Pick of the week’s Gossip

Benedict Cumberbatch went to great lengths to prepare for his role as a rancher in 1920s Montana in The Power of the Dog ( see page 31). As well as learning ironmongery and woodwork, he refused to wash. “I wanted that layer of stink on me,” he told Esquire. In fact, he was so anxious to stay in character, he refused to answer to his own name. “If someone forgot... and called me Benedict, I wouldn’t move.”

But his method acting came at a cost: he smoked so many roll-up cigarettes, he gave

himself nicotine poisoning three times. “Filterless rollies, just take after take,” he reflects. “When you have to smoke a lot, it genuinely is horrible.”

When Adele announced two concerts in Hyde Park, frontrow tickets were going for as much as £580. That kind of pricing makes commercial sense, but it doesn’t suit some artists. Billy Joel, for instance, never puts front-row seats on sale. Instead, he gets his crew to find “real fans” – who are “usually in the cheap seats” – and herd them to the front. “This way you’ve got people in the front row that are really

happy to be there,” he once explained. The alternative, he had learnt, was just grim. “I’d look down and see rich people puffing on a cigar, [going] ‘Entertain me, piano man.’”

Elton John has long enjoyed upstaging Rod Stewart: in public and sometimes in private too. One Christmas, Stewart bought his friend a Harrods champagne fridge. “It cost me £600; a lot of money in the 1970s,” he recalls. “We swapped presents and he said: ‘Oh very nice, dear, thank you.’” And in return? “He gave me a Rembrandt painting! I’ve never felt so stingy.”