Fresh Air Interview with Benedict Cumberbatch
It's been a good year for Benedict Cumberbatch. The English actor has earned an Oscar nomination for his starring role in the film The Imitation Game, and he's won critical acclaim and a big following for his performance on TV's Sherlock.
In The Imitation Game, Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, the brilliant, eccentric mathematician who led the team that broke the Enigma code used by German forces to encrypt their radio transmissions during World War II. Years later, in 1952, Turing was convicted of homosexuality, which at the time was illegal in Great Britain.
Cumberbatch tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies that because there are no visual or audio recordings of Turing, his portrayal of the man — including his stammer and awkwardness — relied on written anecdotes and the Turing family's own memories of the mathematician.
"The nieces I met ... were fantastically candid and had incredibly fond memories of this wondrous man and talked of him as someone who made them feel equals as children. ... They loved his company," Cumberbatch says. "They remember being very at ease; they don't remember being embarrassed or awkward about his stammer or him being embarrassed or awkward around them. That told me a lot. That told me a lot about who this man was — the arrested development in him; the idea that he could sympathize with the innocence of children because of everything the world had thrown at him to corrupt him, to destroy him, to make him an outsider."
Cumberbatch also starred in the HBO miniseries Parade's End and played WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the movie The Fifth Estate. His other film credits include War Horse, 12 Years a Slave, August: Osage County and the Hobbit film series, in which he played the voice of Smaug the dragon.