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Jul. 5th, 2013
БЛЕСТЯЩАЯ СТАТЬЯ, БЛЕСТЯЩАЯ!
Portrait. How a British character-actor with an unusual animalistic magnetism, via Sherlock Holmes, successfully became world’s sexiest film star.
By Marijn van der Jagt.
Actors who want to become film heroes better be handsome, and a broad chest might help too. You may burst of acting talent, but when you call yourself “Shergar” after the famous racehorse at school to be a step ahead of the bullies, then it is not very likely that you will ever play romantic conquerors or mythical commanding officers. ‘My face screams “character-actor”, and I learned to accept that,’ complained Benedict Cumberbatch about five years ago.
In the London theatres he played himself out of his skin, but the film- and television roles, which he was offered before his thirstiest year, were mainly distinct. Pinned up gentlemen in costume-dramas and socially awkward smart guys were his speciality. He dreamed of one day playing an action hero, but when he fantasized aloud in his posh English accent, about his ‘Daniel Craig-moment’ - ‘I’d love to transform my body into some ridiculous war machine’– then he had the laughs on his side. Once he ventured to audition for the role of James Bond in a computer game. Dressed in tuxedo he made emergency jumps on the love seat in a dirty office, an idiotic scene about which he could tell heavenly. Because even for the digital version of 007 his appearance was too alien. An elongated head with a stubby nose, girlish curved lips, animal-like slanted eyes, and than that lanky body. A malicious critic once called him a startled meerkat.
Dirty verb
Cumberbatch is still compared to animals. There is a website called ‘Otters Who Look Like Benedict Cumberbatch’, with pictures of otters which have exactly the same expression as the actor. Yet meanwhile he is known as the sexiest man on earth. The last few years several leading international newspapers and magazines have credited him that status. How that happened, is for the chosen one a mystery. ‘I’m still trying to process this misconception,’ was one of his dry remarks to the interviewers who congratulated him. He has a growing crowd of female fans who call themselves the ‘Cumberbitches’, on websites that are dedicated entirely to him.
That was something that the actor had not foreseen when he decided to exchange his stage name Ben Carlton into the baroque-ish name which he inherited at birth. And certainly not that his last name would be used as a dirty verb: ‘I’ve cumberbatched all over my skirt!’ wrote a fan at a sultry picture of her idol. The properly educated Englishman himself refuses to utter the word ‘Cumberbitch’, out of respect for the achievements of feminism. He recently was a guest on The Graham Norton Show where he called his screaming fans with half play-acted shame the ‘the eh… Cumbercollective’.
He was on the Graham Norton Show because he stars in Star Trek into Darkness. Next to the actor who plays Captain Kirk in the movie, a Bratt Pitt-like blonde God. But it is not this handsome Captain that is the public attraction on the Star Trek posters, and that was shown bare chested in a shower teaser video. And the excited women in the talk show audience who had flown from Japan and South Korea to catch a glimpse of their hero, had indeed come for Benedict Cumberbatch. Because ever since he played the title character in the new Sherlock Holmes-series that the BBC has sold in nearly two hundred countries, he is now worldwide seen as a highly desirable man.
He got sick of the criticism that he would be ‘posh’.
Nicotine patches
In England they already knew that he was good, by his stage roles, his endearing portrayal of Stephen Hawking in the film about the crippled astronomer, and his breathtakingly beautiful leading role in the film Third Star on a fragile young man dying of cancer and who - like Cumberbatch himself earlier - longs for a heroic part in life. But his interpretation of Sherlock made Cumberbatch a national treasure. The pimped version of the primal detective series consists of three feature-film-length episodes per season. At the start of series two, ten million Brits watched the dazzling fast ‘deductions’ of the savage, by Cumberbatch played, ‘sociopath’.
What makes the series so endearing is that the creators are true to the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle in every single detail, all the while their Sherlock is a twenty-first-century man. Sherlock walks around in an old-fashioned coat and lives in the furnished flat with his old landlady, yet he prefers to communicate through text messages and his assistant Watson maintains an internet blog about his genius friend. Sherlock Holmes exchanged the chequered hat and the pipe for nicotine patches. “It’s a three-patch problem” he mumbles thoughtfully.
Cumberbatch himself doesn’t consider his black dyed hair handsome: combined with his pale skin it gives him a sinister, gothic look. But there is something irresistible in Sherlock’s quicksilver speed and that deep, sonorous bass voice in which Cumberbatch debits the witty lines (‘We’ve got ourselves a serial killer. I love those. There’s always something to look forward to!’). The fact that this Sherlock is not at all interested in women (apart from that one SM-diva whom he intellectually could not deduce and whose best seductive line states ‘brainy is the new sexy’), leads to jokes about his suspicious cozy friendship with Watson in the series. However, it also contributes to his appeal. And the difficulty to maintain a girlfriend in reality feeds the dreams of the Cumberbitches.
The international success of Sherlock helped Cumberbatch to cross the pond to Hollywood. Which he wanted for some time. Not only because he wanted to play James Bond, he felt himself limited by his genteel image in the class-conscious England. The one time the extremely polite actor came upon the wrong side of the press, was about that theme. He said that he was sick of being accused of being ‘posh’, which is an insult for someone who claims to be of chic decent or (acquired) wealth.
That was the reason for certain journalists to extensively highlight his posh background. He comes from a plantation family, and with his role in the film Amazing Grace as the eighteenth-century politician who wanted to put an end to slavery, he once characterised his attempt to make amends with his infected family history. And yes, he has been educated at one of the best private boys schools in England, through wich he learned to talk well-mannered and know how to play someone from the upper class. But his parents both have a precarious existence as actors, and said that they worked themselves to death to pay for the expensive education. He wanted to go to Hollywood so that the whining about his origin would stop. And because of all the characters he could play in America, even those with working-class accents.
Five years ago he had grinned that it would probably not work out with the American agent he had taken by the arm: ‘He thinks I’m a character from a book by Dickens.’ But in 2011 he starred in Spielberg’s War Horse, this year Star Trek into Darkness followed, and in October, the American film with his portrayal of Julian Assange wil be released. In the following months, we’ll see him next to Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender in the Hollywood slaves drama 12 Years a Slave, and with Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep in the family drama August: Osage County. Next year he plays the title role in an American film about Alan Turing, the homosexual computer pioneer. And the first footage of the second Hobbit film, in which Cumberbatch plays a major part: that of the dragon Smaug, has just been released.
Intellect on legs.
Who thinks he only provides bass-toned voice to the computer generated dragon is wrong. Cumberbatch threw his long body into battle to make the fantasy creature move around, and despite his anecdotes about how moronic he looked in his tights and lights helmet he confirms that the role of the dragon has been an important step in his development as an actor. After decades of playing stiff and distinguished gentlemen and in their movements restricted figures, Benedict Cumberbatch is finally more than just a portion of intellect on legs.
As Sherlock he still claims that he is not interested in his body. ‘The brain is what counts. Everything else is transport,’ he replies as Watson asks him directly whether he ever does ‘it’. Yet the eccentric detective enjoys to wear open falling dressing gowns in his floral wallpaper home, or to be dressed in nothing but a sagging sheet whilst paying his brother in the government a visit. Spicy footage which spontaneously makes the Cumberbitches to go cumberbatching.
He has always been a physically set person, goes paragliding, mountaineering and participates in some other spectacular sports, and has no problem with revealing his body for parts. ‘He is at ease with physical and emotional bareness,’ wrote a theatre critic about his highly praised theatre role as Frankenstein’s creature in a Broadway-production of film director Danny Boyle. That of emotional bareness was already known to film and television viewers. So beautifully he bares his soul of the dying young man in Third Star, and whom he with one glance makes despair and amazement coincide in the starry skies above. You can even feel it in his portrayal of the devious girl molester in the film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, in which Cumberbatch gives a sinister, yet tragic chilling. And just have a look on YouTube at the opening scene of Painted with words, the BBC series about Vincent van Gogh, in which he shows the painter with eyes like black holes at the height of the psychosis that made him cut off his own ear.
And now that he is (almost) thirty-seven, the film and television industry finally realises that Benedict Cumberbatch has a body. The man he plays in Star Trek into Darkness lies somewhere between the line of his historical figures and brilliant scientists. Without giving away too much, we can say that John Harrison is a man from a distant past. The man who Captain Kirk gets before him, exercises like a futuristic version of Hannibal Lecter, who even in prison overpowers from within his superior brain. But Cumberbatch definitely has his ‘Daniel Craig-moment’: chases on raging hover vehicles, death jumps from spaceships. In preparation he extensively went to the gym and followed a strict diet to grow muscle mass. Beneath his nice and tight Star Trek-shirt he still does not stand off a muscular wardrobe. But the exercises have helped to put down the explosive intergalactic fighter, who alone mows down armies of evil Klingons and after a rain of sounding punches from Captain Kirk didn’t spill a single drop of his ‘super blood’.
Isn’t ‘brainy’ the new sexy?
A Merry Shamelessness
From his stories about the recordings Cumberbatch speaks of great interest in scientific knowledge: he could not believe they filmed in a laboratory for Star Trek into Darkness where the largest laser in the world is housed and where they experiment with nuclear fusions. But with Cumberbatch that nerdy excitement – wasn’t brainy the new sexy? – goes along with a wonderful naivety. The best anecdote from the Star Trek recordings includes the morning Benedict Cumberbatch walked on the set with heavy dots of cream on his face because his colleagues had made him to believe that it was necessary anti-radiation cream. He himself is the first to remind interviewers who start about this, that he of all people, the very man who has portrayed the brilliant Stephen Hawking and another bunch of super intelligent figures, believed this urban myth.
That merry shamelessness with which Cumberbatch presents himself as some stupid ass only makes him more adorable. In reality he seems to rattle as fast and enthusiastically as his turbo-Sherlock. At school they thought he should do drama because he would tire his class nonstop with his imitations, which he still does on request. There are quite a few amusing statements of him in circulation. As first response to an email that he received at two o’clock in the morning from the American Star Trek director which stated that he got the part of John Harisson ‘Do you want to play?’ was the only sentence in the email. Cumberbatch had no idea what he was supposed to play. ‘A game of squash? Tennis? Another racket-based activity?’ When the news finally dawned there was a lot of nocturnal ‘jumping around an awful lot’ in his London apartment and hands went up into the air.
It’s just a role in a science fiction fantasy and compared with the latest discoveries in the laboratory fusion does not seem very important. He is still not allowed to play the romantic hero, but a sexy villain is more than what he has ever dreamed of. And for a young man who called himself Shergar at shool because of his bony appearance, it is a victory of the spirit over the body.
Portrait. How a British character-actor with an unusual animalistic magnetism, via Sherlock Holmes, successfully became world’s sexiest film star.
By Marijn van der Jagt.
Actors who want to become film heroes better be handsome, and a broad chest might help too. You may burst of acting talent, but when you call yourself “Shergar” after the famous racehorse at school to be a step ahead of the bullies, then it is not very likely that you will ever play romantic conquerors or mythical commanding officers. ‘My face screams “character-actor”, and I learned to accept that,’ complained Benedict Cumberbatch about five years ago.
In the London theatres he played himself out of his skin, but the film- and television roles, which he was offered before his thirstiest year, were mainly distinct. Pinned up gentlemen in costume-dramas and socially awkward smart guys were his speciality. He dreamed of one day playing an action hero, but when he fantasized aloud in his posh English accent, about his ‘Daniel Craig-moment’ - ‘I’d love to transform my body into some ridiculous war machine’– then he had the laughs on his side. Once he ventured to audition for the role of James Bond in a computer game. Dressed in tuxedo he made emergency jumps on the love seat in a dirty office, an idiotic scene about which he could tell heavenly. Because even for the digital version of 007 his appearance was too alien. An elongated head with a stubby nose, girlish curved lips, animal-like slanted eyes, and than that lanky body. A malicious critic once called him a startled meerkat.
Dirty verb
Cumberbatch is still compared to animals. There is a website called ‘Otters Who Look Like Benedict Cumberbatch’, with pictures of otters which have exactly the same expression as the actor. Yet meanwhile he is known as the sexiest man on earth. The last few years several leading international newspapers and magazines have credited him that status. How that happened, is for the chosen one a mystery. ‘I’m still trying to process this misconception,’ was one of his dry remarks to the interviewers who congratulated him. He has a growing crowd of female fans who call themselves the ‘Cumberbitches’, on websites that are dedicated entirely to him.
That was something that the actor had not foreseen when he decided to exchange his stage name Ben Carlton into the baroque-ish name which he inherited at birth. And certainly not that his last name would be used as a dirty verb: ‘I’ve cumberbatched all over my skirt!’ wrote a fan at a sultry picture of her idol. The properly educated Englishman himself refuses to utter the word ‘Cumberbitch’, out of respect for the achievements of feminism. He recently was a guest on The Graham Norton Show where he called his screaming fans with half play-acted shame the ‘the eh… Cumbercollective’.
He was on the Graham Norton Show because he stars in Star Trek into Darkness. Next to the actor who plays Captain Kirk in the movie, a Bratt Pitt-like blonde God. But it is not this handsome Captain that is the public attraction on the Star Trek posters, and that was shown bare chested in a shower teaser video. And the excited women in the talk show audience who had flown from Japan and South Korea to catch a glimpse of their hero, had indeed come for Benedict Cumberbatch. Because ever since he played the title character in the new Sherlock Holmes-series that the BBC has sold in nearly two hundred countries, he is now worldwide seen as a highly desirable man.
He got sick of the criticism that he would be ‘posh’.
Nicotine patches
In England they already knew that he was good, by his stage roles, his endearing portrayal of Stephen Hawking in the film about the crippled astronomer, and his breathtakingly beautiful leading role in the film Third Star on a fragile young man dying of cancer and who - like Cumberbatch himself earlier - longs for a heroic part in life. But his interpretation of Sherlock made Cumberbatch a national treasure. The pimped version of the primal detective series consists of three feature-film-length episodes per season. At the start of series two, ten million Brits watched the dazzling fast ‘deductions’ of the savage, by Cumberbatch played, ‘sociopath’.
What makes the series so endearing is that the creators are true to the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle in every single detail, all the while their Sherlock is a twenty-first-century man. Sherlock walks around in an old-fashioned coat and lives in the furnished flat with his old landlady, yet he prefers to communicate through text messages and his assistant Watson maintains an internet blog about his genius friend. Sherlock Holmes exchanged the chequered hat and the pipe for nicotine patches. “It’s a three-patch problem” he mumbles thoughtfully.
Cumberbatch himself doesn’t consider his black dyed hair handsome: combined with his pale skin it gives him a sinister, gothic look. But there is something irresistible in Sherlock’s quicksilver speed and that deep, sonorous bass voice in which Cumberbatch debits the witty lines (‘We’ve got ourselves a serial killer. I love those. There’s always something to look forward to!’). The fact that this Sherlock is not at all interested in women (apart from that one SM-diva whom he intellectually could not deduce and whose best seductive line states ‘brainy is the new sexy’), leads to jokes about his suspicious cozy friendship with Watson in the series. However, it also contributes to his appeal. And the difficulty to maintain a girlfriend in reality feeds the dreams of the Cumberbitches.
The international success of Sherlock helped Cumberbatch to cross the pond to Hollywood. Which he wanted for some time. Not only because he wanted to play James Bond, he felt himself limited by his genteel image in the class-conscious England. The one time the extremely polite actor came upon the wrong side of the press, was about that theme. He said that he was sick of being accused of being ‘posh’, which is an insult for someone who claims to be of chic decent or (acquired) wealth.
That was the reason for certain journalists to extensively highlight his posh background. He comes from a plantation family, and with his role in the film Amazing Grace as the eighteenth-century politician who wanted to put an end to slavery, he once characterised his attempt to make amends with his infected family history. And yes, he has been educated at one of the best private boys schools in England, through wich he learned to talk well-mannered and know how to play someone from the upper class. But his parents both have a precarious existence as actors, and said that they worked themselves to death to pay for the expensive education. He wanted to go to Hollywood so that the whining about his origin would stop. And because of all the characters he could play in America, even those with working-class accents.
Five years ago he had grinned that it would probably not work out with the American agent he had taken by the arm: ‘He thinks I’m a character from a book by Dickens.’ But in 2011 he starred in Spielberg’s War Horse, this year Star Trek into Darkness followed, and in October, the American film with his portrayal of Julian Assange wil be released. In the following months, we’ll see him next to Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender in the Hollywood slaves drama 12 Years a Slave, and with Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep in the family drama August: Osage County. Next year he plays the title role in an American film about Alan Turing, the homosexual computer pioneer. And the first footage of the second Hobbit film, in which Cumberbatch plays a major part: that of the dragon Smaug, has just been released.
Intellect on legs.
Who thinks he only provides bass-toned voice to the computer generated dragon is wrong. Cumberbatch threw his long body into battle to make the fantasy creature move around, and despite his anecdotes about how moronic he looked in his tights and lights helmet he confirms that the role of the dragon has been an important step in his development as an actor. After decades of playing stiff and distinguished gentlemen and in their movements restricted figures, Benedict Cumberbatch is finally more than just a portion of intellect on legs.
As Sherlock he still claims that he is not interested in his body. ‘The brain is what counts. Everything else is transport,’ he replies as Watson asks him directly whether he ever does ‘it’. Yet the eccentric detective enjoys to wear open falling dressing gowns in his floral wallpaper home, or to be dressed in nothing but a sagging sheet whilst paying his brother in the government a visit. Spicy footage which spontaneously makes the Cumberbitches to go cumberbatching.
He has always been a physically set person, goes paragliding, mountaineering and participates in some other spectacular sports, and has no problem with revealing his body for parts. ‘He is at ease with physical and emotional bareness,’ wrote a theatre critic about his highly praised theatre role as Frankenstein’s creature in a Broadway-production of film director Danny Boyle. That of emotional bareness was already known to film and television viewers. So beautifully he bares his soul of the dying young man in Third Star, and whom he with one glance makes despair and amazement coincide in the starry skies above. You can even feel it in his portrayal of the devious girl molester in the film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, in which Cumberbatch gives a sinister, yet tragic chilling. And just have a look on YouTube at the opening scene of Painted with words, the BBC series about Vincent van Gogh, in which he shows the painter with eyes like black holes at the height of the psychosis that made him cut off his own ear.
And now that he is (almost) thirty-seven, the film and television industry finally realises that Benedict Cumberbatch has a body. The man he plays in Star Trek into Darkness lies somewhere between the line of his historical figures and brilliant scientists. Without giving away too much, we can say that John Harrison is a man from a distant past. The man who Captain Kirk gets before him, exercises like a futuristic version of Hannibal Lecter, who even in prison overpowers from within his superior brain. But Cumberbatch definitely has his ‘Daniel Craig-moment’: chases on raging hover vehicles, death jumps from spaceships. In preparation he extensively went to the gym and followed a strict diet to grow muscle mass. Beneath his nice and tight Star Trek-shirt he still does not stand off a muscular wardrobe. But the exercises have helped to put down the explosive intergalactic fighter, who alone mows down armies of evil Klingons and after a rain of sounding punches from Captain Kirk didn’t spill a single drop of his ‘super blood’.
Isn’t ‘brainy’ the new sexy?
A Merry Shamelessness
From his stories about the recordings Cumberbatch speaks of great interest in scientific knowledge: he could not believe they filmed in a laboratory for Star Trek into Darkness where the largest laser in the world is housed and where they experiment with nuclear fusions. But with Cumberbatch that nerdy excitement – wasn’t brainy the new sexy? – goes along with a wonderful naivety. The best anecdote from the Star Trek recordings includes the morning Benedict Cumberbatch walked on the set with heavy dots of cream on his face because his colleagues had made him to believe that it was necessary anti-radiation cream. He himself is the first to remind interviewers who start about this, that he of all people, the very man who has portrayed the brilliant Stephen Hawking and another bunch of super intelligent figures, believed this urban myth.
That merry shamelessness with which Cumberbatch presents himself as some stupid ass only makes him more adorable. In reality he seems to rattle as fast and enthusiastically as his turbo-Sherlock. At school they thought he should do drama because he would tire his class nonstop with his imitations, which he still does on request. There are quite a few amusing statements of him in circulation. As first response to an email that he received at two o’clock in the morning from the American Star Trek director which stated that he got the part of John Harisson ‘Do you want to play?’ was the only sentence in the email. Cumberbatch had no idea what he was supposed to play. ‘A game of squash? Tennis? Another racket-based activity?’ When the news finally dawned there was a lot of nocturnal ‘jumping around an awful lot’ in his London apartment and hands went up into the air.
It’s just a role in a science fiction fantasy and compared with the latest discoveries in the laboratory fusion does not seem very important. He is still not allowed to play the romantic hero, but a sexy villain is more than what he has ever dreamed of. And for a young man who called himself Shergar at shool because of his bony appearance, it is a victory of the spirit over the body.
И это не вызывает сомнений
Jul. 5th, 2013 09:23 pmОригинал взят у ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bjilka в ;)
bjilka в ;)Перед запуском нового канала Drama телесеть UKTV решила выяснить, какие моменты из драматических британских телесериалов запомнились зрителям больше всего. Проведя опрос среди двух тысяч респондентов, телевизионщики выявили лучший эпизод теле-драмы: им оказалась сцена купания героя Колина Ферта — Мистера Дарси — из экранизации романа Джейн Остин «Гордость и предубеждение».
...
Ну а закрыл тройку лидеров любимый во всем мире «Шерлок» — а именно эпизод из последней вышедшей в эфир серии «Рейхенбахский водопад», когда Шерлок Холмс (в исполнении несравненного Бенедикта Камбербэтча) бросается с крыши.
(с)
полностью здесь
...
Ну а закрыл тройку лидеров любимый во всем мире «Шерлок» — а именно эпизод из последней вышедшей в эфир серии «Рейхенбахский водопад», когда Шерлок Холмс (в исполнении несравненного Бенедикта Камбербэтча) бросается с крыши.
(с)
полностью здесь