“The Courier” star Benedict Cumberbatch and director Dominic Cooke discuss their new film in this interview with CinemaBlend’s Jeff McCobb. Cumberbatch discusses losing over 20 pounds for his role, while Cooke talks about why Cumberbatch was perfect for this true story about a Cold War British spy.
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00:00 and volunteering to bring back the best source
00:01 of Soviet intelligence you've got at a time
00:03 where Russia and America are on the brink of nuclear war.
00:06 (dramatic music)
00:08 - Your versatility really shines through in this
00:15 because this character has this confidence
00:18 where he never skips a beat,
00:19 but he's also a complete fish out of water.
00:21 - Can't believe I'm actually having lunch with spines.
00:24 - What were the challenges of balancing that
00:27 and was it difficult?
00:29 - Thank you, that's very kind of you to say.
00:32 And you know, it's something I was kind of acutely aware
00:34 of having to craft throughout the whole film
00:37 and really track because obviously shooting out a sequence
00:39 like most movies, you know, he goes from being a naive,
00:44 he's sort of slightly dismissive of even the idea
00:47 to being someone who's fairly professional at spy craft
00:50 and his job to being a sort of all out hero
00:53 trying to save his friend,
00:55 however, ill advisedly or tragically.
00:58 - He would never leave me to die and I'm not leaving him.
01:02 - Yeah, it's so important because to me,
01:05 that was what was sort of attractive about the role,
01:06 that and the fact that he starts as an every man,
01:08 someone from a very humble, worse background.
01:10 - What does this do, shoot poison darts?
01:13 - Quite far away in his ordinariness
01:14 from some of the extraordinary characters I've played before
01:17 and to see that transition, to make that really work
01:22 was key to me and also to bring the audience in,
01:25 to make them feel that they were questioning
01:27 whether they could have gone through what he went through.
01:30 You know, and I mean, although it's soft spying
01:33 in the sense that, you know,
01:34 we're not talking about hyper surveillance
01:36 or James Bond antics, it's still punishable by death.
01:41 I mean, it's a terrifying thing to think
01:44 of what would happen and what would have happened
01:45 if he had only been caught.
01:47 - What if I get caught?
01:48 - Then execute, be correct.
01:49 - It's a really important aspect of the characters drawn
01:53 in the script, but also is how I wanted to play him,
01:55 so thank you for asking that question.
01:57 I was wondering about the Wynn character
01:59 because he's a really complicated character.
02:02 To play both sides of that, I mean, Cumberbatch was on fire.
02:06 Was that a scary idea,
02:09 trying to cast the right person for that role?
02:11 - You know what?
02:12 I was only halfway through it
02:13 and I thought he's got to do it.
02:14 We'd worked together a few times before.
02:16 I knew him really well.
02:17 I was desperate to work with him again.
02:20 And you know, some actors do have,
02:22 I mean, Rachel Brosnahan's another actor
02:24 who has a sort of innate feel of how to put themselves
02:27 into a specific historical period, but be truthful.
02:30 Because it's very easy if you're playing sort of
02:33 uptight British to go into a sort of weird,
02:36 you know, sort of caricature.
02:38 But I knew with Benedict that he could get that,
02:41 but also find this sort of vulnerable human being
02:44 in the middle of it, who, as you say,
02:45 he's a sort of rookie.
02:47 I mean, he didn't know what the hell he was doing.
02:48 - I don't understand why.
02:49 I'm just a salesman.
02:52 - And the stakes are incredibly high, you know?
02:55 So he sort of managed, I think,
02:57 to get that sort of formal sort of restraint
03:01 that especially guys at that time in Britain had,
03:05 and play the sort of innocent son.
03:08 He has a storyteller's instincts about that,
03:11 which is really helpful, you know?
03:13 - I'm just a salesman.
03:14 - Exactly.
03:15 You're a civilian, so the KGB won't be watching.
03:18 - In the latter half of the film,
03:19 you have some scenes where you look pretty emaciated,
03:24 you know, your physicality changes significantly.
03:27 Did you lose weight for that role,
03:29 starve yourself to get into character,
03:31 and how do you balance that with the fact
03:33 that soon you would have to film as a bonafide superhero?
03:36 - Yeah.
03:37 It's hard, it's weirdly,
03:40 it's hard both ends of the scale, obviously,
03:42 but it's very hard.
03:43 It took me a long time to put the weight back on.
03:46 I mean, I did "The Mauritanian" a while after,
03:49 but I still look incredibly thin in that film, I think.
03:52 I mean, as opposed to my normal sort of body weight,
03:54 but I helped to augment this process
03:57 with Dominic by producing it.
03:58 But I think even if we hadn't produced it
04:00 as a company in Sunday March,
04:02 Dominic and I would have really, really, really driven
04:05 for the hiatus we had in order for me
04:07 to be able to lose the weight.
04:09 It was imperative to me, you know?
04:10 I lost about a stone and a half,
04:12 and it was through the usual methods of dieting,
04:16 but also some extreme exercise.
04:18 I was very fit.
04:19 It was all done in a very healthy way.
04:23 It wasn't about atrophy or lethargy.
04:24 It was very much about trying to shred everything
04:26 to shrink back my body mass around muscle.
04:30 But when you do start to feel slightly kind of,
04:34 I can't remember what the word is when you,
04:36 it's horrible, but it basically is a description
04:38 for self-digestion.
04:39 You have to also just strip away muscle.
04:41 That's a very nasty thing to be doing.
04:43 And you get very disorientated.
04:46 You feel dehydrated.
04:47 You feel hungry all the time.
04:49 You feel emotionally and physically very vulnerable,
04:51 all of which plays very helpfully into a character
04:55 that must've endured this for months, if not years.
04:57 And so you look at those photographs and you think,
05:00 it may only be four scenes of a film,
05:02 but I have no choice but to honor the truth
05:05 of what he endured for a far, far longer period of his life,
05:09 and just go there and just get on and do it.
05:11 And it needs that.
05:13 We need to be honest about what the risk was
05:15 that was run and taken and received.
05:20 He just lost two weeks of his life to a mental breakdown.
05:22 And I think a long, long time,
05:24 and a lot of strain physically and emotionally
05:28 after that really took its toll on him.
05:30 So yeah, it was the least I could do to try and honor that.
05:33 - It feels like there'll be so many complications
05:36 navigating a film like this, juggling the history
05:38 and the secrets being kept between individual characters,
05:41 but you managed to make it shockingly cohesive.
05:43 What were some of the challenges you faced
05:46 taking on a true story?
05:48 - Wow, well, I suppose, I mean, with any true story,
05:51 you've got to sort of honor the spirit of it,
05:55 but not the letter, because you've got to compress
05:57 a whole sort of three-year period into two hours.
06:00 And so there's a tight rope to be walked
06:03 if you're doing that, because there is a responsibility.
06:06 And any period thing takes a bit of extra work,
06:09 'cause you've just got to find a credible world for it.
06:13 And I think it's no good sort of just dropping
06:16 contemporary characters, contemporary sort of behavior
06:20 into a period setting.
06:21 You have to sort of get the actors to completely embody that.
06:25 And I mean, people were really different back then.
06:28 They behaved really differently.
06:30 - Speaking of the period itself,
06:32 I kept thinking about, as a person with a passion
06:35 for shooting, how much fun that would have been at times.
06:39 Because of the era and the locations,
06:41 like there was a particular shot with the wild elevators
06:44 that keep moving, and I was just like,
06:46 how much fun would this be to shoot?
06:48 Was that just a delight given on the show?
06:51 - Yeah, the elevators were fabulous.
06:54 We had, yeah, I mean, listen, it's pressure.
06:58 You know, there's a huge amount of pressure in shooting,
07:01 just because of the time you have.
07:02 And when you're shooting on location,
07:04 and you're in one place for a day,
07:06 you know, you've got to kind of get it,
07:07 you've got to get it done.
07:09 And there were a lot of sort of, in this movie,
07:11 there was a lot of stuff that was shot,
07:13 you know, in multiple locations.
07:16 So we had to sort of deliver.
07:17 So that sort of takes the fun out of it.
07:19 But we did, in Prague in particular,
07:22 which stands in for Moscow,
07:23 we had some fantastic settings
07:27 and brilliant sort of extraordinary locations.
07:31 There was some trying bits as well.
07:32 It was mightily cold.
07:34 And we did quite a lot of night shoots, which are tough.
07:37 But, you know, there was a joy.
07:38 I mean, some of the sort of eccentric
07:41 '60s settings were brilliant.
07:43 And Prague had some wonderful sort of Soviet style
07:45 architecture, which we used and really enjoyed.
07:49 - Maybe we're only two people,
07:51 but this is how things change.
07:55 (dramatic music)
07:57 (upbeat music)