“The Courier” star Benedict Cumberbatch and director Dominic Cooke discuss their 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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00:00I'm volunteering to bring back the best source of Soviet intelligence you've got at a time
00:03where Russia and America are on the brink of nuclear war.
00:12Your versatility really shines through in this because this character has this confidence where
00:18he never skips a beat, but he's also a complete fish out of water.
00:21Can't believe I'm actually having lunch with spines.
00:25What were the challenges of balancing that and was it difficult?
00:30Thank you, that's very kind of you to say.
00:33It's something I was kind of acutely aware of having to craft throughout the whole film
00:37and really track because obviously shooting out a sequence like most movies,
00:41he goes from being a naive, who's sort of slightly dismissive of even the idea,
00:47to being someone who's fairly professional at spycraft and his job to being a sort of
00:52all-out hero trying to save his friend, however ill-advisedly or tragically.
00:58He would never leave me to die and I'm not leaving him.
01:02Yeah, it's so important because to me that was what was sort of attractive about the role,
01:06that and the fact that he starts as an everyman, someone from a very humble Welsh background.
01:10What does this do? Shoot poison darts?
01:13Quite far away in his ordinariness from some of the extraordinary characters I've played before
01:17and to see that transition, to make that really work was key to me and also to bring the audience
01:25to make them feel that they were questioning whether they could have gone through what he
01:29went through. Although it's soft spying in the sense that we're not talking about
01:35hyper-surveillance or James Bond antics, it's still punishable by death.
01:42I mean, it's a terrifying thing to think of what would happen and
01:45what would have happened if he had been caught.
01:47What if I get caught? Then execute me, correct?
01:50It's a really important aspect of the characters drawn in the script,
01:53but also is how I wanted to play him. So thank you for asking that question.
01:57I was wondering about the Wynne character because he's a really complicated character.
02:03To play both sides of that, I mean, Cumberbatch was on fire.
02:07Was that a scary idea, trying to cast the right person for that role?
02:11You know what? I was only halfway through it and I thought he's got to do it.
02:15We'd worked together a few times before. I knew him really well.
02:17I was desperate to work with him again.
02:20And, you know, some actors do have...
02:22I mean, Rachel Brosnahan is another actor who has a sort of innate feel of how to
02:26put themselves into a specific historical period, but be truthful.
02:30Because it's very easy if you're playing sort of uptight British to
02:34go into a sort of weird caricature.
02:38But I knew with Benedict that he could get that,
02:42but also find this sort of vulnerable human being in the middle of it,
02:45who, as you say, is a sort of rookie.
02:47I mean, he didn't know what the hell he was doing.
02:48I don't understand why. I'm just a salesman.
02:52And the stakes are incredibly high, you know.
02:55So he sort of managed, I think, to get that sort of formal sort of restraint
03:02that especially guys at that time in Britain had,
03:05and play the sort of innocent son.
03:08He has a storyteller's instincts about that, which is really helpful, you know.
03:13I'm just a salesman.
03:14Exactly. You're a civilian, so the KGB won't be watching.
03:18In the latter half of the film, you have some scenes where you look
03:22pretty emaciated, you know.
03:25Your physicality changes significantly.
03:28Did you lose weight for that role?
03:30Starve yourself to get into character?
03:32And how do you balance that with the fact that
03:34soon you would have to film as a bona fide superhero?
03:36Yeah, it's hard.
03:39It's weirdly, it's hard both ends of the scale, obviously.
03:42But it's very hard.
03:44It took me a long time to put the weight back on.
03:46I mean, I did the Mauritanian a while after,
03:49but I still look incredibly thin in that film, I think.
03:52I mean, it was opposed to my normal sort of body weight.
03:54But, you know, I helped to augment this process with Dominic by producing it.
03:58But I think even if we hadn't produced it as a company in Sunday March,
04:02Dominic and I would have really, really, really driven for the hiatus we had
04:06in order for me to be able to lose the weight.
04:09It was imperative to me.
04:10You know, I lost about a stone and a half,
04:12and it was through the usual methods of dieting,
04:16but also some extreme exercise.
04:18I was very fit.
04:19It was all done in a very healthy way.
04:23It wasn't about atrophy or lethargy.
04:24It was very much about trying to shred everything to shrink
04:27wrap my body mass around muscle.
04:31But when you do start to feel slightly kind of...
04:35I can't remember what the word is when you...
04:37It's horrible, but it basically is a description for self-digestion.
04:39You know, you have to also just strip away muscle.
04:42That's a very nasty thing to be doing.
04:44And you get very disorientated.
04:47You feel dehydrated.
04:48You feel hungry all the time.
04:49You feel emotionally and physically very vulnerable,
04:51all of which plays very helpfully into a character
04:55that must have endured this for months, if not years.
04:57And so you look at those photographs and you think,
05:00it may only be four scenes of a film,
05:02but I have no choice but to honour the truth of what he endured
05:06for a far, far longer period of his life.
05:10And just go there and just get on and do it.
05:11And it needs that.
05:13We need to be honest about what the risk was that was run
05:16and taken and received.
05:19You know, he just lost two weeks of his life to a mental breakdown.
05:22And I think a long, long time and a lot of strain
05:27physically and emotionally after that really took its toll on him.
05:30So yeah, it was the least I could do to try and honour that.
05:33It feels like there'll be so many complications
05:36navigating a film like this,
05:37juggling the history and the secrets being kept
05:40between individual characters,
05:41but you managed to make it shockingly cohesive.
05:44What were some of the challenges you faced taking on a true story?
05:48Wow. Well, I suppose, I mean, with any true story,
05:51you've got to sort of honour the spirit of it,
05:55but not the letter,
05:56because you've got to compress a whole sort of three-year period
05:59into two hours.
06:00And so there's a tightrope to be walked if you're doing that,
06:04because there is a responsibility.
06:06And any period thing takes a bit of extra work,
06:09because you've just got to find a credible world for it.
06:13And I think, you know, it's no good
06:15sort of just dropping contemporary characters,
06:18contemporary sort of behaviour into a period setting.
06:21You have to sort of get the actors to completely embody that.
06:25And, I mean, people were really different back then.
06:28They behaved really differently.
06:31Speaking of the period itself,
06:32I kept thinking about, as a person with a passion for shooting,
06:37how much fun that would have been at times.
06:39You know, because of the era and the locations,
06:41like there was a particular shot with the wild elevators
06:44that keep moving,
06:45and I was just like, how much fun would this be to shoot?
06:48Was that just a delight?
06:52Yeah, the elevators were fabulous.
06:55We had, yeah, I mean, listen, it's pressure.
06:58You know, there's a huge amount of pressure in shooting
07:01just because of the time you have.
07:02And when you're shooting on location
07:04and you're in one place for a day,
07:06you know, you've got to kind of get it,
07:07you've got to get it done.
07:09And there were a lot of sort of, in this movie,
07:11there was a lot of stuff that was shot,
07:13you know, in multiple locations.
07:16So we had to sort of deliver.
07:17So that's what takes the fun out of it.
07:19But we did, in Prague in particular,
07:22which stands in for Moscow,
07:25we had some fantastic settings
07:27and brilliant sort of extraordinary locations.
07:31There were some trying bits as well.
07:32It was mightily cold,
07:34and we did quite a lot of night shoots, which are tough.
07:38But no, there was a joy.
07:39I mean, some of the sort of eccentric 60s settings
07:42were brilliant,
07:43and Prague had some wonderful sort of Soviet style architecture,
07:46which we used and really enjoyed.
07:49Maybe we're only two people,
07:52but this is how things change.
08:00you