Benedict Cumberbatch

So, who is Patrick Melrose?

Patrick is a character desperate to distance himself from his terrible childhood and, as a result, is psychologically all over the place. He’s addicted to drugs and near suicidal, but also incredibly funny and brilliant. He goes on this extraordinary journey from victimhood to survivor, via the most richly comic, scalpellike postmortem of an upperclass system that’s crumbling. It’s an extraordinary stretch of one man’s life.

Back in 2012, you said this was the one part that you wanted to play...

I remember saying it at a fan convention in Australia. I also said Hamlet – those are the only two roles that I’d ever bucket listed. The last [Patrick Melrose] novel had been published in 2011, and that was the year I’d started to read the series. I felt that I had a little understanding of that milieu – the brilliance but coldness of the cynicism and the irony.

Was it a difficult role to play, in terms of the tough subjects tackled?

The hardest task was containing that amount of hurt and pain, having to go to a place where that was coursing through his veins and tipping him towards chaotic, selfdestructive behaviour. Some of the scenes in the hotel room in [the first episode] Bad

News are pretty tough. That was a weird day at the office, let’s put it that way.

How did you deal with it?

I’ve learned to leave the work on screen, go home in the car, turn on the radio and start to let go, so that I walk in the door and it’s not, “How was your day?” “Well, I was looking at my dead dad, thinking of him raping me, and then I injected cocaine into my left ankle and smashed up a hotel room, before nearly overdosing on heroin and waking up surrounded by blood, vomit and needles. You know, the norm!”

Like Sherlock Holmes, these Patrick Melrose novels have a dedicated fan base – is there any pressure there?

Yeah, there really is, and that’s a bit daunting. Of course, I’ve experienced that with other iconic literary figures before, but we did something very radical with Sherlock –I think we also brought it to a massive new audience. Sherlock Holmes is literally the most adapted character in fiction. But this is one of only two attempts [to adapt the Melrose novels; a film version of the fourth novel came out in 2012]. Every reader has their own cinema playing when reading fiction this good, and no one can be everyone’s Patrick Melrose. Although, maybe with this new face technology, they could stick other actors’ faces on my head to make that come about. Nicolas Cage as Patrick Melrose, perhaps?