Cumberbatch — he flirted with changing his name to Carlton like his father, but soon realised there was no need — is not one of the pretty boys. His looks are too striking and unusual to make him the sort of rom-com pin-up who opens a movie. He has exotic cheekbones, slanting blue-green eyes (“mum’s”), retroussé nose (“my aunt’s”), thick hair (“dad’s”), and the most lavishly accentuated upper lip since Clara Bow. Look closer and its outline seems to have been tattooed, making his cupid’s bow visible from halfway back in the stalls. The marking first appeared when he was working in South Africa, skin damage, he was told by a dermatologist, and an indication of high oestrogen levels normally seen in men with cancer. He was tested and cleared. He laughs: “Then I was just worried that people would think I wore make-up every day.”
The looks, which lend Holmes his effete aura and ambiguous sexuality, are helpful for a character actor, chameleon enough to see him play a twisted killer or a flouncing Kenneth Williams. “I’m aware of the power of looks,” he says. “I’ve wanted to play roles that have gone to much better-looking people and you just think, ‘Oh well, that’s the pin-up guy’s… an actor like my friend James McAvoy, who’s gorgeous on screen. I’m not that. But at least I don’t have to worry about taking precious care of my face because it’s my commodity. That’s a great freedom. I’m not afraid of being heinous for the sake of a part.”
He was recently compared in The Mirror to Shergar, but finds the insult hilarious, claiming to be flattered. “The irritating thing is that I’ve always said that myself, and now some journalist has taken credit for it. I looked good in the picture, the horse looked good. What’s the problem?” At the press launch of Sherlock he was asked if he minded being typecast as intense, clever, sexually ambiguous characters and, feeling relaxed, he risked a joke. “I’m here to tell you,” he announced, “that in real life I’m a f***ing fantastic lover!” He groans. “That got everywhere. Everyone was coming up to me going, ‘So, how good are you, exactly?’ Jesus Christ…”
Actually, he is keen to flex his alpha-male credentials in Atonement, After the Dance, now War Horse. “I’d love to beef up and do a Tom Hardy [the star of Bronson]. Bring it on.”
The starring roles in War Horse, the story of a young boy who tries to find his horse Joey in the trenches of France, really belong to the stallions, who for the first time ride into the tanks, guns and gas of war. In real life, the lead is a 17½-hand equine gladiator, “half a tonne of 35-miles-per-hour joy” as Cumberbatch puts it. “It’s not told from his perspective like the book, otherwise it would be Disney, but obviously the Bafta will go to Joey as best horse actor.”
Horror of horrors, he was late for his appointment with Spielberg because of Westminster’s frustrating parking system, and the director’s clipboard minions were twitchy when he arrived. “So I went in with my shoulders up saying, ‘Sorry, so sorry,’ and Steven was just so sweet. I told him that the officers mustn’t look like doomed upper-class fools, there has to be something heroic about their charge, and he agreed.” Accompanying Cumberbatch at the audience were his equally nervous fellow officers Tom Hiddleston and Patrick Kennedy, also public schoolboys, the latter at Harrow where he played the son Biff to Cumberbatch’s Willy in Death of a Salesman. “We were together in Atonement as well. Steven was saying, ‘My God, you guys, you are like a club, you’re so unbelievably perfect for this, it’s great.’ But we are really vehicles for the horses, it’s their journey.” He laughs. “Tom was going into character, and Steven was saying, ‘Yeah, all that’s great, but we gotta get the right horse.’”
2010年08月20日 08点08分
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