Shout out to CB, who alerted me that Benedict Cumberbatch did an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday. Yes, Cumby can never stop hustling. Bless him. I’m serious – I’ve come full circle on Cumby’s hustle. At first I enjoyed it, then I found it vaguely annoying, then I just wanted him to STAHP, and now I’m back to being amused. Bendy obviously spent most of the interview talking about Alan Turning, but there were some good moments where he talked about Sherlock, Sherlock’s sex appeal and his own (Bendy’s) sex appeal. I’m including the embedded audio at the end of the post, but you can see the full NPR thing here.
On empathizing with Turing’s social awkwardness:
“I’ve turned up to costume parties in the wrong costume. I’ve made social faux pas aplenty. I’ve put one foot in front of the other and fallen over. If you’ve ever experienced the idea of feeling slightly outside, or the creeping paranoia of a teenager where you just feel that you don’t quite fit into anything, where you’re just finding out who you are and everyone else seems to have got it sorted, [you can relate]. … I think what formulated very early in his life was this incredible sensitiveness to the world and his environment and the way people treated him, and that was born out of having a stammer.
On Turing’s prosecution for being gay:
The choice then for men who were arrested and prosecuted for being gay was the choice between two years’ imprisonment or two years’ chemical castration through weekly estrogen injections. This is less than 100 years ago in a country that had just been liberated from the threat of fascism by one of the very men that they then punished for his sexuality. It’s barbaric, it’s frightening and sadly it’s not a history lesson — it’s something that we need to be equally wary of in our current climate of intolerance. … He, in that period, chose the estrogen injections rather than the imprisonment in order to be able to continue his work. The estrogen injections not only corrupted his mind but started to eat away at his body. … He lost this athletic body but he also lost a mind that was attuned to the one thing he was left to love and focus on, which was his work.
On Sherlock’s sex appeal
Being really hyperobjective about it, I kind of … do understand it because he’s aloof, he’s pretty cold and mean; but he’s utterly brilliant, can be incredibly charming, incredibly capable and smart and funny but also flawed. I think he’s rather a thrilling person to spend time with.
On his own sex appeal
It’s a projection of work, and that’s why you’re right to ask the question about whether Sherlock is sexy, because I sure as hell ain’t. And I’ve been around for 10 or 15 years before this happened and I wasn’t on any lists of the millionth most attractive. … It’s just very flattering and it makes me giggle, as [fans] know, because it is — it’s sort of silly. … I think it is a reflection of the work and hopefully how I come across when I’m talking about the work, rather than what I actually have got.
On fame
I’m still getting used to all of it. There are days when, like everybody, you feel not your best and not yourself and uncomfortable with who you are and not in your own skin and you’d rather be at home under a duvet doing what you do at home. You crave privacy, basically, and you have to get along in the world and see a colleague and go into the office with your cold or your hangover or just whatever the thing that’s griping you. And that’s the same with fame, I guess. There are days you wear it lightly and you don’t mind that people you’ve never met before recognize you when you walk in a room, or there are days when you just wish you were invisible.
“You’d rather be at home under a duvet doing what you do at home”…? I know what I do under the duvet. Is it the same as what Cumby does under the duvet? As for his “I sure as hell ain’t” sexy talk… that was Cumby trying to sound like a bro. He was trying to put it in terms Americans would understand! I’m sure the word “ain’t” felt like dirty pennies in his mouth. “I hope I never have to say that terrible word again…” he muttered to himself. “Damn Yankees.”
Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.
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