Benedict Cumberbatch is currently promoting The Hollow Crown in Britain. We still don’t have an air date here in America, but it will probably air next fall on PBS, that’s my guess. But the British premiere is upon us, and as such, Benedict covers some of the local British magazines. I can’t say I took this Radio Times cover very seriously though. The mud around Benedict’s face just looks… wrong. Very wrong. Benedict spoke about playing Richard III to the mag:
Learning he was related to Richard III: “I was literally dressed as Shakespeare’s version of Richard III when I received an email from Leicester University saying that I was a not-altogether-ridiculously-distant descendant of Richard. I’m a third cousin 16 times removed, which is still distant, but puts me ahead of an awful lot of other people.”
Attending the reinternment of Richard III in Leicester Cathedral. “To have been present when Richard III found his resting place was moving. I was at the burial of a king.”
Why Richard III’s story is important in the modern world: “These films stretch way beyond the remit of historical or period drama. They are about everything we’re facing – all the debates about who we should ally ourselves with, whether we should be part of Europe, and how deep these divides go within a society. And the violence of medieval warfare has a resonance with what’s going on with extremism in the world…To see the headlines, and then read the day’s shooting script, realizing we are enacting a beheading, literally taking someone’s head off their shoulders – sad to say, these are things which are still part of our world.”
