00:00I'm volunteering to bring back the best source of Soviet intelligence you've got at a time
00:03where Russia and America are on the brink of nuclear war.
00:12Your versatility really shines through in this because this character has this confidence where
00:18he never skips a beat, but he's also a complete fish out of water.
00:21Can't believe I'm actually having lunch with spines.
00:25What were the challenges of balancing that and was it difficult?
00:30Thank you, that's very kind of you to say.
00:33It's something I was kind of acutely aware of having to craft throughout the whole film
00:37and really track because obviously shooting out a sequence like most movies,
00:41he goes from being a naive, who's sort of slightly dismissive of even the idea,
00:47to being someone who's fairly professional at spycraft and his job to being a sort of
00:52all-out hero trying to save his friend, however ill-advisedly or tragically.
00:58He would never leave me to die and I'm not leaving him.
01:02Yeah, it's so important because to me that was what was sort of attractive about the role,
01:06that and the fact that he starts as an everyman, someone from a very humble Welsh background.
01:10What does this do? Shoot poison darts?
01:13Quite far away in his ordinariness from some of the extraordinary characters I've played before
01:17and to see that transition, to make that really work was key to me and also to bring the audience
01:25to make them feel that they were questioning whether they could have gone through what he
01:29went through. Although it's soft spying in the sense that we're not talking about
01:35hyper-surveillance or James Bond antics, it's still punishable by death.
01:42I mean, it's a terrifying thing to think of what would happen and
01:45what would have happened if he had been caught.
01:47What if I get caught? Then execute me, correct?
01:50It's a really important aspect of the characters drawn in the script,
01:53but also is how I wanted to play him. So thank you for asking that question.
01:57I was wondering about the Wynne character because he's a really complicated character.
02:03To play both sides of that, I mean, Cumberbatch was on fire.
02:07Was that a scary idea, trying to cast the right person for that role?
02:11You know what? I was only halfway through it and I thought he's got to do it.
02:15We'd worked together a few times before. I knew him really well.
02:17I was desperate to work with him again.
02:20And, you know, some actors do have...
02:22I mean, Rachel Brosnahan is another actor who has a sort of innate feel of how to
02:26put themselves into a specific historical period, but be truthful.
02:30Because it's very easy if you're playing sort of uptight British to
02:34go into a sort of weird caricature.
02:38But I knew with Benedict that he could get that,
02:42but also find this sort of vulnerable human being in the middle of it,
02:45who, as you say, is a sort of rookie.
02:47I mean, he didn't know what the hell he was doing.
02:48I don't understand why. I'm just a salesman.
02:52And the stakes are incredibly high, you know.
02:55So he sort of managed, I think, to get that sort of formal sort of restraint
03:02that especially guys at that time in Britain had,
03:05and play the sort of innocent son.
03:08He has a storyteller's instincts about that, which is really helpful, you know.
03:13I'm just a salesman.
03:14Exactly. You're a civilian, so the KGB won't be watching.
03:18In the latter half of the film, you have some scenes where you look
03:22pretty emaciated, you know.
03:25Your physicality changes significantly.
03:28Did you lose weight for that role?
03:30Starve yourself to get into character?
03:32And how do you balance that with the fact that
03:34soon you would have to film as a bona fide superhero?
03:36Yeah, it's hard.
03:39It's weirdly, it's hard both ends of the scale, obviously.
03:42But it's very hard.
03:44It took me a long time to put the weight back on.
03:46I mean, I did the Mauritanian a while after,
03:49but I still look incredibly thin in that film, I think.
03:52I mean, it was opposed to my normal sort of body weight.
03:54But, you know, I helped to augment this process with Dominic by producing it.
03:58But I think even if we hadn't produced it as a company in Sunday March,
04:02Dominic and I would have really, really, really driven for the hiatus we had
04:06in order for me to be able to lose the weight.
04:09It was imperative to me.
04:10You know, I lost about a stone and a half,
04:12and it was through the usual methods of dieting,
04:16but also some extreme exercise.
04:18I was very fit.
04:19It was all done in a very healthy way.
04:23It wasn't about atrophy or lethargy.
04:24It was very much about trying to shred everything to shrink
04:27wrap my body mass around muscle.
04:31But when you do start to feel slightly kind of...
04:35I can't remember what the word is when you...
04:37It's horrible, but it basically is a description for self-digestion.
04:39You know, you have to also just strip away muscle.
04:42That's a very nasty thing to be doing.
04:44And you get very disorientated.
04:47You feel dehydrated.
04:48You feel hungry all the time.
04:49You feel emotionally and physically very vulnerable,
04:51all of which plays very helpfully into a character
04:55that must have endured this for months, if not years.
04:57And so you look at those photographs and you think,
05:00it may only be four scenes of a film,
05:02but I have no choice but to honour the truth of what he endured
05:06for a far, far longer period of his life.
05:10And just go there and just get on and do it.
05:11And it needs that.
05:13We need to be honest about what the risk was that was run
05:16and taken and received.
05:19You know, he just lost two weeks of his life to a mental breakdown.
05:22And I think a long, long time and a lot of strain
05:27physically and emotionally after that really took its toll on him.
05:30So yeah, it was the least I could do to try and honour that.
05:33It feels like there'll be so many complications
05:36navigating a film like this,
05:37juggling the history and the secrets being kept
05:40between individual characters,
05:41but you managed to make it shockingly cohesive.
05:44What were some of the challenges you faced taking on a true story?
05:48Wow. Well, I suppose, I mean, with any true story,
05:51you've got to sort of honour the spirit of it,
05:55but not the letter,
05:56because you've got to compress a whole sort of three-year period
05:59into two hours.
06:00And so there's a tightrope to be walked if you're doing that,
06:04because there is a responsibility.
06:06And any period thing takes a bit of extra work,
06:09because you've just got to find a credible world for it.
06:13And I think, you know, it's no good
06:15sort of just dropping contemporary characters,
06:18contemporary sort of behaviour into a period setting.
06:21You have to sort of get the actors to completely embody that.
06:25And, I mean, people were really different back then.
06:28They behaved really differently.
06:31Speaking of the period itself,
06:32I kept thinking about, as a person with a passion for shooting,
06:37how much fun that would have been at times.
06:39You know, because of the era and the locations,
06:41like there was a particular shot with the wild elevators
06:44that keep moving,
06:45and I was just like, how much fun would this be to shoot?
06:48Was that just a delight?
06:52Yeah, the elevators were fabulous.
06:55We had, yeah, I mean, listen, it's pressure.
06:58You know, there's a huge amount of pressure in shooting
07:01just because of the time you have.
07:02And when you're shooting on location
07:04and you're in one place for a day,
07:06you know, you've got to kind of get it,
07:07you've got to get it done.
07:09And there were a lot of sort of, in this movie,
07:11there was a lot of stuff that was shot,
07:13you know, in multiple locations.
07:16So we had to sort of deliver.
07:17So that's what takes the fun out of it.
07:19But we did, in Prague in particular,
07:22which stands in for Moscow,
07:25we had some fantastic settings
07:27and brilliant sort of extraordinary locations.
07:31There were some trying bits as well.
07:32It was mightily cold,
07:34and we did quite a lot of night shoots, which are tough.
07:38But no, there was a joy.
07:39I mean, some of the sort of eccentric 60s settings
07:42were brilliant,
07:43and Prague had some wonderful sort of Soviet style architecture,
07:46which we used and really enjoyed.
07:49Maybe we're only two people,
07:52but this is how things change.
08:00you
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