbatch’s parts have tended toward tortured genius, though he bristles at the reductive labeling. “I have played stupid people as well! If anyone’s got any other stupid people I can play, let me know.” He also takes issue with people asking him where Turing and Sherlock fall on the autism spectrum. “I think they are both utterly conditioned by their circumstance,” he says. With Turing especially, “I think it’s a really quick shorthand to go ‘autistic, Asperger’s, learning difficulties, slightly dyslexic,’ or some kind of devaluing way of labeling him.” Turing’s stammer, Cumberbatch points out, was developed from being brought up by foster parents and worsened through being bullied at school and by the death of an early love. “He was born into a really intolerant world.”
Sherlock is similarly stymied, he says—definitely abstinent, though, Cumberbatch says, not asexual. He’s convinced Sherlock did consummate his relationship with the whip-smart dominatrix Irene Adler: “Yeah, I think they were definitely at it after he *rescued her from the beheading in Pakistan,” says Cumberbatch. “I’m sure they were. I’m convinced of that.” But “I think he’s been burnt in the past. I think he also realizes he can’t beat female intuition. He can read women if he’s not attracted to them or involved with them, and he knows that he’ll get very confused if he’s starting to feel something for someone. So to embroil himself where he might be enslaved through adoration or sexual desire or any kind of power or chemistry to do with love is too big a risk for him, for what he wants to achieve. That doesn’t make him gay, and it doesn’t make him asexual; it means, you know, he’s purposely abstaining for the sake of his craft. Not something I do.”
Excuse me?
“Not something I do.” Cumberbatch laughs. “That’ll probably be the headline: “Benedict Cumberbatch Doesn’t Abstain From Sex for the Sake of His Acting.” Wouldn’t it be great? Should I just say that?”
He did, however, have dental plates made based on Turing’s teeth to get into character for The Imitation Game—a rather ingenious way to mimic Turing’s stammering speech patterns, since there are no recordings of his voice. “I said, ‘Nobody will know, because nobody knows how his teeth were. If it’s uncomfortable, you don’t have to wear them,’” says The *Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum. Cumberbatch wore them anyway. He’d also wake up at five every morning before coming to set to go for a run and clear his mind, just as Turing did. Cumberbatch says he loved the way Turing saw his body as a vessel for his mind, and tends to approach his own roles with an athlete’s physicality. At Harrow, he played rugby; these days, he gets his thrills riding horses and motorcycles, as well as snowboarding and skydiving.
We are either two or three double pisco sours deep when Adam Ackland, Cumberbatch’s “bessie mate” and partner in their production company, SunnyMarch, comes over. Ackland’s been taking meetings on their behalf all day. “He’s been out a-*hunting whilst I’ve been in a-talking,” says Cumberbatch, who orders more pisco sours and some fried chicken. “Sing it!” he sings. He also takes a messy bite of ahi tuna that flies onto my phone. “Oh, no!” he says. “I’ve got a bit of ceviche splat on your ****ing Samsung. I’m so sorry! Oh, Jesus!”
I tell him it’s fine. Now the phone is worth something. “Exactly,” he says, laughing. “I was going to say, ‘Go and frame the phone and sell it on eBay or something.’ Though it’s not my splat. It’s not a Cumbersplat. It’s a ceviche splat.”
Cumberbatch started SunnyMarch because “selfishly,” he says, “I want to make films that I want to see, basically.” The second hope is to find a new way of doing business and to do away with the dreaded full days of back-to-back three-minute junket interviews he’s been enduring in Toronto. His objection isn’t to having to do the interviews—“I don’t mind the slog”—but how short they are, because how is a man who won’t join Twitter because he’s too verbose for 140 characters supposed to talk in brevity about a movie that, he says, is “about communication, about love, about conditioning, about society, about war, about peace, about science and what it is to be human, how to be heroic, while being normal or different”? And the guilt he says he has about not giving reporters what they need and anxiety over not doing Alan Turing justice will only increase as Harvey Weinstein tries to make an Oscar push for The Imitation Game, which Cumberbatch says “is enormously exciting for me and for the film. But, you know, in all honesty, I can’t actually do that thing,” meaning the months-long campaign. “I don’t have the time to commit to it.” He’s shooting Richard III for the BBC until Christmas, then a Sherlock special in January (and season four by the end of the year), then playing a motion-capture Shere Khan in Andy Serkis’s Jungle Book: Origins, and he will spend his summer as Hamlet—in a production that sold out within a day, the fastest-selling theater ticket in London history. With his own company, he says, “I want to see if there are other ways of doing this. I might be crashingly disappointing. Or I might realize that Harvey is actually a really decent guy and it’s just the only way of doing things.”
Our waiter approaches one last time. “The gentlemen at the bar are fans and wanted to send over a glass of Champagne. This is Billecart-Salmon Brut.”
Cumberbatch’s whole affect grows tense, as if he’s trying to tamp down annoyance. “Well, thank you,” he says with a little sigh, and waves back to the very enthusiastically waving distant figures at the bar—it turns out they’re his Imitation Game co-stars and good friends Matthew Goode (a.k.a. Finn on The Good Wife) and Allen Leech (a.k.a. Tom on Downton Abbey).
“Matthew and Allen!” says Cumberbatch, cracking up. “Jesus Christ. Send it back! Can you send it back and say I’ve got an allergy?” he asks the waiter. “Thank you very much.” Then, for good measure, he shouts, loud enough so they can hear him: “And it’s not good enough!”
A minute or so later, the waiter is back. “They want to know if the allergy is to the Champagne or to them.”
“Both. Just say I’ve got an allergy to cheap Champagne. Tell them exactly that. I have acid reflux, and unless it’s really good bubbles, I’m not going to take that!” He shakes his head and laughs. “But please don’t sell that too well. Make sure they know it’s a joke. They’ll really think I’m an *******.”
*This article appears in the November 17, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.
