Benedict Cumberbatch, who of course plays Sherlock Holmes in the BBC’s Sherlock, has told the Sun’s TV Biz that playing the verbose and super intelligent detective is “hard graft.”
As fans of the show will know, Sherlock is given to long-winded but meticulously formed monologues regarding his deductions about the cases he’s working on.
Of playing the intense role, Benedict said, “Every deduction is hard. It’s always a painful process.
“There are all the details. It’s like a stream of consciousness of incredibly condensed information.
“He just goes at 100 miles an hour and it’s a huge speed to rush it out.
“It’s just hard, it’s hard graft — there’s no other word for it.”
And it seems with regard to learning lines, Benedict reckons his co-star, Martin Freeman – who of course plays Doctor John Watson – has a far easier time of it than he does.
He said, “I practise at home, there is a lot of midnight oil burned [and] I’m not saying Martin has an easy job, because what he does is with scalpel precision and he works incredibly hard…
“But he has a photographic memory, he looks at the lines in the morning and it’s learned, that’s it.
“I can’t. And if I fall behind or if I’m having difficulty getting something in, it’s really hard.
“Hats off to him for putting up with me.”
However, as the paper points out, Benedict and Martin’s efforts certainly paid off since 9.6million of us tuned in to watch last Sunday.
And of that episode, which saw Sherlock getting a thrashing from lesbian dominatrix Irene Adler, who was played by Lara Pulver, who, incidentally, has also starred Spooks, and in hit US drama True Blood as Sookie’s fairy godmother.
Benedict said, “Lara went for it, it was really painful, I actually had welts on my arm.
“I don’t know how people get pleasure out of that kind of thing, I genuinely don’t.
“I know I was on a set but I did wonder, ‘What is it that puts people in that mindset?’”
And of the scenes in which Lara had to appear naked, Benedict said, “It wasn’t the first scene we did, thank God, but she just went for it.
“It takes someone to have real chutzpah to go ahead and do that as an actress. I applaud that.
“It’s a very brave thing to do. I don’t know a single actress that is completely happy with their body, I don’t know many women who are, or men that are. Maybe Peter Andre!”
Don’t miss next Sunday’s episode which is a retelling of Arthur Conan Doyle’s arguably most famous Sherlock story, which features the Hound of the Baskervilles.
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