The unstoppable rise of Benedict Cumberbatch

Suddenly Benedict Cumberbatch is walking down the corridor. I thought he was in the room I’d been stationed to wait outside. But, no, here he comes, with his train. Would you like anything, one of them asks him. “Just an apple, that’s all I want,” he says, as they sweep past. A flunkey disappears to obtain the required fruit. “Get a red one,” calls one of the publicists.

A little later, once we are talking, an apple appears, meticulously prepared. “I love how requests manifest,” says Cumberbatch. “It’s a sliced, peeled apple. I could feed that to my baby.”

Welcome to the court of the next Marvel superhero. At the centre of it all is an actor looking the young side of 40 in tracksuit cardigan and trainers, and still a little bemused by the attention. But there’s no doubt he now has a seat at what he once called “the top table”. He may even be sitting somewhere near the head of this table, though he hasn’t worked that out yet.

For the first time Cumberbatch is playing the lead in an American blockbuster: Doctor Strange, the quixotic sorcerer who protects the world the Avengers – Marvel’s team of superheroes – inhabit from attacks from other dimensions. He wears a red cloak that enables him to fly and he creates shimmering, spinning weapons of fire by making shapes with his hands. He’s pretty cool.

Doing this film may be a masterstroke. Cumberbatch has rarely gone for the bum choice. Few actors on the up would pick a posh, poisonous rapist (Paul Marshall in 2007’s Atonement) as a stepping stone, but for those watching hard, this was an acting vignette so insidious in its nastiness, so sort-of sexy in a ghastly way, that it was much more riveting than that film’s larger performances. Alan Turing in The Imitation Game (2014), Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013) – these were difficult, irascible figures, but they gave Cumberbatch the chance to carefully excavate their humanity. Even Sherlock – hard to believe now – was a risky selection when he first made it. Who wanted to take on the invidious task of drawing comparison with Jeremy Brett and Basil Rathbone, an exercise which, on paper, looked far more likely to fail than to send its star shooting into the stratosphere?

But the stratosphere is where he is now, the possessor of an American Emmy award, an Oscar and Bafta nominee many times over, and the subject of adulation by a group of fans who call themselves Cumberbitches. He also secured record ticket sales for the Barbican when he appeared as Hamlet in Shakespeare’s tragedy last year.

Now Doctor Strange promises to expose him to a new audience.

The film is really good. It’s funny and exciting, and it has emotional depth, as well as jaw-dropping special effects, especially when viewed in 3D. Cumberbatch’s performance is arch and nuanced. Tim Robey, the Telegraph’s critic, wrote that by “pulling the rug out from under Cumberbatch’s cruisecontrolled thespy authority as often as possible, the film finds a smart way to rescue him from his own hype, and thereby helps him live up to it all over again”.

This, I deduce, is in some part thanks to the actor himself. “We plussed the humour. I especially kept on adding to the humour.” He added whole lines – and some of the funniest ones, it turns out.

I’ve met Benedict Cumberbatch before, about four years ago, when he was promoting Tom Stoppard’s BBC Two adaptation of the Ford Madox Ford novel Parade’s End, an underrated production that included exquisite turns by Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall as a mismatched upper-crust couple.

Both times he has been generous and warm, but he was looser the first time in the offering of opinion – and spoke even faster. He was quite happy, for instance, to describe Downton Abbey, an obvious comparison point to Parade’s End, as a programme where “you can happily go off and make yourself a cup of tea and pick it up again” and as “a long soak in the bath with s----- milk chocolate”.

He is more careful now, wary,

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