Benedict Cumberbatch only agreed to take part in an upcoming Channel 4 drama about the EU referendum after being reassured it would not be a pro-remain “stitch-up”, its creator has revealed.
James Graham, who wrote Brexit: The Uncivil War, said he had to persuade Cumberbatch, who plays the leave campaign strategist Dominic Cummings, at a “neutral-ground meeting over pizza”.
Graham said Cumberbatch, who campaigned for remain, focused on finding “the humanity” in the role. “He met Dominic, I think they got on really well,” he said. “Benedict’s absolute obsession all the way through was to make sure that it wasn’t too one-sided. That the film wasn’t blaming him.”
The political drama focuses on Cummings as well as the remain campaign leader Craig Oliver, a former David Cameron spin doctor.
Described by Channel 4 as a drama that will “examine the anatomy of a modern data-driven election campaign”, the two-hour film is based on Graham’s interviews with key players.
It also draws on accounts taken from two books – Unleashing Demons: The Inside Story of Brexit, by Oliver, and All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class, by the Sunday Times political editor, Tim Shipman.
Graham – who had a Broadway and West End hit with his play about the birth of the Sun newspaper, Ink – believes the drama helps to explain how global politics has shifted since the referendum, helped by a wave of resentment that Cummings identified and tapped into via social media.
“There’s this idea that there are all these global baddies that are manipulating us, and I don’t quite agree with that,” said Graham. “But something is happening. There’s a reason why political parties and campaigns are spending millions more on [targeted social media campaigns] now than traditional advertising.”
Graham said he did not want to make a drama that would only interest “policy wonks in Westminster”, and wanted Brexit: The Uncivil War to “function as a thriller, as a political mystery”. A key part of that was securing the participation of the campaign’s main players.
“A mainstream audience, a popular audience, would not have heard of Dominic Cummings,” he said. “I wouldn’t have heard of Dominic Cummings throughout the entirety of the campaign and I consider myself reasonably engaged and in-tune.
“I think the responsibility, if you’re going to interrogate what decisions were made and who was responsible for those decisions [is] to put the strategist behind the scenes in the spotlight.”
Cummings is presented as being initially reluctant to join the campaign after leaving the political sphere following a public bust up with Cameron – whom he described as “bumbling” – while working as a top aide for the then education secretary, Michael Gove, in 2014.
Nigel Farage, Arron Banks, Boris Johnson and Gove all feature in the story, but the thrust of the action focuses on the rivalry and war of ideas between Oliver, played by Rory Kinnear, and Cummings.
“In most great plays or great films, the main protagonist has to be quite surprising,” said Graham. “Often they’re transgressive or disruptive, and Dominic Cummings felt like the most vivid of those characters.”
Key moments in the campaign are revisited, including the leave bus with its claim the UK was sending £350m a week to the EU, and Cummings’ search for the perfect slogan. He tears up numerous drafts before settling on the now infamous: let’s take back control.
“It’s a genius slogan,” said Graham. “There was an intellectual basis for it. These things do seem relatively simplistic on the surface but research, polling, use of data, and even philosophical interrogation of the nation and its history, are all bundled up into that one simple message.”
Graham said he saw the film as the first in a long line of productions that would pick over the bones of Brexit and attempt to understand the motivations of the figures who reshaped modern Britain.
“We don’t think this is the defining version of history,” said Graham. “We’re lucky and privileged to be one of the first out of the gates to be willing and perhaps stupid enough to try and do this. There will be revelations over the next 50 years about these people and what they did to us. This is just an opening gambit.”
• Brexit: The Uncivil War airs on Channel 4 at 9pm on Monday 7 January
