Benedict Cumberbatch on fame, science and his new Radio 3 play, Copenhagen (RADIO TIMES)

EXCLUSIVE: we talk to the Sherlock star as he tackles Michael Frayn's modern classic with Simon Russell Beale and Greta Scacchi


Jack Seale
2:50 PM, 11 January 2013

Benedict Cumberbatch is at a point in his career where he needn't say yes to any project if he doesn't fancy it. The star of the biggest drama on British TV, Sherlock, he's proved himself on stage in Danny Boyle's innovative, award-sweeping reinvention of Frankenstein, and will become a proper Hollywood star this summer thanks to a major role in feverishly anticipated nerdgasm Star Trek into Darkness – a casting that director JJ Abrams says was "a formality" after one viewing of a Sherlock DVD.

At this rate, by 2014 Cumberbatch will simultaneously be playing Batman, Superman and James Bond – but even if that happens, on present form you can bet he'll still be a regular presence on good old BBC radio.

Christmas Day on Radio 4, just before the Queen's speech: there he was as the young Rumpole of the Bailey. Then on Wednesday, the Radio 4 sitcom Cabin Pressure came back for series 4 with Roger Allam, Stephanie Cole and, yes, Benedict Cumberbatch all returning as the staff of a tiny airline.

Now he's on the wireless yet again, playing German nuclear scientist Werner Heisenberg in a new version of Michael Frayn's modern classic play Copenhagen (Sunday 8.30pm Radio 3). The three-hander has a cast from the velvet-lined box inside the top drawer: Simon Russell Beale is Heisenberg's Danish former mentor Niels Bohr, while Greta Scacchi takes the ultimately crucial role of Bohr's wife Margrethe. Exalted company, but Cumberbatch is the big name.

The play premiered in 1998 and is a famously knotty beast, concerned with the details of atomic physics and the insoluble question of whether, when Heisenberg visited Bohr in 1941, he was trying to glean info that might help the Nazis get the bomb, or warning Bohr that Hitler wanted it. The three protagonists discuss this meeting after their deaths.

"I never saw a production of it," says Cumberbatch when RT visits during a break in recording at Broadcasting House in London. "So I'm probably going to piss a lot of people off who want to hear it the way they last heard it. There's no way I can impersonate that.

"These are such extraordinary people with so much on their shoulders. So much of what they did affected so many people. It's a ripe topic for drama and he's just a master, Crazy Phrasey Frayn. He's brilliant."


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