Benedict Cumberbatch Talks Secrets, Leaks, and Sherlock

‘I was frightened,’ Benedict Cumberbatch says in a soft, thoughtful voice Over lunch on a rainy afternoon in New York City. He’s not talking about the terrible act of violence he survived on a trip to South Africa a few years ago. Nor the daunting prospect of playing some of the world’s most recognizable figures: Stephen Hawking, in a 2004 BBC movie that served as one of his early breaks, or notorious WikiLeaker Julian Assange in Bill Condon’s The Fifth Estate, opening Oct. 18.

He’s talking about privacy. “I was worried about being exposed,” he says. It began in 2010, when his reinvention of Sherlock Holmes besotted legions of his countrymen — and, famously, the groups of countrywomen who called themselves “Cumberbitches” until he told INSTYLE U.K. that he was concerned “about what it says for feminism … Cumberbabes might be better.” When Sherlock’s second season premiered on PBS, its ratings beat recent numbers of cult favorites like Mad Men, with Cumberbatch as its cerebral pinup. “Stepping into the populist limelight,” he says, “has been quite crazy.”

(PHOTOS: Behind the Scenes with Benedict Cumberbatch)

Sometimes an actor captures a cultural moment in a film. Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, for example, embodied the fever dreams of the feminist backlash in a single sociopath, a woman whose sexual power threatened to destroy all it touched. And sometimes an actor’s body of work provides a kind of historical shorthand: Dennis Hopper’s shift from Easy Rider‘s wide-eyed radical to the shell-shocked journalist in Apocalypse Now to the suburban, Reagan-era rot of Blue Velvet captures almost 20 years in under seven hours.

In a single year’s clutch of performances, Cumberbatch has channeled half a dozen shades of zeitgeist. Here’s 2013 for the 37-year-old British actor: In a world where the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist can change hour to hour, he portrayed the enigmatic villain Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, a popcorn-with-politics sequel to J.J. Abrams’ franchise refurbishment. As battles over health care shut down the U.S. government, he’ll appear with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts in the all-star ensemble August: Osage County, in which cancer burns a path of ruin through an extended heartland family. We hardly need another movie to show how the ghosts of slavery haunt the U.S., but Cumberbatch’s poignant turn as a softhearted slave owner in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as a freeman sold into slavery, emphasizes once again how racism wounds everyone it touches. And there’s his chameleonic, bravura performance as Assange in The Fifth Estate, which was almost kiboshed by Assange himself and is a test case for the tension between privacy and technology that’s unfolding in real time.

(MORE: Richard Corliss’ review of The Fifth Estate)

Cumberbatch is seizing his moment. He responded to an e-mail Assange released as a critique of the film with his own thoughtful discourse on what journalism and democracy should be — and not just in the press but in e-mails to Assange. That began a feedback loop culminating in Assange’s claim on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos that Cumberbatch “tried to ameliorate some of the worst elements of the script but unfortunately with limited success, though I’m pleased he tried.” Assange went on to blast the project as “a big cashing-in” by “a rich organization … that’s intending to make a lot of money from this process.” (The film was co-produced by DreamWorks, which has a distribution deal with Disney.) Cumberbatch has, so far, let that be the last word.

On a lighter note, Cumberbatch basically broke the Internet one recent afternoon by offering new ideas for erotic fan fiction on a Reddit AMA (an online “ask me anything” session). When asked if he ever has “cheekbone-polishing parties” with fellow Brit and Doctor Who lead Matt Smith and Thor‘s Loki, Tom Hiddleston, Cumberbatch wrote, “We like nothing better than buffing our Zygoma. And imagining a horny time traveling long overcoat purple scarf wearing super-sleuth nordic legend f — – fantasy. Get to work on that, internet.” It surely did.

Despite those vertiginous cheekbones and his utterly distinctive face, Cumberbatch is fully able to transform on film. As the warrior Khan he’s a ferocious, furrowed mix of calculation and pure id. In a climactic speech, swells of rage and disgust look ready to burst through his forehead. His Sherlock, on the other hand, sometimes appears as little more than two eyes and two hands while he commands a restricted palette of gestures that conveys more inner life than most actors’ entire bodies. Sherlock’s trick of “speaking at the speed of thought,” as Cumberbatch describes it, seems to come naturally to the actor, as does his propensity for close observation. “A kind of frightening thing happened,” says Cumberbatch’s Fifth Estate co-star Daniel Brühl, who plays Daniel Domscheit-Berg, WikiLeaks’ former spokesman under the nom de Web Daniel Schmitt and the author of one of the books that were adapted for the movie’s screenplay. “The first time I met him in London for rehearsal, he took one look at me and told me what I had had for breakfast.” Brühl laughs. “I said, ‘Hi, Sherlock, nice to meet you.’ And he said, ‘Sorry, sorry, I just can’t let go of that part.'”

As Smaug in Peter Jackson’s forthcoming Hobbit films, Cumberbatch’s body will be absent completely, replaced by cutting-edge CGI. “I’ve got to be a however-many-hundreds-of-years-old, fire-breathing, dwelling-under-a-mountain creature of destruction and doom. That can fly. And that is about the size of the Empire State Building,” he says with amazement. Tolkien’s work was a formative influence on him. “Growing up,” he says, “my dad read it to me, and it was a real treat, a feast for a child’s imagination. He did an amazing Smaug and hobbits and Gandalf as well — it’s the audiobook that will never exist. If I was good that night, I’d get to hear two chapters.”

There’s a touch of playfulness in Cumberbatch’s dashing Peter Guillam, in 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. With his handsome suits and leonine highlights, Guillam was all youth and flash in the drab world of Cold War espionage. But Guillam’s glamour was “a hollow symbol,” Cumberbatch says. “He’s covering up the fact that he’s a gay man in a very heterosexual world, and he has to compromise any idea of domestic security to protect his own back.” Cumberbatch fast-forwards to his newest character. “I guess,” he says, “Julian ended up doing the same thing. He’s literally living in a converted bathroom next to an embassy behind Harrods. I don’t know what will happen if more revelations come out that finger him or somehow embroil him in something where he can’t exist as a refugee any longer.”

LAW AND ORDER
In 1976, London was a city roiled by Irish Republican Army bombings, major trade-union strikes, punks hawking up their first rebellious emissions and a long, hot summer. That July, Cumberbatch was born to two actor parents, Timothy Carlton and Wanda Ventham. (His father had dropped the mouthful of a surname.) “As actors, they had this peripatetic, slightly out-of-control lifestyle, uncertain of future careers,” he recalls. He has a half-sister from his mother’s previous marriage: “She’s adorable. She kind of babysat me when I was growing up.”

His parents were set on his finding a different livelihood. “They afforded my education by taking every job that was coming — an education for getting me opportunities to do anything but be an actor,” he says. He first considered becoming a barrister. “It was very romantic, the notion of setting up in court like Rumpole of the Bailey.” The closer he got to donning the wig and robes, though, the more ambivalent he became. Life as a lawyer was hardly secure. “The reality was being equally oversubscribed, equally as good as your last job, equally as unrewarding and hardworking and peripatetic.” He “kissed that life goodbye,” he says, at 17. He spent England’s traditional gap year before university teaching English in a Tibetan monastery, then studied drama at the University of Manchester before earning an M.A. at the prestigious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (alma mater to Jim Broadbent and Chris O’Dowd, among others).

He landed roles in BBC miniseries and on London stages; by 2005 he’d earned a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor as the emotionally stunted academic Jorgen Tesman in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Cumberbatch won the Olivier seven years later for playing both Frankenstein and his monster in Danny Boyle’s 2011 production for the Royal National Theatre. His father was starring in a revival of Cause Célèbre at the nearby Old Vic that season. “[My father and I] would sort of meet at bars on the South Bank afterwards,” Cumberbatch recalls. “I love the fact that I make [my parents] proud. And because they’re actors, they get it, which is wonderful.”

When Sherlock came along in 2010, his mother understood the strange balance of respect and irreverence it takes to keep a television icon fresh: she’d spent 20 years as various characters on the BBC’s legendary Doctor Who.

“I knew I was in very safe hands with the creators, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat,” Cumberbatch says. Their update of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective series — which replaces Victorian Gothicism with millennial dread, Holmes’ icy yet almost demure decadence with a quasi-autistic, nicotine-addled quirk and Watson’s gentlemanly idolatry with a mutually acknowledged, winking, anxious homoeroticism — won a devoted following on both sides of the Atlantic and earned Cumberbatch an Emmy nomination in 2012. The show returns for a third season this winter.

PHOTOS: Behind the Scenes with Benedict Cumberbatch

PLAYING ASSANGE
Cumberbatch’s startlingly accurate Assange, a blend of bombast and beguilement, is no cat-stroking international man of demystification but a characterization that’s far more complex. Even Assange acknowledged Cumberbatch’s good intentions in his e-mail heard round the world. “[I have] examined your previous work, which I am fond of,” he wrote. But in the end, Assange said, “your skills play into the hands of people who are out to remove me and WikiLeaks from the world.”

Cumberbatch has put a lot of thought into the charge. “I’ve never been an activist,” he says, “but I’ve always been politically aware. I protested against budget cuts and cuts to education. I marched against the Iraq War. All that protesting was just swept aside to pave the way for an illegal war, and the results of that war were made very, very plain by those leaked war logs.”

The Fifth Estate does an admirable job demonstrating the pressure Assange was under while preparing the leak of almost 400,000 classified U.S. military records from the Iraq War. The most extensive intelligence disclosure in American history required balancing the safety of sources with Assange’s devotion to transparency (a notion that becomes both his raison d’être and bête noire by film’s end) as well as the commercial and journalistic requirements of the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel.

“I first became aware of the WikiLeaks story through the fact that the news had pushed the war to the 16th page, and this put it right back on the front page again,” Cumberbatch says. “All our worst fears about the realities of the mess were confirmed. The rule of law is being overrun so fast, eroding our civil liberties in a way that fundamentalists could possibly cherish. Yet there is a very real threat, for the other liberty that we could have taken away is our life, at any point, through the act of terrorism. I think intelligence services have really struggled post-Iraq with credibility, and I feel for them to a certain degree. They are trying to protect our right to exist.”

Cumberbatch believes The Fifth Estate honors what Assange created. “The idea that people could not fear retribution for anonymously whistle-blowing on malpractice? That’s an incredibly potent, powerful new democratic tool.”

As for Assange, the film all but ignores the sexual-assault charges he faces. In an e-mail to Assange, Cumberbatch says, he wrote that he hoped the film would largely sidestep the more lurid details of Assange’s life in favor of engaging with the philosophical and political ramifications of WikiLeaks. And it largely has: though Condon indulges in a panoply of aesthetic bells and whistles, The Fifth Estate clearly holds those who risk their safety for more-transparent governance in great esteem.

A WHALE OF A LESSON
Cumberbatch himself is no stranger to life-threatening situations. In 2005, while filming the miniseries To the End of the Earth in South Africa, he and two friends drove to the coast to learn scuba diving. On the drive back, a tire went flat.

“I got out to fix it,” Cumberbatch says now, “and these guys surrounded us. Just before the tire blew, we’d been listening to Radiohead, that song ‘How to Disappear Completely.'” Cumberbatch sings a line from the song, softly: “I’m not here. This isn’t happening.” The men looted the car, then took him and his friends hostage. “I was bouncing on the knee of the front passenger, with my back against the windscreen, and my thumb hit the radio. That song came on. It was absurd.”

The kidnappers drove the car off the side of the road, under an overpass. They tied Cumberbatch up and threw him in the trunk. After what felt like hours, they extracted him and tied him to his friends. “I felt that big, cold barrel of a gun on the back of my neck,” he says. “I was in the execution position.” He’d recently seen photos of beheadings in Iraq, “and that was very much the image in my mind as I bent my hands behind my back, tied up with my shoelaces with my feet behind me, on my knees with a gun to my head.”

The shot never came. The power of persuasion that serves him so well as an actor worked on his kidnappers, who released them. They found their way to freedom, unscathed but shaken. He worried he might just “shrivel up into a shell and not want to be part of the world.” Instead he woke up the next morning, had a beer and a cigarette, and says he thought, “I want to be part of this. I want to go out and swim and run through the sand dunes and into that landscape. It was a small event in a big country.” Later he went to Mozambique and finished a scuba course. “My first underwater dive, I saw a sperm whale and its calf, 10 meters away from me. The pilot of the boat said, ‘You lucky f — -er, I’ve been doing this for 10 years and I’ve never seen one so close. And on your first dive? F — – you!’ And I just laughed and thought, You know, I did go through a bit to get here!”

He’s learned how to keep things hidden. “With Star Trek, with Sherlock, God knows there are other projects as well … I can’t at all talk about them,” he says. “It’s ridiculous. I kind of feel like I’m carrying around all these secrets.” For a man under the bright glare of celebrity, Cumberbatch keeps much of his private life in the dark. “Every time I’m seen at a bar with a girl, I get photographed,” he says with a sigh. “Anyone who has a computer knows my entire dating history. I get it. Paparazzi is an inescapable, immovable obstacle.”

He’s become the object of the kind of DIY paparazzi of Internet fans as well: dozens of Tumblrs are devoted to his life, with awkwardly punny names like Cumberbum and A Cumberbatch of Cookies. When he repeats how his success is “an embarrassment of riches,” he puts equal emphasis on both sides of the phrase.

Cumberbatch says he admires the way August: Osage County producer George Clooney has managed celebrity: “He’s a wonderful man to be around. He just wears his fame and who he is as a public persona, and it doesn’t seem to cost him, you know?”

August was filmed in rural Oklahoma, where Cumberbatch assumed he’d go unnoticed. Even there, though, the master sleuth’s reputation preceded him. “I thought, Oh, I won’t get recognized here,” he says, laughing. “But the first café I walked into, the waitresses were like” — and here he approximates a gum-chewing Midwestern accent with affection — “‘Oh my God! Aren’t you on television? Don’t you play Sherlock Holmes?’ It’s amazing the spread of that thing, it’s incredible.”

He had better luck going incognito in New Orleans, where he filmed 12 Years a Slave. “All that darkness, just outside the city border, [the remains of] steamboats and slave markets, and just extraordinary shops and extraordinary stories — everyone has a passion, and it’s all kind of on display. I have the radio station WWOZ on my phone.”

Beyond jazz, he is a fan of soundtracky postrockers Sigur Rós and just saw Nile Rodgers’ Chic in London. “To have that many people in a disco mood, everyone dancing and smiling without shame in your moves, is the best kind of high,” he says.

You get the sense that as articulate as Cumberbatch is, that kind of abandon is a rarity. He likens a successful performance not to a moment of losing himself, the flow that his fellow Buddhists often talk about, but in more athletic terms, as if it takes a bit of physical exertion to get there. “It’s rather like a sportsman,” he says, “where you hit a sweet spot and think, Oh, that felt good. You don’t necessarily know why it is. It’s pretty fleeting, and I guess that’s how it should be, because the minute you try to hold on to it, it’s too precious, and you start to try to reinvigorate the ghost of what you’ve done rather than keep evolving it.”

Few actors are evolving faster, or more intelligently, than Cumberbatch. So far he has resisted a rom-com cash-in or action-hero self-mythologizing, though he’s scheduled to play the great hero of inaction, Hamlet, on the London stage next spring. His next big film project is 2014’s The Imitation Game, in which he portrays the groundbreaking father of computer science, Alan Turing, who was chemically castrated in 1952 for being gay and whose work, like that of the modern Sherlock and Assange, takes place at the intersection of communication, technology and humanity.

Cumberbatch’s zeal for unraveling these knotty sorts of men is unmistakable. “Coming back to Julian for a second,” he says, “he’s a man who, excuse his message of transparency, wants to keep as much of himself together as possible.” The same could be said for the man who plays him, but the resemblance ends there. “As far as typecasting,” Cumberbatch says, “I think I’m clear of that.”