Cumberbatch: Fans with phones help me to act
IT IS the bane of most actors’ lives – the ubiquitous camera phone following their every move, even while they are performing.
But the rise of fans glued to their mobile may have had one happy side effect: forcing actors to concentrate more intently.
Benedict Cumberbatch, the award-winning actor, said the constant flash of cameras while he is filming in public has compelled him to concentrate better than ever before, joking it may even have been helpful.
Speaking at a screening of The Child In Time, an adaptation of an Ian Mcewan novel in which he plays a father struggling to come to terms with losing his four-year-old daughter in a supermarket, Cumberbatch said hundreds of fans filming him was now “part of the gig”.
Explaining that some scenes had required him to film in public, he claimed one trip to London’s South Bank had resulted in “500 f-----g people all with their cameras out”.
“That’s odd, but that’s just it now,” he said. “It’s part of the gig. It’s good in a way because you can’t muck around… one of the biggest self-criticisms and things I’ve tried to develop is concentration. You have no room [nowadays] not to concentrate; you have to be completely absorbed in your task in the present tense.
“In a weird way, the more noise there is there, the harder you have to work to cut it out and get into the place you’re actually supposed to be in that moment.”
Asked by his co-star Kelly Macdonald whether he was seriously claiming it was helpful, he clarified that he was trying to be positive about the situation, adding: “You have to pretend it is. One scene in the 90-minute drama, he said, involved him running out of a supermarket in a desperate attempt to find his lost child. Describing “running outside into a busy street and people going: ‘Can I have a selfie?’”, he added: “That was hard and difficult – and it is very weird.”
The one-off drama will be broadcast on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday, as Cumberbatch – star and executive producer – praised the “golden age” of drama on television, saying any actor that remained snobbish about the small screen was missing out.
“It’s their loss,” he said. “If you give it enough air and space, it [television] can feel cinematic, but I think those terms are so beautifully intertwined now that you can’t always separate cinema and television. If it’s good material, it’s good material.”
Cumberbatch has not always been quite so sanguine about fans filming on a mobile phone.
In 2015, when he starred in Hamlet at the Barbican, he made a personal intervention to theatregoers at the stage door, imploring them to stop filming inside.
“It’s mortifying and there’s nothing less supportive,” he said then.