You might assume that Cumberbatch is an Oxford wanker, too, what with that ridiculously British name, that estimable vocabulary, that affinity for saying whilst, that silky posh accent, those piercing blue eyes, that chiseled face, that translucent skin suggesting overcast skies and manor-house libraries-all of which allows He’s been so slammed that he hasn’t seen any movies at the festival and is “desperate” to hear my review of all of them, particularly The Riot Club, a social satire about an elitist society of young wankers at Oxford that he’s familiar with from when it was a play called Posh, directed by Lyndsey Turner, who’s directing him as Hamlet at the Barbican next year. I know she’s married, and I’m very happy as well, but she-I think it’s her talent”). “Otherwise my head would spin off in a thousand directions, and it wouldn’t be pretty.” The highlight of his trip, he says, has been meeting Naomi Watts (“Man, I have such a crush on her. “Somebody probably told me when I was born what all of my life was for, but I kind of tend to forget information until it becomes immediately relevant,” Cumberbatch says. He says he likes tequila, too, which starts a debate about whether pisco is made from cactus or grapes (it’s a brandy, so grapes), which prompts a discussion about Googling and books and Kindles and how nobody ever just knows anything or retains information anymore. He got hooked on pisco sours, he says, because he likes whiskey sours, and a friend who’d visited South America demanded he try one. “Doubles, motherfuckah!” says Cumberbatch, grinning and doing a seated dance. “Singles or doubles? What kind of day was it today?” Related Storiesīenedict Cumberbatch Is the New King of Celebrity Impressionists No sooner has Cumberbatch sat down on the 31st floor of Toronto’s Trump Hotel and announced that he’d “fancy a pisco sour” than our preternaturally attentive waiter appears: “Two pisco sours, I hear?” “I’ve known Ben for 15 years,” his Imitation Game co-star Matthew Goode will tell me the next day, “and yesterday was the first time I realized that he’s like a Beatle.”
Without warning, a tiny Japanese girl hurdles, impressively, from the back of the pack to the front, kicking a few heads on the way. My grandmother is in love with him, too, and she’s 75!” gasps a 20-something in a peacoat. “I love his squinty eyes and just his face.
“He’s so dishy!” titters one frazzled redhead carrying crude drawings of Cumberbatch in the BBC’s Sherlock, with long curls and a trench coat, collar turned up. The crowd jostles forward, hundreds of arms with cell phones raised aloft, pointing through the cloud of homemade collages of Cumberbatch’s face.
By festival’s end, it will have won TIFF’s People’s Choice Award, which has previously gone to The King’s Speech and 12 Years a Slave-a strong predictor that the math movie and its hot-nerd lead actor stand a good chance at the Oscars.Ī black SUV approaches, and the shrieking begins. And it’s certainly happening now, at the Toronto premiere of The Imitation Game, which is very much not a blockbuster but a World War II period piece about the antisocial British cryptographer (and gay martyr) Alan Turing. It happened at TIFF last year, too, when he was promoting his Assange movie, The Fifth Estate, which went on to become the biggest wide-release flop of 2013. But no, it’s Benedict Cumberbatch, a movie star without a hit movie to his name and a made-for-meme, extreme-Brit sex symbol who plays his most notable roles ( Sherlock Holmes, Julian Assange, Star Trek Into Darkness’s Khan) with a powerful whiff of sexlessness.īut neither logic nor common sense seems to apply to the seismic force of female hysteria that follows Cumberbatch wherever he goes. “Denzel must be coming,” a middle-aged male passerby surmises, since this is a Toronto International Film Festival premiere. The ones nearest the front have been camped out for hours, bodies wedged against barricades-a scrum of people ten rows deep, jockeying for position, climbing lampposts for better views, and rendering blocks of King Street, Toronto’s main downtown drag, impassable.