Cumberbatch is propelled to awards season by the Dog and cats
The Sherlock actor returns to our screens with a thoughtful and empathetic performance in a biopic of Victorian artist Louis Wain, writes James Mottram
Benedict Cumberbatch has always been the master of the eccentric, tortured genius. Think of his Sherlock, synapses firing on all cylinders. Or Marvel’s time-bending mystic Doctor Strange. Or Alan Turing, the man behind the Second World War’s Enigma code-breaking team in The Imitation Game, the film that won the British star his first Oscar nomination. Yet none of these characters quite compares to his latest, Louis Wain, the real-life cult artist who devoted his paintbrush to feline art.
The Victorian-era illustrator is the subject of The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, a biopic every bit as idiosyncratic as its protagonist. Wain painted anthropomorphised cats with huge eyes – sitting at the dinner table, smoking cigars, driving cars. His psychedelic artwork became much sought-after, particularly in the 1960s. Yet a tragic decline in his mental health – Asperger’s syndrome, dementia and schizophrenia have all been suggested – meant he was confined to institutions in his final years.
When Cumberbatch read the script, he immediately fell for Wain and his intoxicating illustrations that changed the way we look at cats. “The artwork triggered something in me,” he says, when we speak over Zoom. “I thought, ‘This is vaguely memorable, I must have experienced some of this as a child.’ It’s amazing how prevalent he is without people knowing who he is. And that was interesting to lift the lid on him again and bring him into the world.”
The story follows Wain’s early years as he elopes with Emily Richardson (Claire Foy), the governess engaged to look after younger members of the Wain family. Vulnerable, sensitive, not quite of his time, Wain was a perfect specimen for Cumberbatch. “I really leant into the quiet brilliance of this quiet man, who was just not quite made for a Victorian world, who was taken advantage of and who was very fragile, but still managed to create so much joy and humour across generations and time.”
Co-produced by Cumberbatch’s company Sunny march, it features a plethora of classy British stars – including Andrea Riseborough as Wain’s sister Caroline, and Stacy Martin, Hayley Squires and Sex Education’s Aimee Lou Wood as younger members of the clan. Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman narrates.
But it is the film’s leading man who dominates. Even the idea of Cumberbatch and kittens on screen together feels like a meme-spawning internet nirvana.
Yet Louis Wain is a film that shows, once again, why the 45-year-old is so good at bringing esoteric characters to life. “I really miss him,” Cumberbatch reflects. “It was by and large a joy, but there were moments of extreme distress and loneliness and isolation, which threw me into an understanding of what he must have endured, in a similar way to when I played Turing.”
Turing was prosecuted for acts of homosexuality and accepted chemical castration as a “treatment” – scenes in the film that were hugely difficult for Cumberbatch to play, he recalls, as they “made me grieve the character that we were bringing to life”. The same goes for Wain. “We tried very hard not to be prescriptive about what his condition was, but he did have mental health difficulties. I don’t believe he was necessarily schizophrenic. I think a lot of that has been imposed on him, although he was diagnosed as that in his life. So much of it feels circumstantial.
“It feels like if he was alive now he would be thriving. We hopefully now live in a more tolerant, supportive time, where people like that are [seen to] have self-worth and valued. His bravery was something I really learned from. I wanted to do justice to him.”
The film reunites Cumberbatch with Foy, with whom he starred in 2011’s moody family drama Wreckers. At the time, both were on the verge of bigger things. “I was going to do The Promise in Israel and he was going to do Sherlock,” remembers Foy, thinking back to the BBC drama that turned Cumberbatch into an Emmy-winning household star and cerebral sex symbol. She marvels at how he has evolved as an actor in the intervening years. “He’s always ready to try anything. He wants to explore every single avenue, every crevice, and go to the limits of everything he can do and that he thinks can be achieved.”
Back when he first met Foy, Cumberbatch was ten years into his career, though his success never seemed in doubt. Raised in Kensington and Chelsea, the son of actors Timothy Carlton and Wanda Ventham (who play his parents in Sherlock), he was educated at Harrow and began acting in earnest there – his drama teacher calling him “the best schoolboy actor” he had ever worked with. At the University of Manchester and London Academy of Music and Drama, he continued to hone his skills. By 2006, he had been nominated for an Olivier Award for his role in a production of Hedda Gabler – the first time he appeared in the West End.
By the time he won the prize six years later – sharing it with Jonny Lee Miller, for Danny Boyle’s electric Frankenstein, in which the pair swapped the roles of Frankenstein and The Creature nightly – Hollywood had begun to take notice. He was the villainous Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, and then came the role as Doctor Strange, a part he reprised in the Avengers movies and in the recently released and hugely enjoyable Spiderman: No Way Home, reuniting with Tom Holland, who plays the web-slinger. “It’s a lovely relationship between him and Spidey,” Cumberbatch reflects, not least as the superhero’s adolescent alter ego Peter Parker is never certain whether to call him “Stephen”, “Doctor Strange” or “Sir”.
A very different performance from the end of last year has caught the eye of critics: in Jane Campion’s 1920s Montana-set psychological drama The Power of the Dog. Cumberbatch has already been nominated for a
Golden Globe for Best Actor and an Oscar nod seems a foregone conclusion for his role as Phil Burbank, a conflicted, cold-hearted rancher. A far cry from his array of eccentrics, it is the most confounding performance of his career. “That was part of the draw,” he nods. “On paper, you wouldn’t go, ‘That’s typecasting.’”
The film wrestles with toxic masculinity, an essential and resonant topic right now, says Cumberbatch. “It reminds you to keep fighting for what it should be. There’s still so much toxic masculinity. This isn’t a done deal at all. We know this, but I think people are finely tuned to it now. The thing everyone must do is to call it out when they see it – to bear witness and back people up, which is sometimes hard, because there is still a societal pressure on the side of the patriarchy or just not wanting to be the one to make things uncomfortable by speaking truth.”
Cumberbatch shot The Power of the Dog in New Zealand in 2020, meaning he spent six months there in and out of lockdown, living with his wife Sophie Hunter and their boys Christopher, six, Hal, four, and Finn, two, as well as his parents.
Being on the other side of the world didn’t feel as remote as you might expect. “It was pretty obvious to us when Facetiming friends and family back home who were very far away that they felt equally far from people who were down the road,” he says. “The isolation of that experience is incredibly damaging. I was incredibly lucky to have my whole family close to me.”
He had previously worked in New Zealand doing motion-capture for his Cganimated role as Smaug the dragon in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit movies (he also voiced the Necromancer). It was his old friend James Mcavoy who first urged him to visit the country when they were shooting Starter for 10 in 2006. Filming in Shropshire, the pair went hiking in the Brecon Beacons. “We both have a love of that kind of thing and just being lost in nature. He just pitched New Zealand and said, ‘You are going to lose your mind. It’s like the Highlands on steroids. It’s got everything.’”
Perhaps because of the level of fame Cumberbatch now experiences, or because he is reaching that meditative midpoint in his life, it is not surprising he enjoys “reconnecting” in nature. “So much of our time is spent with a lot of people – some of whom we know well, some of whom we don’t. It sounds antithetical, but I crave that isolation sometimes, to recalibrate and check in with something bigger than all of us. And then come back with a renewed appreciation of what [life] is.
“Especially after this pandemic. Dinner parties, lunches, walks in nature with friends and family – we don’t take any of it for granted any more.”