00:00 and volunteering to bring back the best source
00:01 of Soviet intelligence you've got at a time
00:03 where Russia and America are on the brink of nuclear war.
00:06 (dramatic music)
00:08 - Your versatility really shines through in this
00:15 because this character has this confidence
00:18 where he never skips a beat,
00:19 but he's also a complete fish out of water.
00:21 - Can't believe I'm actually having lunch with spines.
00:24 - What were the challenges of balancing that
00:27 and was it difficult?
00:29 - Thank you, that's very kind of you to say.
00:32 And you know, it's something I was kind of acutely aware
00:34 of having to craft throughout the whole film
00:37 and really track because obviously shooting out a sequence
00:39 like most movies, you know, he goes from being a naive,
00:44 he's sort of slightly dismissive of even the idea
00:47 to being someone who's fairly professional at spy craft
00:50 and his job to being a sort of all out hero
00:53 trying to save his friend,
00:55 however, ill advisedly or tragically.
00:58 - He would never leave me to die and I'm not leaving him.
01:02 - Yeah, it's so important because to me,
01:05 that was what was sort of attractive about the role,
01:06 that and the fact that he starts as an every man,
01:08 someone from a very humble, worse background.
01:10 - What does this do, shoot poison darts?
01:13 - Quite far away in his ordinariness
01:14 from some of the extraordinary characters I've played before
01:17 and to see that transition, to make that really work
01:22 was key to me and also to bring the audience in,
01:25 to make them feel that they were questioning
01:27 whether they could have gone through what he went through.
01:30 You know, and I mean, although it's soft spying
01:33 in the sense that, you know,
01:34 we're not talking about hyper surveillance
01:36 or James Bond antics, it's still punishable by death.
01:41 I mean, it's a terrifying thing to think
01:44 of what would happen and what would have happened
01:45 if he had only been caught.
01:47 - What if I get caught?
01:48 - Then execute, be correct.
01:49 - It's a really important aspect of the characters drawn
01:53 in the script, but also is how I wanted to play him,
01:55 so thank you for asking that question.
01:57 I was wondering about the Wynn character
01:59 because he's a really complicated character.
02:02 To play both sides of that, I mean, Cumberbatch was on fire.
02:06 Was that a scary idea,
02:09 trying to cast the right person for that role?
02:11 - You know what?
02:12 I was only halfway through it
02:13 and I thought he's got to do it.
02:14 We'd worked together a few times before.
02:16 I knew him really well.
02:17 I was desperate to work with him again.
02:20 And you know, some actors do have,
02:22 I mean, Rachel Brosnahan's another actor
02:24 who has a sort of innate feel of how to put themselves
02:27 into a specific historical period, but be truthful.
02:30 Because it's very easy if you're playing sort of
02:33 uptight British to go into a sort of weird,
02:36 you know, sort of caricature.
02:38 But I knew with Benedict that he could get that,
02:41 but also find this sort of vulnerable human being
02:44 in the middle of it, who, as you say,
02:45 he's a sort of rookie.
02:47 I mean, he didn't know what the hell he was doing.
02:48 - I don't understand why.
02:49 I'm just a salesman.
02:52 - And the stakes are incredibly high, you know?
02:55 So he sort of managed, I think,
02:57 to get that sort of formal sort of restraint
03:01 that especially guys at that time in Britain had,
03:05 and play the sort of innocent son.
03:08 He has a storyteller's instincts about that,
03:11 which is really helpful, you know?
03:13 - I'm just a salesman.
03:14 - Exactly.
03:15 You're a civilian, so the KGB won't be watching.
03:18 - In the latter half of the film,
03:19 you have some scenes where you look pretty emaciated,
03:24 you know, your physicality changes significantly.
03:27 Did you lose weight for that role,
03:29 starve yourself to get into character,
03:31 and how do you balance that with the fact
03:33 that soon you would have to film as a bonafide superhero?
03:36 - Yeah.
03:37 It's hard, it's weirdly,
03:40 it's hard both ends of the scale, obviously,
03:42 but it's very hard.
03:43 It took me a long time to put the weight back on.
03:46 I mean, I did "The Mauritanian" a while after,
03:49 but I still look incredibly thin in that film, I think.
03:52 I mean, as opposed to my normal sort of body weight,
03:54 but I helped to augment this process
03:57 with Dominic by producing it.
03:58 But I think even if we hadn't produced it
04:00 as a company in Sunday March,
04:02 Dominic and I would have really, really, really driven
04:05 for the hiatus we had in order for me
04:07 to be able to lose the weight.
04:09 It was imperative to me, you know?
04:10 I lost about a stone and a half,
04:12 and it was through the usual methods of dieting,
04:16 but also some extreme exercise.
04:18 I was very fit.
04:19 It was all done in a very healthy way.
04:23 It wasn't about atrophy or lethargy.
04:24 It was very much about trying to shred everything
04:26 to shrink back my body mass around muscle.
04:30 But when you do start to feel slightly kind of,
04:34 I can't remember what the word is when you,
04:36 it's horrible, but it basically is a description
04:38 for self-digestion.
04:39 You have to also just strip away muscle.
04:41 That's a very nasty thing to be doing.
04:43 And you get very disorientated.
04:46 You feel dehydrated.
04:47 You feel hungry all the time.
04:49 You feel emotionally and physically very vulnerable,
04:51 all of which plays very helpfully into a character
04:55 that must've endured this for months, if not years.
04:57 And so you look at those photographs and you think,
05:00 it may only be four scenes of a film,
05:02 but I have no choice but to honor the truth
05:05 of what he endured for a far, far longer period of his life,
05:09 and just go there and just get on and do it.
05:11 And it needs that.
05:13 We need to be honest about what the risk was
05:15 that was run and taken and received.
05:20 He just lost two weeks of his life to a mental breakdown.
05:22 And I think a long, long time,
05:24 and a lot of strain physically and emotionally
05:28 after that really took its toll on him.
05:30 So yeah, it was the least I could do to try and honor that.
05:33 - It feels like there'll be so many complications
05:36 navigating a film like this, juggling the history
05:38 and the secrets being kept between individual characters,
05:41 but you managed to make it shockingly cohesive.
05:43 What were some of the challenges you faced
05:46 taking on a true story?
05:48 - Wow, well, I suppose, I mean, with any true story,
05:51 you've got to sort of honor the spirit of it,
05:55 but not the letter, because you've got to compress
05:57 a whole sort of three-year period into two hours.
06:00 And so there's a tight rope to be walked
06:03 if you're doing that, because there is a responsibility.
06:06 And any period thing takes a bit of extra work,
06:09 'cause you've just got to find a credible world for it.
06:13 And I think it's no good sort of just dropping
06:16 contemporary characters, contemporary sort of behavior
06:20 into a period setting.
06:21 You have to sort of get the actors to completely embody that.
06:25 And I mean, people were really different back then.
06:28 They behaved really differently.
06:30 - Speaking of the period itself,
06:32 I kept thinking about, as a person with a passion
06:35 for shooting, how much fun that would have been at times.
06:39 Because of the era and the locations,
06:41 like there was a particular shot with the wild elevators
06:44 that keep moving, and I was just like,
06:46 how much fun would this be to shoot?
06:48 Was that just a delight given on the show?
06:51 - Yeah, the elevators were fabulous.
06:54 We had, yeah, I mean, listen, it's pressure.
06:58 You know, there's a huge amount of pressure in shooting,
07:01 just because of the time you have.
07:02 And when you're shooting on location,
07:04 and you're in one place for a day,
07:06 you know, you've got to kind of get it,
07:07 you've got to get it done.
07:09 And there were a lot of sort of, in this movie,
07:11 there was a lot of stuff that was shot,
07:13 you know, in multiple locations.
07:16 So we had to sort of deliver.
07:17 So that sort of takes the fun out of it.
07:19 But we did, in Prague in particular,
07:22 which stands in for Moscow,
07:23 we had some fantastic settings
07:27 and brilliant sort of extraordinary locations.
07:31 There was some trying bits as well.
07:32 It was mightily cold.
07:34 And we did quite a lot of night shoots, which are tough.
07:37 But, you know, there was a joy.
07:38 I mean, some of the sort of eccentric
07:41 '60s settings were brilliant.
07:43 And Prague had some wonderful sort of Soviet style
07:45 architecture, which we used and really enjoyed.
07:49 - Maybe we're only two people,
07:51 but this is how things change.
07:55 (dramatic music)
07:57 (upbeat music)
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