We have data on fic and sex courtesy of a survey of two thousand fans by the Three Patch Podcast. Over 75 percent of survey respondents—almost all of whom identified as either female or a gender minority—said they learned a lot about their own sexual preferences through fic. And about 65 percent said their “solitary sexual activities” have been more satisfying since reading explicit fic. But I think the specific question Benedict Cumberbatch and the Out interviewer are puzzling over is the role of slash fic in female fantasy. Basically, what do girls want with an erotic story that doesn’t have any girls in it?

  Well, here’s how respondents answered a question on the perspectives they enjoy inhabiting when engaging in “solitary sexual activity” with fandom-inspired sexual fantasy. In other words, who are they while fantasizing about, say, for example, Sherlock Holmes biting Dr. Watson’s dog tags? And bear in mind that respondents could choose multiple answers:

  Forty-seven percent said they enjoy inhabiting the perspective of one particular character in the relationship; 25 percent said they prefer the perspective of the more dominant person in the scene and 52 percent the more submissive person. Twenty percent enjoy the perspective of the character portrayed as closest to their gender identity, while 41 percent prefer the character closest to their personality, and 13 percent said it was the character closest to their physical attributes. Fifty-eight percent said they enjoyed the perspective of an outsider observing the scene, and 20 percent inserted themself into the action.

  I don’t know about you, but it sounds to me like these fic readers know how to “operate” their sexuality. Also, if you think the appeal of slash fic is that it “removes women from the picture,” you’re kind of forgetting that, if anything, it’s (cisgender) men who’ve been removed from the picture. It’s almost entirely women and gender minorities who are in charge of the show.

  Notes on chapter eight

  Benedict Cumberbatch himself has a problem with seeming, an occupational hazard for an actor. He’s played a lot of geniuses, which, he says, just makes him seem clever. “Perversely, I am probably one of the stupidest actors I know,” he told Stellar magazine. “I’m playing some of the smartest characters because I’m drawn to them. They are so different from me.” I don’t know about this; he seems clever enough. He’s definitely well read. “You would have to be a pretty smart cookie to keep up with him,” his half sister, Tracy, told the Sun back when he was single, and then she followed up with a real zinger: “I think that is why possibly he has trouble with girlfriends.” Incredible. But it’s easy to confuse the actor with the character. When doing press about his role as Alan Turing, Benedict Cumberbatch had to repeatedly point out that he personally got a B in high school math. When he played Stephen Hawking, one journalist asked him how stars are created. “Good grief, that’s a really unfair question,” he replied. The entire promotional cycle for The Grinch became focused on whether Benedict Cumberbatch hates Christmas (he doesn’t, but he does hate plastic packaging). After playing Dr. Stephen Strange, Benedict Cumberbatch’s co-star Tilda Swinton jokingly asked him if he was confident to answer the call for a neurosurgeon during an in-flight emergency. “Yeah, I could definitely scrub up in the little airplane loo,” he says. “I’d get one of those plastic knives out, a few serviettes, and just get carving. It’s all very simple once you’ve opened it up.” Benedict Cumberbatch was proud, however, to report some cowboy skills did rub off on him after playing a rancher in The Power of the Dog. While on holiday with his family on the Isle of Wight, he found himself among a group of people whose path to the beach was blocked by a herd of cows. “There were people standing there with boogie boards and picnic bags looking terrified because they just wouldn’t move,” he says. “So I just went, ‘I know what to do!’ and started herding the cows out of the way.”

  The biggest-seeming problem for Benedict Cumberbatch came from playing Sherlock Holmes. Benedict Cumberbatch says the closest he gets to being able to do a Holmesian deduction is seeing someone on the train and noticing they have mud on their shoe. And yet, we still want him to be Sherlock. Comedy writer John Finnemore captures this in a short skit he produced for BBC radio called “What’s Benedict Cumberbatch Really Like?” In it, a woman approaches Finnemore and, knowing he worked with Benedict Cumberbatch on Cabin Pressure, wants the inside scoop. “Oh, he’s down-to-earth, very funny, great to be around,” Finnemore replies, but the woman isn’t happy with that answer. “But what’s he really like?” she keeps asking, over and over, as Finnemore searches for increasingly generic descriptions of Benedict Cumberbatch: “He’s an adult Caucasian male, above-average height, mild wear on upper-right molars.” Then: “He’s an omnivorous bipedal mammal.” But the woman still isn’t satisfied. “But what’s he really like?” she keeps asking, until Finnemore eventually says Benedict Cumberbatch is just like Sherlock Holmes, a high-functioning sociopath who lives on Baker Street. “You know what?” she replies excitedly. “That is exactly how he comes across on the telly!” Benedict Cumberbatch knows this, that he’s been typecast. He reports that at a pre-Oscars party, Ted Danson screamed across the room, “Oh my God! Fuck! It’s Sherlock! You’re Sherlock! Oh God!” He says he consoles himself with the fact that “no one calls George Clooney ‘Doug Ross’ anymore.”

  The best confusion between Benedict Cumberbatch and his character comes from Benedict Cumberbatch himself. When a journalist from Elle says she thinks Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t be any good in the sack, Benedict Cumberbatch vehemently disagrees. “I would be devastating,” he says, forgetting his pronouns. “I’d know exactly how to please a woman, I’d know exactly where to put my fingers, where to put my tongue, where to put my—his, I should say—his fingers, his tongue.” Benedict Cumberbatch knows he’s mixing up the actor and the character, but he can’t stop. “I’d know exactly how to get that person into it, and get pleasure out of making that person feel pleasure to the point that I probably wouldn’t even have to enter . . . But when I did”—and in this moment, it seems Benedict Cumberbatch and Sherlock Holmes are one and the same—“it would be explosive.” I think Benedict Cumberbatch might understand more about fanfiction than he realizes.

  Notes on chapter nine

  Benedict Cumberbatch appeared in a sex scene with Scarlett Johansson, early in his film career, in The Other Boleyn Girl. And what did his girlfriend at the time think about that? “We had a giggle about it,” he told the Times. “She was fine.”

  Feelings about celebrities aren’t always benign. Benedict Cumberbatch says he’s aware of some “obsessive, deluded, really scary” fan behavior, referring to people online who claim his wife is a criminal mastermind or an escort or something (it’s hard to keep up), and his children are all fake. It’s the kind of thing that has been going on since Paul McCartney supposedly died in a car crash in the sixties, but now with added internet.

  On the subject of Benedict Cumberbatch’s objectification, Caitlin Moran asked him if he’d be happy, in the interests of feminism, to “play a role in a female-centered film where you were man-totty? Hot, objectified manmeat?” He replies cheerfully, “If it’s good enough for Chris Pine [in Wonder Woman], it’s good enough for Benedict Cumberbatch! Yeah! Definitely!” Moran suggests he’d appear only in his underpants, in a slow pan from feet to the head, and Benedict Cumberbatch chimes in, “. . . with sexy screaming saxophone music in the background? Ha-ha-ha, yes! So long as it was fun. I’d have to be in good shape, though. Prepare.”

  If you would like to objectify Benedict Cumberbatch in the truest possible sense of the word, breaking him down to his component parts, you’re in luck—someone has already done it for you. As Bill Bryson reports in his book The Body, the Royal Society of Chemistry has worked out not only every precise element contained in the body of Benedict Cumberbatch—mostly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus—but also exactly how much it would cost you to buy these elements if you wanted to build your own Benedict Cumberbatch at home from scratch (£96,546.79, not including VAT or cost of construction).

  Benedict Cumberbatch understands the patriarchy and his role in it. In the same interview with Caitlin Moran in which he says he’s happy to be manmeat, Benedict Cumberbatch announced that he won’t take a role unless the female actors on the project are being paid the same as the men. He’s proud that he and his friend Adam Ackland are the only men employed by his production company SunnyMarch. “If it’s centered around my name, to get investors, then we can use that attention for a raft of female projects.” When he was asked in a later interview—in which he’s supposed to be promoting luxury watches—about what it means to be a modern “gentleman,” he replied, like a goddamn gentleman, it’s “about passing that platform on to other people.”

  Top 10 Benedict Cumberbatch characters, hairwise, according to me: 1. Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock); 2. Sherlock Holmes (the different hair he has in “The Abominable Bride” special); 3. Wallace (“Little Favour”); 4. King Richard III (Richard III); 5. Christopher Tietjens (Parade’s End); 6. Prince Hamlet (Hamlet); 7. Stephen Lewis (The Child in Time); 8. William Prince Ford (12 Years a Slave); 9. Stephen Strange (Doctor Strange); 10. Little Charles (August: Osage County).

  The worst hair is surely Dominic Cummings (Brexit: The Uncivil War), which was so bad that whenever he wasn’t on set, Benedict Cumberbatch had to wear a hat, including to accept his South Bank Sky Arts Outstanding Achievement Award. “I’m not wearing this to remain aloof and anonymous,” he explains on stage, but because of the “horror story that is my haircut.” Notable mention goes to the Julian Assange platinum blond bob for The Fifth Estate. When that movie came out, the singer Phoebe Bridgers wasn’t famous. But as soon as she was, it was pointed out how much she looked like Benedict Cumberbatch looking like Julian Assange. She embraced it, selling a T-shirt on her 2018 tour that was, simply, a photo of Benedict Cumberbatch as Assange, printed beneath the words “Phoebe Bridgers.” Amazing.

  Benedict Cumberbatch’s face has appeared on more than one birthday cake. The actress Keeley Hawes told a great story about this on The Graham Norton Show. She says while she was filming The Hollow Crown somewhere in the British countryside, she went out to dinner at a local pub with co-stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Dame Judi Dench. A few pubgoers noticed these celebrities in their midst and were checking them out, but then a sixteen-year-old girl came up to them and started to cry. “Sobbing!” Hawes says. “And it turned out that she was having, in the hall next door, in the middle of nowhere, a Benedict Cumberbatch–themed birthday party—with the cake with Ben’s face on it—and there he was! With Judi Dench as a sort of side note. It was quite extraordinary. It was a wonderful thing to see. And of course he was brilliant, because he’s lovely.” Graham Norton adds, “Isn’t that terrible, when your life has peaked at sixteen.”

  Notes on chapter ten

  Benedict Cumberbatch was already at boarding school when the Police Academy movies were released. They probably didn’t show them there. “I was never obsessive about anything I watched when I was a kid,” he told SFX magazine, “except maybe The A-Team and Airwolf. . . . And I loved Knight Rider and Baywatch. But I was never obsessed.” He was eight when he was sent away to school, which he says, “seems a bit of a wrench. I don’t know if I could do it with a kid of eight.” He has a recurring dream, he told Harper’s Bazaar, where he’s been abandoned in his grandmother’s house and wakes up to find everyone’s gone. “So speaks a child who went to boarding school.” He laughs. “Abandonment issues, I think that could be it. I forgive you, Mum and Dad. It’s fine.” In a later interview he’d clarify his feelings about the experience, saying, “The first lump-in-the-throat moments were really horrible, but they were soon overridden by the sheer joy of what I was doing. It was like a band of brothers: sailing and camps and cricket and boys being boys and having adventures.” He’s now the father to three young sons, his own “very merry band.”

  Benedict Cumberbatch’s wife, theater director Sophie Hunter, was obsessed with the English pop band Bros when she was a teenager. Benedict Cumberbatch manages to reveal this information while being interviewed on the red carpet at the BAFTA Awards one year. As soon as the words leave his lips, you can see the flash of realization on his face that he has said The Wrong Thing. “She’s going to hate me for saying that!” he says, shaking his head, and smiling straight down the lens, a man resigned to his fate. For his part, the first record Benedict Cumberbatch bought was Now That’s What I Call Music!: Volume 24 featuring 2 Unlimited, Shaggy, and Duran Duran.

  Notes on chapter eleven

  Benedict Cumberbatch has many interests. He reads a lot (a bit of a literary critic himself, he once did book reviews for British TV chat show Richard & Judy) and likes music (Sigur Rós, Radiohead, Elbow, Pink Floyd, David Bowie). He swims, he writes, he practices his French, he supports many excellent causes (including appearing at an Extinction Rebellion protest), he goes to Wimbledon, he talks about how he’s vegan or not vegan, he does yoga and meditates. But his “thing” is clearly acting, and always has been, well before it was his profession. “I really, really love my job,” he told Vogue. “I love sets. I love crews. I love theaters. I love audiences.” In the lead-up to his run as Hamlet, Benedict Cumberbatch was asked if he was preparing for the role, and he replied, “I started preparing for Hamlet when I was seventeen. Probably before that.” He has always loved the one thing, and has never stopped. When he appeared in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the age of twelve, the title of the review in the school magazine prophesied everything to come: “Benedict Cumberbatch’s Bottom Will Long Be Remembered.”

  Benedict Cumberbatch has his own sense of what’s weird and what’s normal. Speaking with Claire Foy in a Variety “Actors on Actors” video, he says about meeting fans, “The selfie thing is a bit weird. I do still feel like, Can we not just have a moment? Can we not just say hello? I don’t want a selfie with, I don’t know, Paul McCartney. I want to talk to him. I want to talk to him about chord structures, albums, tours, you know what I mean? Dig a bit deeper.” Some things are normal (talking about chord structures), some things are weird (photos of bone structure). We’ll have to agree to disagree. Benedict Cumberbatch then says that Claire Foy must have the same problem with fame now, being so recognizable from The Crown. “I’m really fortunate, in the sense that I have always—” And she stops herself, starts again. “You,” she says to Benedict Cumberbatch, “are a very distinctive-looking person.” “I’m an odd-looking person,” he says, and Claire Foy, horrified, says, “No! It’s not about being odd-looking!” and he says, “But I am. Me and Matt Smith, you can kind of spot us.” In contrast, Claire Foy says she can walk into a room and people will squint at her, thinking, “ ‘Hmm, did I work with her? Is she my cousin?’ I’m familiar to people, but I don’t attract attention.”

  There aren’t many occasions when you get to cheer for an actor like they’re your sports team, but when Benedict Cumberbatch won his first BAFTA TV Award after six previous nominations, I was legitimately elated. I actually leaped up and punched the air, which isn’t a thing I do. Having never followed a sport of any kind, it was educational: you really can experience someone else’s victory as your own! A Canadian friend once told me that ice hockey fans riot after a loss, but riot even more after a victory, and now that made perfect sense. I was all set to flip a car and light something on fire. That the win was for Patrick Melrose made it even better. It is, in my opinion, the best performance of Benedict Cumberbatch’s career, my absolute favorite. If you—and is this even possible?—have gotten this far into this book without having seen Benedict Cumberbatch in anything, maybe you could start here.

  Notes on chapter twelve

  Denigrating their own looks is something many of the Cumberbitches do in my conversations with them. I heard the phrase “I’m not exactly a model myself” so many times, unprompted, it became really unsettling. Benedict Cumberbatch will similarly never pass up an opportunity to talk down his appearance. On the subject of his resemblance to an otter, he says, “It’s a great disservice to a wonderful woodland amphibious creature.” I wonder, does this somehow make him more attractive to women who are unhappy with their own looks? I don’t know, but it makes for an interesting dynamic. On one occasion, a fan presented him a photo for an autograph and Benedict Cumberbatch duly signed his name on the image of himself in a tuxedo, seated on a stool, but then scrawled underneath: Posh Aliens have landed!! HATE this photo . . . Ah well!! This personalized photo eventually ended up on the r/Cumberbitches subreddit for all to see. “Would still bang,” the first commenter declares. “No hesitation,” chimes in the next.

  Benedict Cumberbatch is in the business of transformations. It’s his job to become someone else. When he was preparing to play Dominic Cummings in Brexit, he went over to Cummings’s house, which you’d think would be very awkward, with them being on opposite ends of the political spectrum. But the Spectator’s Mary Wakefield, who is also Cummings’s wife, described what happened as “a hell of a thing.” “He sat down opposite Dom at about 8.30 p.m. that summer evening in what I imagine is a very Cumberbatchian pose: legs folded beneath him, alert, leaning forward, head up. ‘Just water, please, I don’t really drink.’ By 10:30 he was leaning back, just like Dom, glass of red in hand. By 1 a.m. he was a mirror image of his subject. It was a Rorschach blot of a scene. Both men reclining, each with an arm behind their head.” Later, when photos of Benedict Cumberbatch as Cummings appear in the press, Wakefield shows them to her son, and he thinks Benedict Cumberbatch is his father. The two men look nothing alike. “Cumberbatch doesn’t so much throw himself into each role as get sucked into them,” writes GQ. It renders him, Vanity Fair says, “a kind of imaginary dress-up doll.” He can be whatever you want him to be.

 

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