Parade’s End: ‘Who is this Benedict Cumberbatch?’
Benedict Cumberbatch is the star name in Sir Tom Stoppard’s new BBC adaptation, Parade’s End, but HBO bosses had to be cajoled into casting him.
Sir Tom Stoppard is returning to the BBC after more than 30 years with a lavish adaptation of Parade’s End, the quartet of novels by Ford Madox Ford.
Beginning in the years before the First World War, it stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Christopher Tietjens, a cuckolded husband, and Rebecca Hall as his adulterous wife Sylvia.
Adelaide Clemens, an Australian actress, plays Valentine, a spirited suffragette who falls in love with Cumberbatch’s buttoned-up civil servant.
The five-part costume drama is a BBC/HBO co-production to be shown on both sides of the Atlantic, and is believed to be the most expensive production ever broadcast on BBC Two with a budget of around £12 million part-funded by the US network.
Benedict Cumberbatch, star of Sherlock, is now an international name with forthcoming roles in Hollywood blockbusters The Hobbit and the newStar Trek film.
However, Parade’s End director Susanna White had to convince HBO bosses to cast him when he was a relative unknown.
She said: “Christopher was probably the hardest character to cast because he’s such a buttoned-up Englishman who doesn’t show his emotions, and yet you have to fall in love with him and want to follow his journey over five hours.
“There was really only a tiny amount of people we felt could play him. Benedict seemed so right for the part but he was less well-known when we started out.
“There was a famous breakfast at The Ivy when HBO said, ‘Who is this Benedict Cumberbatch?’ And we said, ‘Trust us, he’s a truly great actor and by the time Parade’s End has come out everyone will have heard of him’.
“And of course, now everyone in America has heard of him.”
Ford’s books were published between 1924 and 1928 but fell out of fashion and the author is often overlooked in lists of the 20th century’s great British novelists.
Success for the five-part television adaptation is likely to fuel a renewed interest in the author’s work.
Sir Tom last wrote for the BBC in 1979, when he worked on the Playhouse series, and admitted that he was unfamiliar with much modern television.
“I watch it sporadically. I can’t say there’s anything where I arrange to be at home at the same hour on the same day every week,” he said.
“I don’t watch as much television as probably the average viewer and I’m a bit out-of-date about television. I write talkies - I wrote Parade’s End in the same spirit as I write stage plays.”
Sir Tom began work on the project in 2008 and it has taken four years to reach the screen. It is due for broadcast in the UK later this summer.
The Edwardian setting and First World War drama have been explored recently in Downton Abbey and the BBC’s adaptation of Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong.
Asked why the period held such fascination for viewers, Sir Tom said: “It was the last period of social history among the top half of the English class system. In the case of 1914, there is a sense of an important page being turned, never to be turned back again.”
Ford’s books were experimental in style and Sir Tom admitted that he had invented a number of scenes in order to keep the narrative flowing.
“I started reading it and pretty damn quickly I really wanted the job,” he said. “It’s a tremendously unputdownable book but you have to come to its aid when you’re adapting it into a television play.
“The structure of the book is not linear, nor does it fall into five equal parts. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on without it necessarily having a dramatic momentum. So there are a lot of things I got from source books and we were using stuff which wasn’t in the novel at all.”
source: telegraph.co.uk
However, Parade’s End director Susanna White had to convince HBO bosses to cast him when he was a relative unknown.
She said: “Christopher was probably the hardest character to cast because he’s such a buttoned-up Englishman who doesn’t show his emotions, and yet you have to fall in love with him and want to follow his journey over five hours.
“There was really only a tiny amount of people we felt could play him. Benedict seemed so right for the part but he was less well-known when we started out.
“There was a famous breakfast at The Ivy when HBO said, ‘Who is this Benedict Cumberbatch?’ And we said, ‘Trust us, he’s a truly great actor and by the time Parade’s End has come out everyone will have heard of him’.
“And of course, now everyone in America has heard of him.”
Ford’s books were published between 1924 and 1928 but fell out of fashion and the author is often overlooked in lists of the 20th century’s great British novelists.
Success for the five-part television adaptation is likely to fuel a renewed interest in the author’s work.
Sir Tom last wrote for the BBC in 1979, when he worked on the Playhouse series, and admitted that he was unfamiliar with much modern television.
“I watch it sporadically. I can’t say there’s anything where I arrange to be at home at the same hour on the same day every week,” he said.
“I don’t watch as much television as probably the average viewer and I’m a bit out-of-date about television. I write talkies - I wrote Parade’s End in the same spirit as I write stage plays.”
Sir Tom began work on the project in 2008 and it has taken four years to reach the screen. It is due for broadcast in the UK later this summer.
The Edwardian setting and First World War drama have been explored recently in Downton Abbey and the BBC’s adaptation of Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong.
Asked why the period held such fascination for viewers, Sir Tom said: “It was the last period of social history among the top half of the English class system. In the case of 1914, there is a sense of an important page being turned, never to be turned back again.”
Ford’s books were experimental in style and Sir Tom admitted that he had invented a number of scenes in order to keep the narrative flowing.
“I started reading it and pretty damn quickly I really wanted the job,” he said. “It’s a tremendously unputdownable book but you have to come to its aid when you’re adapting it into a television play.
“The structure of the book is not linear, nor does it fall into five equal parts. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on without it necessarily having a dramatic momentum. So there are a lot of things I got from source books and we were using stuff which wasn’t in the novel at all.”
source: telegraph.co.uk
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