LOS ANGELES _ Benedict Cumberbatch always has been eager to embrace acting challenges, whether finding a way in "Sherlock" to bringing new life to a character played countless times in TV or film or to making one of the Marvel Comics Universe's lesser characters in "Doctor Strange" compelling enough to make him stand cape-to-cape with the other heroes. He's upped his acting game again starring in the new five-part limited Showtime series "Patrick Melrose."
The premium channel series is based on the much heralded "Patrick Melrose" series of semi-autobiographical novels written by Edward St. Aubyn dealing with his growing up in a highly dysfunctional upper-class English family. The role is complicated, but Cumberbatch was well aware of what it would take to bring the character to life because he's been a longtime fan of the book series. He was so determined to get the production made, he not only is he starring in the series but is also an executive producer.
"He's one of the most, I think, if not the most extraordinary prose stylists working in the English language," Cumberbatch says of St. Aubyn's writing.
"And via the most richly comic, scalpel like postmortem upper class system that's crumbling, a power related to that that dissolves as the stories continue," he says. "And not just cash-poor landed gentry, but just the inherent snobbery, the treachery, the self-loathing, the cynicism, the patronizing attitudes, the racism, the sexism, all the -isms. How they were exposed and rightly vilified in the most humorous, entertaining and at times terrifyingly dark and real ways. It's an extraordinary stretch of one man's life."
Each episode of the series is devoted to one of the five novels. The appeal of taking on the character was Melrose's story is told over the decades starting with him as an innocent child and going through him being a self-destructive 20-year-old to a sober thirtysomething drawn back to more addictions. Cumberbatch saw so much detail in the books and how deep St. Aubyn had written the character, his only concern was whether he could do justice to the work.
The series is vastly different than the work he's done in "Sherlock," "Doctor Strange" or even "The Imitation Game." So much of his performance with those characters required him to keep control on his emotions. "Patrick Melrose" gives Cumberbatch the freedom to be more expressive.
"One is emotionally very introverted, and it's also oppression. And the other one, it's all on the sleeve and to the point that paranoid schizophrenia rears its head and really would take him over in a second," he says.
Executive producer Michael Jackson watched in awe of not only how Cumberbatch was able to handle the role that covered two decades, but how in a scene where Melrose is in the throes of his heroin addiction and hearing voices, Cumberbatch acts out each one, essentially playing five or six characters in one scene. Jackson calls it "an incredible achievement of acting."
Cumberbatch got some help as Academy Award nominee Jennifer Jason Leigh and Screen Actors Guild winner Hugo Weaving star as the parents. Rounding out the cast are Anna Madeley, Blythe Danner, Allison Williams, Pip Torrens, Holliday Grainger and Celia Imrie.
Leigh also had read the novels and fell in love with them because she found the stories to be funny and scathing at the same time. The work was so rich and textured, her first response was that it would be impossible to make the books into a screen production. The idea Showtime would devote an hour to each book still didn't strike Leigh as being a doable project.
Then she read the adaptation by David Nicholls.
"It's such a rich screenplay. It's really so funny and it's so painful. It's so well realized. And the character is addicted to drugs and to alcohol. She tries her best, but she's kind of a terrible failure as a mother," Leigh says. "It's sort of an indictment of what of having all of that money and how crippling that can be."
Taking on the role of Patrick Melrose was one of the few items left on Cumberbatch's acting bucket list. The other production he wanted to take on was "Hamlet" and finally got to do the role of the Prince of Denmark on the London stage.
Cumberbatch smiles and says, "So I can retire after this. This is me signing out. It's been nice to meet you all."
