Top Ten Benedict Cumberbatch Performances

Benedict Cumberbatch is fast becoming my all time favourite actor, due to his unique ability to bring passionate empathy and deep understanding of the human condition for all the roles he plays.

Mostly known for playing Sherlock Holmes on the fantastic BBC modern day setting series "Sherlock", Alan Turing in "The Imitation Game" and more recently Stephen Strange in "Doctor Strange", he often plays characters who are remarkable geniuses who are flawed or crippled in some way. Others include historical or fictional authoritative and aristocratic figures who are always trying to do the right thing, but some ultimately fail in their mission.

His work is absolutely outstanding and has inspired many in some way or another. He has certainly inspired me and made me get a better understanding of the world, the arts and life in general.
As a tribute to him, here are my favourite top ten performances from Mr Cumberbatch:

Number Ten: Stephen Hawking in "Hawking"

This is the role that brought him to attention in the acting field in both television and films. This telefilm follows Stephen Hawking, a young and brilliant scientist who struggles more and more against Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a crippling illness that eventually deteriorates all the muscles in the body.

His desperate determination to make a breakthrough in his scientific studies before his disease hinders him entirely ultimately leads to him finding the proof of the Big Bang theory. After discovering  how the universe was created in only a matter of minutes, resulting from the ancient explosion of stars in space, he finally earns his respected place in the scientific community. He is recognised today as one of the most iconic physicists in the world.

Cumberbatch successfully portrays Hawking as his ALS cripples his speech and body muscles more and more as the film moves on, but soldiers on to complete his important work.

"We are very, very small, but we are profoundly capable of very, very big things."




Number Nine: Khan in "Star Trek Into Darkness."

Chosen to play the bad guy for the rebooted Star Trek sequel, Cumberbatch inhabits Khan, a super human terrorist intent on exacting revenge on Starfleet enterprises for the grave exploitation and murder of his beloved crew at the hands of Admiral Marcus.

Despite Khan being inherently evil, brutal, cold and stoic, Cumberbatch gives him humanity and helps us understand the reasons for doing what does to the Starfleet heroes. He sheds cold tears over the loss of his crew and saves a dying little girl with his magic blood,  in order for her father to sacrifice himself in bomb explosion in London.

"My name is KHAN."

Number Eight: Richard the third of Gloucester in : "The Hollow Crown: Richard III"

In this series based on Shakespeare's historical plays, spanning several generations, Benedict plays  the humpbacked Richard III in Henry VI part 2 and Richard III.

In Henry VI, he starts off as an adolescent who bares witness to the many atrocities in a civil war known as The Wars of the Roses.
Bitter and angry over his deformity, convinced that no woman will love him, he turns into a hellish monster, thirsty for blood and the crown.

He gets more and more evil in Richard III, literally killing his way to the throne, including his brothers and nephews, before becoming completely paranoid and hateful towards everyone, including himself.

It's a truly inexhaustible, frightening and powerful performance. Benedict has the perfect ability to play a character that shocks and disgusts you, while at the same time being completely seduced by him.

"A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" 

 Number Seven: Smaug in "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug"

After Sherlock, this is the role that also caught Cumberbatch to my attention. Performed entirely in motion capture animation, and voice over, the result is a perfect and utterly terrifying Smaug.

His beautiful velvet voice, terrifying as it is powerful, is rendered even more scary as the psychopathic, greedy and paranoid dragon guarding the Dwarf kingdom inside the goldmine of the Lonely Mountain.

He is also reunited with his Sherlock co-star Martin Freeman, who plays the protagonist Bilbo Baggins.

"I am fire. I am... DEATH!"

Number Six: Doctor Stephen Strange in "Doctor Strange"

In this Marvel action flick, Benedict plays Doctor Stephen Strange, an extremely arrogant surgeon who, after getting his hands ruined in a horrible car accident, searches for alternative means to heal them. Arriving in Kamar-Taj, Nepal, he meets The Ancient One, who introduces him to  all sorts of different universes and the practice of Mystic Arts.

The transformation from the selfish, unfeeling surgeon to the humble to the self-sacrificing Sorcerer is absolutely incredible. Benedict is fully able to bring both the hostility and the sweetness in the character, as well as showcasing the physical and psychological struggles he faces.

They truly couldn't have picked a better actor to play the part.

"Dormmamu, I've come to bargain!"

Number Five: James in "Third Star"

This low budget drama is very underrated and little known, but it's one of the best films I've seen.
James has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer which will ultimately claim his life. So he decides to spend the little time he has left with his three best friends by going on a trip in West Wales in search of Barafundle Bay beach, his favourite place in the world. Carried around in a home-made special cart, James embarks with his friends on a journey of self discovery, silly games, love, heartache and living.

Bearing some resemblance to Alfonso Curaon's Y Tu Mama Tambien, Third Star (who's title is an intentionally misguided reference to Peter Pan) delivers emotional performances and depth, especially in the third act, when things really begin to get less comical. Cumberbatch bravely takes on the role of a passionate child-like charismatic man wanting to die with dignity and not suffer the humiliating and painful deterioration that cancer will eventually bring to him. It touches you on such an deep level, because the bond between these four characters is so real and strong.

"Remember that you were loved by me, and you made my life a happy one. And there is no tragedy in that."

Number Four: Vincent Van Gogh in "Van Gogh: Painted With Words"

This is a docudrama, which combines a narrated documentary of the life and times of Vincent Van Gogh, and a telefilm drama. Van Gogh's letters and own words are acted out brilliantly by Cumberbatch, who embodies the passion for his paintings, struggles with mental health and difficulties with his family life.

Many of Van Gogh's famous quotes, feelings about life, art and sadness are expressed vividly though Cumberbatch's superb acting. It really is amazing when your favourite actor embodies another real life figure who you also equally admire.

"One loves because one loves."

Number Three: Christopher Tietjens: in "Parade's End"

Aristocratic, sensitive, sophisticated Christopher Tietjens endures many hardships in this mini series involving the social difficulties of 1910s England during WWI. He marries a spiteful, vengeful, unfaithful, self-loathing woman, Sylvia (Rebecca Hall) after she becomes pregnant with a baby who might not even be his, and subsequently falls in love with a young suffragette, Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens).
Instead of divorcing cruel Sylvia to be with a woman he truly loves, he at first sacrifices his happiness in order not to shame her. Leaving both Valentine and Sylvia to fight for his country, he endures both physical and emotional suffering during the war, but ultimately succeeds in making the right choices for everyone in his life.
Cumberbatch said that he truly admired this character and wants to weave many of Christopher's traits into his own life.

"I can't go back. The sentimentalist must be stoned to death. It makes everyone uncomfortable."

Number Two: Alan Turing in The Imitation Game

This film is outstanding, tremendously amazing and powerful, and is by all means the biggest role in Cumberbatch's career.

This is an incredibly important film, as it is about Alan Turing,  a British genius mathematician, cryptographer and engineer who cracked the enigma code during World War II, ending the war by two years. He also created the first design for the digital computer, and invented the "Turing Test", which gave birth to the idea of artificial intelligence.

He was also openly gay at a time where being so was illegal in Britain. In 1952 he was arrested for "gross indecency" after he admitted to a police officer that he was gay and having an affair with another man. He was given a choice between prison time or female hormone injections (chemical castration), and he chose the latter in order to continue his work.

Very tragically, he committed suicide in 1954. This is one of the huge, shameful injustices the British government committed in the 20th century.

Benedict Cumberbatch completely embodies Turing with his research and imagination of how this character would move, speak and act around others. This truly was one of my most anticipated movies, and it was well worth the wait.

"Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of, that do the things no one can imagine."


Honourable mentions:

August: Osage County:  Little Charles

Playing the mousy, awkward young nephew of Meryl Streep's deceased husband, Cumberbatch demonstrates his singing abilities during a touching scene beside a piano and his loved one (Julianne Nicholson).

The Fifth Estate: Julian Assange

Although this film received a lot of backlash and failed at the box office, I personally don't agree with the critics on this one.
The Julian Assange in this film is portrayed as someone who wants to change the world and expose corruption and save many lives. At the same time, however, he is arrogant, strange and unfeeling towards those around him and ruthless in terms of his work. Cumberbatch tries to differ from the "monster" the media has made him out to be, and succeeds in capturing the vulnerability of a jaded activist deeply affected by the horrible things that happen in the world.

Joe/Charlie - Inseparable

This is a short film, not even lasting ten minutes long, but arguably one of the best short films I've seen. Joe (Cumberbatch) a family man, learns some very bad news about a scan of his brain at a doctor's appointment,  which looks like a terminal cancer.
After sobbing intensely in his car, he contacts his twin brother Charlie (also played by Cumberbatch), who is a low level gambler down on his luck and who gets beaten up by loan sharks after he loses a bet.
Joe meets up with Charlie, and he agrees to switch lives with him, so that Joe's wife and child can continue to live as a family as he did before.
It's a truly touching and beautiful film that plays out almost like a silent film, relying on very little dialogue, and the emotion on Benedict's photogenic face in certain scenes.

Hamlet  - Hamlet

In the 2015 three-month run at the Barbican theatre, Benedict plays the grief-stricken and complicated young Prince of Danes, once again to absolute perfection. He demonstrates his famous ability to cry on cue during his many soliloquies, as well as his comedic skills by dressing up as a toy soldier, strutting around the room to fake madness. The whole play was an absolute joy to watch.

Number One: Sherlock Holmes - "Sherlock"

Undoubtably the role he will always remembered for. It is after all the reason why I and so many others fell in love with him in the first place.

The show follows the many adventures the famous consulting detective and doctor John Watson, and the underlying threat of enemies such as Moriarty and others.

Sherlock Holmes is adapted in this series in modern day - with the same characteristics as the character from Arthur Conan Doyle canon, but with a few small changes. In this series, he labels himself as a "high functioning sociopath", disregards human emotion and avoids drug use in favour of solving crimes and does not suffer fools or cruel men.

From his brilliant deduction skills, to his many methods of disguise, to his eccentric interactions with others, Benedict's Sherlock is pure, solid entertainment.

"The name is Sherlock Holmes, and the address is 221B Baker Street."


To put so much effort, hard work, research and emotional commitment to a role, and be so kind hearted and compassionate in real life, Benedict definitely deserves all the happiness in the world. :)

Shark Tale: Ten years on.

I first watched Shark tale in the cinema of Pathe Balexert 10 years ago on October the 30^th 2004. I was fifteen years old.  I had high anticipations for the film, as I was already a fan of Will Smith at the time after I had a dream about him during the summer holidays in Spain.

At 13:00, in a less than packed room, I watched the animated DreamWorks comedy, and I came out of the cinema an hour and a half later completely blown away. The acting, the storyline, the animation all astounded me. It was unlike any other film I had seen before.

After that, I simply could not wait to see it again. But I vowed not to watch it again in the cinema, as it would be a waste of money. I would wait patiently, or rather impatiently for the DVD to come out in my local store (when it was still standing) In the meantime, I listened to the fantastic soundtrack and I began to search for the films the actors of Shark Tale, Will Smith, Robert DeNiro, Martin Scorsese, Jack Black, Renée Zellweger, Angelina Jolie and Michael Imperioli, and then watch them one by one. Along the way, I discovered Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece: GoodFellas. Shocked by it’s violence at first, but ultimately falling in love with it, I became a huge fan of his movies.  Robert DeNiro, one of the greatest living actors of our time, gives everything in movies, both good and bad, small and big.  My admiration for Will Smith became stronger and stronger throughout the years.

When I finally got to watch Shark Tale again on the 28^th of January 2005, rented from the DVD store, I was once again so impressed with it that I watched it again the next day.  My love of movies had been born, and I discovered many truly wonderful films after watching Goodfellas, all thanks to this Academy Award nominated film about a little fish telling a big white lie.

Not everyone was impressed however.  And throughout the years, many people have agreed that this film is shallow, full of unnecessary pop culture references and its missed aim at a kid’s audience. It’s now all but forgotten, and no one seems to want to remember it.   Now that I am no longer a teen and have seen many fantastic movies since then, I’ve decided to re-watch the film for it’s ten year anniversary and see if some of the critics have a point.

Basically the film is about Oscar (Will Smith) , a hip hop cleaner fish, working at a car wash who dreams of a better life outside his seemingly mediocre existence.  His obsession with money and fame leads to loans from his boss Sykes (Martin Scorsese), and it all eventually goes sour after he wastes the money he owes on a betting seahorse. His colleague and best friend Angie (Renée Zelleger) is in love with him, and she represents the life that he could have had if he wasn’t so infatuated with a luxury life style.

Meanwhile, Mob Boss Don Lino (Robert DeNiro) wants his son Lenny to eat meat when he continually refuses to do so.

So when his brother Frankie (Michael Imperioli) takes him out for a swim and eat a fish, they both come across Sykes’s Rastafarian jellyfish henchman, Ernie and Bernie (Doug E. Doug and Ziggy Marley) torturing Oscar. After Lenny, a straight up vegetarian, fails to eat Oscar, Frankie goes after him and in the process is hit by a fallen anchor and mortally wounded.  Lenny, grief-stricken, blames himself and leaves. The jellyfish then find Oscar beside the dead Frankie and assume that he had killed him. And Oscar being Oscar, lies that he did and makes up a fantastic story about the “confrontation”, which everyone laps up like a pack of starving puppies.  This brings Oscar the fame and fortune he always wanted, and even snagging himself a new girlfriend, the self confessed superficial gold digger Lola (Angelina Jolie). But his troubles are far from over, as an angry Don Lino wants answers as to who killed his son.

All the characters are pretty well developed and well crafted. After watching this again, I came to a conclusion: This is a fun movie to watch with some unexpected elements. One of which is Lenny’s character, who, as a vegetarian shark, cannot tell his alpha-male mob boss father that he doesn’t eat meat. This is of course an allegory for a male homosexual coming to terms with his sexuality, and dreading to tell his father the truth, for fear that he might reject him.

“He’s special, alright.” says Sykes in a dark voice to Lino.

“I’m so tired of keeping it all a secret!” Lenny laments to Oscar later in the movie. “And my dad, forget it, he’ll never accept me for who I am!”

Bear in mind that this was made in 2004, a time when people wouldn’t dream of putting in a gay character in an animated film.

The film is, however, by no means groundbreaking or intentionally smart, for the following reasons:

The first one being is that the producers clearly wanted to aim for a kids’s audience, changing the name “Shark Slayer” to “Shark Tale” early in production to appeal to families. Yet the film doesn’t seem to want to do that. It deals with an adult fish getting in dept with a boss who deals with the Mafia, a son of a mobster who comes to terms with his differences and Angie’s unrequited love of Oscar. It’s played out as a mild comedy for adults, a little like Groundhog Day and Keeping The Faith.

Another reason that the critics were so harsh on this film, was that it came out merely a year after the universally successful Pixar fish film Finding Nemo, so it was quite inevitable that they were going to make comparisons.  That film clearly knew what its target audience was, and triumphed immensely on every level with sadness, wit, depth and comedy.

The two previous DreamWorks animated films, Antz and Shrek, featured similar adult themes, and some mild language. Shark Tale became somewhat in between, which probably led to its downfall with the critics.

But in actual fact, this is really what attracted me so much in the first place. Animated movies are strictly made as comedies for children, and nothing else. Which is a shame, as animation is an art that should go to all genres of movies. See Ralph Bakshi films for the proof.

As for the endless pop culture references, this film is in part a parody of the Godfather. But it's not something that should be the drive and heart of a good storyline, in my opinion.  A much better parody of the mobster culture is Analyze This, which also stars Robert DeNiro as a gangster boss who seeks help from an unwilling modest psychiatrist (Billy Crystal).

I saw that one reviewer pointed out that the film copies rap and hip hop culture, and makes shallow materialism and the soulless luxuries that go with it, into the things that most people desire or should desire the most.

They also pointed out that the similarity of the fish and the celebrities who voice them, that singles out the “monstrous” and “disturbing” celebrity obsessed culture that we still live in.

I don’t agree with the reviews, but I can see where they’re coming from. A film which doesn’t know it’s own target audience often leads to failure.

Yes, we do live in a celebrity, materialistic and fame-obsessed world, and for a movie to graphically exploit these things is a very weak move indeed.

But Shark Tale ultimately fights against the idea of desperately having all the money and fame at whatever costs, and shouts out the message that a “normal” boring life is actually really cool, and is nothing to be ashamed of.

"Before the money and before the fame, before the lie, to me, you were a somebody, Oscar. Now you're nothing, but a fake, a sham, a con. You're a joke. Just go. Because I'm tired of hearing how everything you had in your life wasn't good enough. Including me." Angie confessing her love for Oscar, and ultimately rejecting him because of his obsession with a materialistic, heartless lifestyle. 

Bottom line, as I said before, Shark Tale is an entertaining, fun movie.  It’s no Lion King or Finding Nemo by any accounts, but it delivers.  I enjoyed watching it then and I enjoy it now.