There is now such a blur between film and TV that if any actor remains snobbish about the small-screen medium, “it is their loss”, Benedict Cumberbatch has said.
Cumberbatch was speaking after the first screening of the new BBC1 drama The Child in Time, in which he stars. The one-off drama – an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 1987 Whitbread award-winning novel – is due to air on Sunday 24 September.
Cumberbatch said actors could not afford to be snooty about what work they took on.
“The lines are so fine, they are beautifully blurred now between what big- and small-screen is – unless you’re talking about something which is episodic,” he said.
“If you give it enough air and space, it [TV] can feel cinematic, but I think those terms are so beautifully intertwined now that you can’t always separate cinema and television. Fuck it, it’s acting. If it’s good material, it’s good material.
“The opportunity to do good work is there whatever the medium – radio, television or film or stage.”
Cumberbatch plays a children’s writer who goes through one of the most harrowing situations it is possible to imagine. He is in a supermarket paying for his shopping and when he turns around, his four-year-old daughter is gone.
All involved in the project admit it is quite a hard sell, because it sounds so grim. But there are laughs and, as the drama unfolds, it is not unremittingly depressing.
Kelly Macdonald, who plays the wife of Cumberbatch’s character, said friends of hers recoiled when she told them what the drama was about – because it sounds so miserable.
“But it’s not,” she said. “It is such a film of love and life and hope and being human.”
Cumberbatch is one of the executive producers of the 90-minute drama. One of the most difficult scenes to film was the scene where Cumberbatch loses his daughter.
It was tricky for practical reasons, director Julian Farino said, in that the store opened at 11am and they were meant to be out by then after starting filming at 6.30am.
The fact Cumberbatch is such a huge celebrity meant filming on a London street presented its own issues. “Running outside into a busy street and people going: ‘Can I have a selfie?’ That was hard and difficult and it is very weird,” said Cumberbatch. “You’ve just lost your child.”
• The Child in Time is on BBC1 on Sunday 24 September at 9pm.
