By Brenda Franco
During the Hay Festival, Judi Dench agreed to star in Richard III along side Benedict Cumberbatch, after he had asked her to.
Dench was being interviewed by TV director Richard Eyre. During a question and answer section, Cumberbatch put her on the spot and asked if she would join him in his new film. She obviously said yes.
The whole thing to me looks like it was set up and a way to get good publicity for both actors. As we discussed today during the panel, Cumberbatch gives off an aura of goofyness like Jennifer Lawrence. For him to ask Dench if he would star with her while she’s doing a Q&A doesn’t seem disruptive, it’s just Cumberbatch being himself. Something that other people don’t think about is that he is an actor and the way he portrays himself is his character. He has to be doing something for us to want to constantly be checking up on him. This thing of acting silly and spontaneous in public is what people like about him. So it would be stupid for Cumberbatch not to continue acting this way. For those reasons, this whole thing seemed staged. It’s not up to him to pick who he stars with, it’s the directors job. Dench is an amazing actress, so she probably already got the role and this scene was just a mechanism to promote their movie together. But people don’t think otherwise because he’s Benedict Cumberbatch and his actions have become mundane that it would be silly to even question them as unintentional publicity.
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Hi Brenda,
While I do think that the spontaneity of Benedict Cumberbatch’s question to Dench is good publicity, I am not entirely convinced it was planned. Actors and actresses are not always in a promotors mindset, hence why they have publicists to do that for them. It is possible that Cumberbatch was given permission to ask Judi Dench to costar with him, but it could have been left up to him to decide how and when he would ask. I don’t think Cumberbatch was acting, because acting is his job and no one enjoys being under the clock their entire life no matter how amazing their job is.
You compared Cumberbatch to Jennifer Lawrence, and I think that it is safe to say the two are very similar. Before Lawrence won her first oscar, she tripped on the stairs to the stage, but everyone loved her for it. Her fall did gain her publicity, but does that mean that she fell on purpose? I am going to go out on a limb and say no. I think that a decision to be public and spontaneous is in Cumberbatch’s nature not acting. To say that he is acting would mean that we have never been exposed to the real Benedict Cumberbatch, in which case we cannot compare him to anyone else (especially Jennifer Lawrence) because we have no idea what he is like. But I don’t think this is the case. I think he enjoys what he does and I think he likes to have some fun with it. No human is capable of putting on a false identity one hundred percent of the time. True colors always have a way of seeping out, and I think silly and spontaneous is one of Cumberbatch’s colors.
-Keira Whitaker
I think this is a really interesting, though difficult to examine example of a publicity stunt. It seems very clear to me that, as Brenda pointed out, actors are not the ones to choose their co-stars. One possibility that I see then is Benedict acting in an almost manipulative manner here. As the reporter for the article linked above closes, “Dench, 80, it not believed to have signed a contract to star in Richard III. But after agreeing in front of a live audience, can she really say no now?” Keeping in mind that it is highly unlikely that Benedict would be so unaware of how production works as to think even his fame would allow him to invite someone new into the project, this seems to me to indicate that there is a possibility that Judi Dench has been in talks with the studio executives about the role but was holding off for one reason or another. One example that comes to mind is that she may have been trying to negotiate for a larger salary or more screen time and the studio was trying to resist. This would point to the possibility that what we see is a moment where Benedict and the studio executives worked to play off of Benedict’s public persona to secure Judi Dench into the role despite her hesitations. Which would mean that Benedict was being highly manipulative and really a bit mean by putting her on the spot in such a public way.
However, equally likely is the perhaps less sinister idea that Judi Dench was just as much a part of this publicity stunt as Benedict was. She could very likely have a contract that has not been made public knowledge and this was a coordinated effort. This seems perhaps even more likely considering the two then launched into scenes from Shakespeare. Since the bard has a history of being the mark of “true acting” this then allowed them both to showcase what great actors they are. Which is not to say that either of them is not a fantastic actor, but rather, that they both here are going about a very public way of proving it. Which really brings to the foreground that regardless of the type of publicity stunt that is being pulled here, Benedict seems to be using it as yet another way to prove he is a “serious actor” and not just the guy who plays a childish genius detective wearing a sheet in Buckingham palace.