Political pressure:

Actor Benedict Cumberbatch admits he became so caught up in his role in Brexit: The Uncivil War, a dramatisation of Britain’s vote about whether to withdraw from the European Union, that he could feel the tension surrounding which way the vote would go. J

Even though he knew the outcome, Benedict Cumberbatch could feel the tension of the Brexit vote in his latest drama.

Benedict Cumberbatch is best known for playing the title character in the BBC’s hit drama Sherlock. Now he is taking on a very different role.

He is portraying Dominic Cummings, the campaign director for Vote Leave, in Brexit: The Uncivil War, an absorbing new British drama about the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.

Given the political turmoil about Brexit, the drama could scarcely be more topical. It is this relevance that drew Cumberbatch to the project in the first place.

“I was attracted to the urgency, the timeliness of it,” he says. “It’s an electric feeling to do work like this.”

Written by James Graham, Brexit: The Uncivil War follows Cummings after he is appointed as the Vote Leave campaign’s “attack dog”. Pitted against the head of the Remain campaign, Craig Oliver (Rory Kinnear), Cummings is depicted as a critic and sceptic.

Described by Oliver as “an egotist with a wrecking ball,” Cummings has an anarchic, anti-Establishment streak as wide as the English Channel. Cummings masterminds a new type of campaigning.

Employing sophisticated data analysis for the first time, he targets three million unregistered, discontented voters with one billion online ads. These people may well have proved pivotal in helping Vote Leave to win the referendum.

There are appearances in the drama by better-known public figures such as Boris Johnson (Richard Goulding), Michael Gove (Oliver Maltman), Nigel Farage (Paul Ryan) and Arron Banks (Lee Boardman). But it is still very much the Dominic Cummings Show.

Between takes on set in an empty London Docklands car park, Cumberbatch sits in a deckchair beside the Brexit battle-bus. The actor, who sports a bald pate, is one of the UK’s most in-demand stars.

The 42 year old, who could almost