Benedict Cumberbatch is a diligent researcher of the lives of his characters, both fictional and non-fictional. On the face of it, the story of Greville Wynne, the character he plays in his most recent film, The Courier, offered rich pickings. But there was a problem. A real-life businessman recruited by MI6 during the Cold War as a go-between with Soviet asset Oleg Penkovsky, the late Wynne had left behind two books detailing his exploits. Unfortunately, he was a compulsive liar. Much of what he described was either wrong or simply couldn’t have taken place. The Courier, then, needed to be one Hollywood biopic that relied less on its source material to try to get to the truth. (When it comes to espionage, it turns out you don’t know who to trust.)
So how best to get a handle on the man?
“It’s weird,” Cumberbatch says. “Things come out of leftfield that pull you in the direction of understanding a character.”
With Greville Wynne it was his tie.
“I said, ‘This tie’s in every single photograph of him. It’s what he wears on his show trial, it’s what he wears when he comes out of prison, it’s what he wears before he was ever embroiled in this whole thing.’ I researched it. It was a University of Nottingham Engineering Club tie. He was never part of any club. It’s a uniform. He’s projecting a personality. It’s an act. A bit of showmanship.”
Benedict Cumberbatch has been busy. He currently has four films awaiting release. Two for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man: No Way Home, and two others in which his love of research proved especially useful. For The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, about an eccentric Edwardian artist whose pictures of big-eyed cats playing cards, doing the washing up, etc, bought him a very big audience but very little money, he enlisted the help of Wain’s long-time art dealer, Chris Beetles.
“I did a lot of the painting that you see in the film,” Cumberbatch says. “That is me doing it though I can’t do it with both hands [Wain painted with two hands simultaneously].”
But he really had his work cut out on The Power of the Dog, the mind-blowing new western by Jane Campion. He plays Phil Burbank, a Montana ranch owner who torments a local widow who unexpectedly marries his younger brother, George. According to Thomas Savage’s original 1967 novel, the elder Burbank is “a great reader, a taxidermist, skilled at braiding rawhide and horsehair, a solver of chess problems, a smith and metalworker, a collector of arrowheads (even fashioning arrowheads himself with greater skill than any Indian), a banjo player, a fine writer, a builder of hay-stacking beaver-slide derricks, a vivid conversationalist”.
All the horse-riding Cumberbatch was fine with, having covered that one in the 2011 movie War Horse.
“Loved it,” he says. “Wonderful just to get back in the saddle.”
That just left braiding, roping, ironmongery, hidetreating, hay-stacking, whistling, whittling and the banjo. leaves you in no doubt he became proficient in them all. He was match-fit before shooting began, visiting an ironmonger on
