John richardson. He was just a very great artist who, to my mind, was the great portraitist of his day. He also had this extraordinary feeling, maybe inherited from his grandfather, of perceiving peoples personalities. Charlie the acting of Benedict Cumberbatch and painting of lucian freud, when we continue. Rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by the following rose additional funding provided by and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Charlie Benedict Cumberbatch is here, one to have the most talked about actors in hollywood. He played everyone from Stephen Hawken to Julian Assange to villain conn. He won an emmy for his role as Sherlock Holmes in sherlock. Now is in a movie called the imitation game, he plays britains great unsung hero alan turing. Heres the trailer for the film. This war, were not winning it. You speak a word of what im about to show you, you will be executed for high treason. Its beautiful. Its the greatest inscription device in history and the germans use it for all communications. Everyone thinks enigma is unbreakable. Let me try and well know for sure. Mr. Turing, do you know how many died because of it . I dont. Three. While we have been having this conversation. Gentlemen, meet mr. Turing. Well work together. Theyll only slow me down. You have six minutes to complete the task. Its impossible. It takes me eight. 5 minutes, 34 seconds. You have to do it in under 6. What is it were really doing . Were with going to break an unbreakable nazi code and win the war. Oh. To pull this off, one actually has to be a genius. Im design ago machine to allow us to break every message, every day, instantly. Youre going to need all the help you can get and they are not going to help you if they do not like you. Have you decrypted a single german message . You will never understand the importance can of what i am creating here our patience has expired. No if you fire alan, you will have to fire me. Me, too. And me. It better blood where york. Alan, you do not have to do this alone. What are you doing . Whats going on . He thinks one of us is a soviet spy. You have more secrets than the best of them. What if i dont fancy her in that way . Cant tell anyone. Its illegal. Im just a mathmetician. Sometimes its people like you who can build things that no one can imagine. Charlie its been a good year to be you. Its not been bad. I chalk it up as a dandy one. Ive had a wonderful time both personally and professionally. Very happy man. Charlie do you go back to do richard iii . I do. They have someone else doing it while im here. Were filming as part of the bbb crown series, all the shakespeare plays. Theyve already transmitted the first three which are fantastic. Charlie you will be richard iii and also who will be hamlet . I will also be hamlet. Charlie every actor has to do it, dont they . Well, its interesting. Its always been a part thats had a an attraction to me. Its a universal role in a sense. Richard iii is a great challenge for any actor, and theres so much of the actors personality especially with am let because theres a lot of direct addresses and shril so soliloqu. Charlie this is the new yorker magazine. I havent seen it. Charlie it says benedict cumberworld. You can tell by the picture what the phenomenon is. Wow. Charlie what is that . I remember doing that photograph. Charlie yeah, a great photograph. One of the photographers daughters and her friends, i thank them so much for going doing that because there are other versions. Charlie it says the ones nearest the front have been camped out for hours. It was fun to do. But, yeah, what was your question . Charlie do you appreciate the phenomenon, would be one. To an extent, yes. He these are very intelligent, smart, driven boys and girls, men and women. I appeal to the generations. Charlie of course, because of the roles you play. And its a thrill for me to bring, you know, these people to the kind of work that ive enjoyed doing, the stories i have been riveted by and i think are important to tell and the people. Charlie is there a common denominator in terms of the kinds of roles youve enjoyed in your mind . Do they meet a certain . No, there are obvious things, the intelligence of the characters, the oddness of some of them, the heroism of some of them. But i do the guy next door as the comedian or as in madagascar playing a talking wolf. Its great fun and you get to flex different muscles. For me, its great variety. Theres not one that define mess as though sherlocks success is necessary. Charlie and played frequently in a variety of places before. Yeah. I always get this wrong but 76 or 96. Its the most portrayed fictional character of all. Charlie how do you prepare to come to that kind of character so that you want to be true to the character and at the same time you want to have your own interpretation . Right. Well, and as far as interpretation goes, a huge amount of heavy lifting is done by mark and steve. All the heavy lifting. They invented the idea on a train writing the dr. Who series. Wouldnt it be interesting to put Sherlock Holmes in modern day. Charlie and in british terms. It is a form of fiction which is a fan phenomenon, but they take great care of the legacy of doyle. Theres a lot of crossover. There are very specific draws. As far as my preparation for that particular iconic world, i have the most fantastic group. Dr. Watson is an observant man trained to be even more observant by sherlock, but he observes this hero and you have a map to plunder every time you go into the series. I go back to the books all the time. Charlie was it inevitable that you would become an actor because of your snarnts. Sadly. Tragically for them because it was a very expensive education, the ability to be able to try and choose any given avenue that might have opened up through that education. But, you know, i think they would have been thrilled at whatever i would have ended up doing, but they probably would have been happier if i had been a doctor or lawyer or teacher or something sensible. Charlie because they knew difficulties of being an actor. It was very real to us as a family. You get split up. Its very pathetic. You cant detail your life, your schedule, down time, your life in a public space, all these things i experienced growing up. Charlie would you do it in any different way in terms of the training, becoming the kind of actor youve become . Looking back on it, probably not. I used to ponder quite a lit by the whether or not i would have had a fun time of it if i had just gone on with it in my 20s and not gone to university in my early 20s. Im kind of glad i didnt have a childhood interrupted by the vagueries. Im glad i had a buffer of domesticity, even with two actor parents. I dont build walls high. I do have to go around in cars quite fast and roll the windows up. I think its very important to normalize your life because you very quickly transition between being the observant to being the observed and that can cut off a lifeline to your work. Charlie being observed as an actor and being observed no, observing Human Behavior and being aware of behavior and things that you can take from your environment and the people in it to being the person that is the main focus of attention. Charlie thats what i meant. Sorry. Charlie as an actor youre constantly observing and looking for ideas to interpret. I still manage to do it and there are ways of remaining anonymous. Sherlock disguised in full sight is sometimes the best way. Charlie youre glad you didnt leave college . Im glad i furthered my education. I made great lifelong friends and had fantastic experiences. We all worked incredibly hard on the productions. So in a way it was my version of theater rap. Its very arduous, very difficult weekly system where you would be getting ready to stage one as youre doing another. Its a great stretch. I think weve all experienced that in my group in university. We put on a ridiculous amount of plays, sometimes three at a time. Charlie what do you love most about acting . A very good question. Theres not a lot not to love, actually. I love the camaraderie. I like the community that compromises the sort o of of affiable. Charlie its a collaborative enterprise. It is. The other night, i felt incredibly exposed and alone. God bless standup comics. I dont know anything more fearful to an actor than an open mic because the thing that brought you, in my instance, to the stage, is i have legions of people behind me. Charlie you on the shoulders of giants. Yes, hard working individuals who have families and come to work because they want to tell the story as much as we do or pay the bills, its a craft or a job. The engagement is these people are working incredibly hard. Charlie and you dont want to let them down. No, you dont. I love the community of actors. Its a surprising body of talent. What they do as musicians, artists and humanitarians as well. I like being engaged in the work. I love bringing extraordinary stories and people to live, and ordinary stories and people to live equally. I have been sort of spoiled with the most extraordinary material. Charlie how do you get there, for you . Tell me, first, when they called you, or when your agent called you, did you know who he was . A little from hughes play, breaking the code. Charlie exactly. That was a while ago. It was on television and i saws the televised version of the stage play. Charlie you knew who they were talking about . Primarily, no. I didnt know that much about him. Charlie i didnt either fort. You read the script and youre engaged with the character. Hes awfully uncompromising, funny, witty, intelligent. Then youre embrawled in the mystery and the code and who this man is and breaking the code and the joy of that and the deevolution and the tragedy of his demise. So the emotional impact of what injustice he was served and what happened to him and the excruciating reality of that is only magnified when you realize i didnt know. This why dont i know this. Charlie me, too. A huge urgency to tell the story. It was a big driving factor in what was first the hype script, rightfully. Its amazing far reaching people who read in the industry for a year and vote for scripts on this site to just position them as things that somehow got lost in development and whatever and stalled their progress. So it came to me with all of that attached to it the most i think it was the top of the list that year. I was in what was an english rose garden on my desk. Page after page, i got to the end, and i was so moved and then incredibly angry. I thought, i have to tell this story. I want to be a part of this film because this man is a hero. He is the father of the Computer Science and computing and computers themselves as a body, as a mechanical thing, object, and a war hero in his work with other great cryptographers. Some estimated two years and could have gone on by aving 14 million lives which is an astonishing thing to com compre. Then afterwards a man for admitting his true nature being prosecuted and given two years in prison and chemical castration through injections. So the world closed on him and punished him and he saw no way out, he couldnt work, he couldnt love. Charlie the characteristic of him that you most wanted to get at came through i dont know if there is one. Hes so complex. Theres a very clear one, sorry. Its a difficult thing to talk about wrathen than sounding a little generalized. Its fact he felt everything so keenly around him. He was able to be influenced by his environment and the people he loved and worked with. That was born out in his relationship with joan clark and his first life love with christopher morcom, the boy he fell in love with at school. Thats the key for me as an actor to be able to understand, very inspiring. We celebrate the fact that hes different. His eccentric behavior was born out of the things weve seen in those days which were illegal. He manages to turn challenges into the good even in the throws of his body being racked by the injections. Charlie we get to know him when hes a mathematician and enigma is the machine the nazis use and they have been ukesful and it was having a devastating effect. They could communicate within the nazi empire without any fear of detection. We can all hear it. Theres a line in it that any school child with an am radio could pick up the signals because you couldnt translate it. Every day they changed the code and there are 159 million and more possible variations and he took an idea from the cryptographers and adapted it in a speck tar lar way it needed to be to beat the enigma machine. Charlie and there was rejection at first and somehow he got churc churchill to sign n letting him do what he wanted to do. I cant imagine the phrasing but you cant imagine the kind of strong command from the commanderinchief. It was complete support. Charlie this is alan turing after he gets support from churchill because all around him people did not believe he was on the right track and he had such confidence, a bit arrogant, would you say justifiably, i think, but yes. Churchills put alan in charge. This is a terrible idea. No, no, no, no. Shall i give these men orders now . I hate to say it but yes. Excellent. Use me. What . You have mediocre english and code breaking skills. You cant fire alan and char. I didnt say anything. Churchill did. Go to hell. Well, this is inhuman. Even for you. Popular at school, were you . Charlie tell us more about who he was and what it is that is important in this film about understanding what was going on there. I think at this stage, its before john clark is brought in to the story, who is another well, to use the phrase, very humanizing influence in his life. He was incredibly sensitive child. He was brought up by foster parents for a large portion of his early life and his mother returning from a diplomatic in india with his father was stunned to discover her son had a stammer. You can only imagine what difficulties these children now face with that difficulty. Then, in an era which wasnt vick torn but might as well have been in attitudes, sent to two boarding schools, the idea of him making easy friends with peers is beyond me. But he was peculiar and had a very different view of the world. He fell in love with an older boy at his public school. Charlie shown through flashbacks. Yes. Brilliantly played by alex lawther in the movie. Its a remarkably mature performance and one of the most moving moments of the film. And he, in that relationship, discovered cryptography and his sexuality, so two very key moments in his life story, the idea that he could also be celebrated and enjoyed for the fact that he was different and he didnt have to worry about his standing opposed to the status quo. So that gave him can have can dense. Christopher told him he had a place in the world and entitled to a seat at the table. Theres lots to talk about. Charlie i know there is. He would then i think it channeled into his work. When christopher died, with the correspondence he had with christophers mother, he was an atheist, but he honored christopher through being a better student and that gave us the work ethic. Charlie a sense of urgency. Yes, to make the most of his life. Youre quite right. His brilliance is picked up by many. And beyond that, in that space, he was adored and very loved. There were people who loved him h. What truly happened is this frndship blossomed into love, romantic but not physical, between john clark, both experiencing prejudice. Charlie both brilliant. Yes. Charlie kiera knightley. A woman in a mans world, fighting for equal pay, same tenants of feminism today, sadly, still. He had to operate within a team. Charlie which was essential to get the job done. It was. Hes more of a team player in reality than in the film. Charlie more in reality . I think so. Other people said he was cantankerous. Other people adored him and didnt mind his eccentricities. Charlie and mistakes were so high. Every day they were failing to win a war resulting in the whole of occupied europe leaning in toward an island. We were besieged. Charlie ships in the atlantic were being sunk. All of that. Charlie it presents the moral dilemma that comes. Comes. It was shocking. Charlie when you talk about fathers of the digital revolution, hes at the top of the list. Absolutely. The titans of Silicon Valley acknowledged that. Charlie they absolutely do. He wanted he wished that the apple logo had been in honor of him. Charlie Walter Isaacson on this program who wrote the book on steve jobs biography talking about alan turing. He came up with the notion of art initial intelligence. He comes up with a test to say how would we define a machine that could think . You put a machine and person in a different room and feed them questions and if after a while you cant tell the difference between the machine and the human then you have no reason to say the machines not thinking and thats called the turing test or the imitation game. The movie is great. Its about alan turing an. Alan turing was homosexual, quite up front about it but he had to keep it secret when he was breaking the german wartime codes. Charlie it was against the law. He gets arrested for gross indecency, finally. Hes given hormone treatments. Its really bad. You know, he seems to ride with it for a while, but after hes written this notion of the imitation game of the computer, a few years later, he bites into a cyanidelaced apple to commit suicide. Is that something a machine would do . It almost helps you realize the emotions and, you know, that come with being human are fundamentally different these days than what a machine does. Charlie i asked him about steve jobs and as you just said, the famous apple, did it come from there, and steve said, no, according to walter, but i wish it had. You think about the fact that it was also a rainbow colored apple in the first inception instead of the glowing white that we have now. Couldnt be more apt. The emotional truth of alan, he was fascinated with he was illustrating on what makes this different, what defines differences and how thin those paper walls are, and we should celebrate it than fear it. And sadly he was in an area where fear dominated and prejudice came about and he was persecuted for being different. Charlie did you watch and read and find everything you could or was it some other way . Sadly, theres no footage. Charlie pictures. There are pictures. Charlie but you dont get the stamina. You cant get that pa from pictures. Theres a lot of fantastic anecdotes. Charlie people who knew him . People who knew him and interviews and surviving family members as well who are very fluid and talking to me about what they remember, but it was very often as children, but even that was a clue into the humanity of the man. There was so much written as to who he was on a day to day basis. There was a story about him visiting and playing chess with his back turned to the board and delighted at his presence and not feeling like they were children, feeling comfortab