Poised to make Alan Turing his own, ‘Sherlock’ star Benedict Cumberbatch is no stranger to sexual politics and bullying.

Poised to make Alan Turing his own, Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch is no stranger to sexual politics and bullying. And he’ll take on all comers.

Photography by Samuel Bradley | Shot on location at the Barbican Conservatory, London.

The hottest ticket in London next summer is not One Direction, Miley Cyrus, or Beyoncé. It is Benedict Cumberbatch playing Hamlet at the Barbican theater. Some 100,000 tickets for the 12-week run went on sale a few days before I was due to meet Cumberbatch — coincidentally at the Barbican — and sold out in minutes. Even by the robust standards of London theater (more than 22 million people attended shows in the 2012–2013 season), that’s some record.

For Cumberbatch, taking on theater’s most ambitious role — “a hoop through which every eminent actor must jump,” as the essayist Max Beerbohm once put it — may be a rite of passage, but it’s also a test of whether popular culture can open the gates to high culture. Can the pop idol Sherlock attract his screaming fans to the Bard? “I hope it sort of goes into the places that television sometimes can,” Cumberbatch says, “to draw people to see me live who haven’t seen Shakespeare before. We want the people who’ve never been in a theater, but we’re not into social engineering, so we can’t say to another cross-section of society, ‘Oh, sorry — you’ve got a library card. Fuck off.’ ”

Of course, the kind of fame that can sell out a three-month run in minutes also has its drawbacks. We’ve barely sat down at our banquette at Gin Joint — a fancy-pants brasserie at the Barbican Centre — when Cumberbatch curses gently under his breath: “Oh lord, here we go, here we go.” He indicates two middle-aged women in flowery dresses sitting at a table across the room. “The florals over there,” he says, eyes averted. “They’re giving a bit of a head-turning — it’s begun.”

But surely Cumberbatch, 38, must be accustomed to such attention at this point? He nods. “I’ve spent a lot of time getting to where I’ve gotten by observing human behavior, so I’m really sensitive to it anyway,” he says. “And you can’t help but feel that you’re on show, which on good days is fine — you breeze through it, and do whatever you do as a performer and a human being to just feel relaxed and comfortable in your own skin. But we all have days when we’d rather not show our face for whatever reason — because we’re hungover, withdrawn, whatever it may be, physical or emotional. And then it’s really hard. It’s really, really hard, because you just don’t want to engage with it.”

SLIDESHOW | BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

It is an odd thing about fame that it puts celebrities at a distinct disadvantage — we know so much more about them than they can know about us. A cursory Google search turns up more trivia on Cumberbatch than can possibly be useful. From an appearance on Katie Couric’s talk show, we learn that he prefers dogs over cats (but owns neither), that if he could be a pop star it would be Jónsi from Sigur Rós, and that he thinks his name sounds like “a fart in a bath.” Elsewhere, you will discover that he is very good at accents (he played Professor Snape in an episode of The Simpsons); that he once taught in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India; and that one of the more inventive nicknames for him at school was “Bendy Dick Cum on My Baps.” His name, for some reason, is a source of constant hilarity. When Jimmy Kimmel invited random people on the street to define Cumberbatch, the answers came back as various as “a batch of cucumbers” and “a wart on your foot.”

The fact that he is so good-natured about this — that he’s a capital-A actor who can handle Shakespeare with the same ease and confidence as he can handle the indignities of the talk show circuit — is part of what makes Cumberbatch so engaging. His geniality and bonhomie feel neither forced nor manic. Perhaps because his ascent has been so rapid, at least in the U.S., it seems he has not had time to become jaded by his celebrity, or worn down by its deprivations. The New York Times recently dubbed him “the accidental superstar” because, well, he seems to have come upon his fame without really trying. He laughs at the tendency of Hollywood types to say he’s popped (“Did I? Sorry, I hope it didn’t smell too much”) but agrees that his career has accelerated.

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