2015年3月17日 星期二

[NY TIMES] 用智慧詮釋天才-班奈迪克.康柏拜區於《模仿遊戲》中再次飾演聰明人(2014.12.31)

原文網址:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/movies/awardsseason/benedict-cumberbatch-acts-clever-again-in-the-imitation-game.html?ref=movies&_r=0



(Nikki、死線、小小、熊喜鮭合譯) 

有著寬額頭和高顴骨,班奈迪克康.柏拜區常被拿來和海獺或是《冰原歷險記》的樹懶喜德比較,這不是沒理由的(特別是如果你看過他在《八月心風暴》中的表現)。他擁有那種低醇悅耳的英國口音,可以高速飆出對話,以極快的速度完美闡述。他的語速可以快到超乎常人想像。最近這些天賦-大頭骨、快語速及上流人士的發音-替他建立了飾演極聰明但不大正常角色的口碑。

康柏拜區最知名角色的莫過於在BBC影集《新世紀福爾摩斯》中,扮演夏洛克.福爾摩斯-一個傳奇老偵探的現代版,覺得事事無趣的高功能反社會者、對人類情感毫無頭緒,以曲速滔滔不絕說出著名的福式推理。他也同時是《星際爭霸戰:闇黑無界》中的基因工程人-可汗,他陰沈的聲音和細緻、快速而清晰的發音凸顯了他超常的邪惡。

在《危機解密》中,康柏拜區是維基解密的朱利安.阿桑奇,這角色看來已經在他的身體中蟄伏很久了。(在片中說的是澳洲腔而不是英國腔。而且比起喜德樹懶,康柏拜區更像大衛.鮑伊。)而現在在《模仿遊戲》中,他是艾倫.圖靈,奇怪而離群的英國天才,他在二次世界大戰時協助破解德國恩尼格瑪密碼,但隨後遭自己的政府迫害,因為他承認自己的同性戀傾向而被強迫施以化學閹割。他死於1954年,推測為自殺。康柏拜區的圖靈說話並不快-他有點結巴,好像追不上他腦袋運轉的速度-這個圖靈很傑出,但有時過於苛刻。這樣的刻劃太深刻動人,使他獲得了金球獎最佳男主角提名,而且幾乎在所有人心中的奧斯卡口袋名單上。「事實上你就是無法把康柏拜區侷限住。」《模仿遊戲》的導演摩頓.帝敦最近說道,「他的層次如此豐富,就像角色本身。」

十一月,康柏拜區在拍攝BBC的莎翁劇《理查三世》時,休息了幾天以便去參加規定的《模仿遊戲》宣傳行程 —訪問、拍照、瓊.史都華每日秀和吉米.法倫今夜秀— 到了行程尾聲他的疲憊已經一覽無遺。某天下午我們在市中心的餐館裡見面,他的聲音偶爾會變慢、降得更低,好像電池快沒電般。但康柏拜區(本人風趣又親切,這和他那才智非凡的大部分同伴可不一樣)一談到艾倫圖靈時又會振作起來,這個角色讓他特別感同身受,而英國政府施予的對待至今仍讓他大皺其眉。「大家總在問我,你做過最困難的工作是什麼。」他道,「我總說就是我現在正在做的。但有些工作真的會觸及敏感神經、或讓你特別有共鳴,而圖靈的故事就有這種急切感。這是接演的主要原因之一 — 讓大家瞭解這個人是誰、他後來怎麼了、他的成就和對我們今日的影響。這是個無與倫比的角色,對任何演員來說都是很高的挑戰,但同時也沒有比這更這更高尚的事業了。」能替這部電影宣傳真的很榮幸,他說,「我一點兒也不介意讓大家知道他是個多棒的人。」

談到被定型為只演出聰明人角色,康柏拜區說,「如果這是實情,倒也不算歹命,但我覺得事實並非如此。」他指出自己也曾經在電影《奇異恩典》,飾演英國歷史上最年輕的首相小威廉.皮特、和《自由之心》裡頭種植場的莊園主人。此外,如果他願意繼續列舉,他也演過《諜影行動》裡的彼得.貴倫、《戰馬》中一次大戰的騎兵軍官,還有《贖罪》裡讓人毛骨悚然的巧克力商。

康柏拜區接著說,很多人拿圖靈和夏洛克比較,因為兩人同樣聰穎,特別在邏輯推理上,而且兩人同樣不擅長人際關係。但他認為圖靈和克里斯多夫.蒂金斯反而有著更深的連結。蒂金斯是他在2012年演出BBC五集電視劇《隊列之末》裡的主角,改編自福特.馬多克斯.福特的系列小說。蒂金斯大致是以福特本人為原型,一個古板的約克夏貴族,在一戰前夕,依然堅持著老派的愛德華時代價值觀,他被認為是當時倫敦最聰明的人,但是如同圖靈,在與人相處上,總顯得尷尬和笨拙。

「他是個聰明的男人,驕傲地面對著世人愚昧和道德淪喪。」康柏拜區繼續說著:「他生在一個偽善的時代,完全跟不上他那時代的腳步。」「圖靈也是如此。」康柏拜區堅持輕描淡寫地詮釋兩人笨拙的社交技巧。「那些忠實反映出複雜性的角色才會真的讓大家感到好奇。」他說著,停頓了一下。「或許現在像是在談論自己,但只用社交高手或社交笨拙這樣來討論他們,太過簡化了。我認為因為他們太非凡、太傑出-因為他們是精英份子-所以他們顯得獨特。但這些人對我而言依然是具有同理心的,對他們的遭遇我也能感同身受,最重要的是他們非常鼓舞人心。」

蒂金斯在小說裡被形容為「一個有著深海魚眼的飼料袋。」為了呈現出這種模樣,康柏拜區把自己增胖,穿著笨重的西裝,填充他的臉頰。身體的改造並不足以取信他人,但他的蒂金斯在每一個部份都是如此符合體統、如此隱忍的英倫紳士,入木三分的演出,如果讓你覺得他本人就是這樣的人,那也沒人會怪你。(他最近才用了老派優雅的登報方式,在《倫敦泰晤士報》刊登他和劇場導演蘇菲.杭特訂婚的消息。)事實上,他是兩位演員-汪達.范森和提摩西.達頓(因為認為沒有人會錄用一個姓康柏拜區的人而改名)的兒子。如今,他們已七十多歲依然持續演出,而且在影集《新世紀福爾摩斯》裡飾演他們孩子的父母。但他們對於康柏拜區心裡曾有著不同的期待,所以在相當程度犧牲下,把兒子送進大概是全英國第二貴族(僅次於伊頓)的哈洛公學。(圖靈在學校曾經受到霸凌,所以可能在哈洛會過得很悽慘;而蒂金斯則可能會很愛那裡,因為那裡就是男孩們在星期天依然穿著燕尾服的守禮之地。)「他們曾試著給我較好的教育,以提供我身為孩子所能奢求的最大機會。」康柏拜區補充他也曾試著抓住這個機會。「一段很長的時間,我曾經夢想長大當一個律師。」他說「這兩種職業有相似的技能,但我發現律師這職業和演員有同樣的風險啊!」

在許多方面《新世紀福爾摩斯》(於2010年首播,而今已是英國最多人收看的電視影集)都算得上是康柏拜區的事業轉捩點。這讓他從一個以劇場和電視電影聞名、經驗老道的性格演員,搖身一變成為被一大群自稱『康柏婊子(Cumberbitches)』的女性所追逐的網路萬人迷。這其中甚至有人為他寫了一首詩發表在《倫敦書評》上。

但有很長一段時間,康柏拜區不怎麼引人注意。在錄用他以前,史帝芬.史匹柏(《戰馬》的導演)從未看過《新世紀福爾摩斯》。史帝夫.麥昆(《自由之心》的導演)和帝敦(《模仿遊戲》的導演)也是。約翰.威爾(《八月心風暴》的導演)在康柏拜區傳給他一個用手機自拍的試演影片後,把那個缺乏自信又脆弱的小查爾斯(這和所有他演的那些天才古怪角色恰好南轅北轍)的角色給了他。「他真的太了不起了,」威爾最近提到,「我有點尷尬之前竟然不知道他是誰。」

當導演蘇珊.娜懷特在《隊列之末》裡錄用用康柏拜區時,她也還沒看過《新世紀福爾摩斯》。她大部分是從他在BBC迷你影集《直到世界盡頭》裡的演出而認識他,他在劇裡飾演一個搭船旅行至澳洲的年輕英國貴族。當時他「頗受注意但大概不是你名單裡的第一名」,她最近說道,而且在一封email裡提及康柏拜區現在之所以會如此「腳踏實地是因為他努力了好久才得到成功。」

「他很清楚掙扎的滋味。」她說。

懷特錄用他不完全是為了他的明星特質,更多是為了他的聰明和機智。她解釋道,湯姆.史托帕所寫的劇既綿密又複雜,而且本人時常來到片場,對於將臺詞完全照他寫的說出來這點十分在意。因為蒂金斯這角色並不是你一眼就會喜歡上的人,而懷特也需要一個會讓觀眾愛上他的演員。「這真是個大挑戰,」她說,「但他精力無窮-他就是能一次又一次的重來。他有這種純粹的能力進駐一個角色。」

現在她不管和康柏拜區去到什麼地方,她說,他們都會被團團圍住。「他不是個偶像男明星-他沒有那種臉蛋-但人們喜愛他。每個人都是,包括我女兒、我媽媽,她都九十幾歲了。一夜之間他突然變成了大明星。」

(完)



原文:

Showing the Smarts to Play the Genius Benedict Cumberbatch Acts Clever Again in ‘The Imitation Game’ 

With his wide forehead and high cheekbones, Benedict Cumberbatch has been compared, and not unreasonably (especially if you’ve seen him in “August: Osage County”), both to an otter and to Sid the Sloth from the animated movie “Ice Age.” He also has one of those rumbling, mellifluous British voices that are capable of revving up and whipping out dialogue, perfectly articulated, at breakneck speed. He can talk faster than most people think. Lately, all these gifts — the big brainpan, the quick tongue, the upper-class diction — have allowed him to make a reputation playing characters who are very bright but not quite normal.

Most famously, Mr. Cumberbatch is Sherlock Holmes in the BBC series “Sherlock,” a modern version of the legendary old sleuth, a bored, high-functioning sociopath, clueless about human emotion, who rattles off those famous Holmesian deductions at something like warp speed. He was also Khan, a genetically engineered human, in “Star Trek Into Darkness,” in which his sepulchral voice and careful, rapid enunciation were themselves indication of unnatural villainy.

Seemingly twitching inside his own skin, Mr. Cumberbatch was Julian Assange, the WikiLeaker, in “The Fifth Estate.” (The accent here was Australian, not Brit, and Mr. Cumberbatch more nearly resembled David Bowie than Sid the Sloth.) And now in “The Imitation Game,” he is Alan Turing, the awkward, eccentric British genius who helped break the German Enigma code during World War II but was later persecuted by his own government, because he acknowledged his homosexuality, and forced to undergo chemical castration. His death, in 1954, may have been a suicide. Mr. Cumberbatch’s Turing is not a fast talker — he stammers a little, as if his brain were whirring too fast — but a brilliant, sometimes acerbic one, and this portrayal is so poignant and affecting that it has earned him a Golden Globe best-actor nomination and put him on just about everyone’s Oscar shortlist. “The thing about Benedict is that you can’t really put him in a box,” Morten Tyldum, the director of “The Imitation Game,” said recently. “He has so many layers, just like the character.”

While filming Shakespeare’s “Richard III” for the BBC, Mr. Cumberbatch took a couple of days off in November for the obligatory “Imitation Game” publicity tour — interviews, photo shoots, appearances on the Jon Stewart and Jimmy Fallon shows — and by the end he was visibly tired. At a downtown restaurant one afternoon, his voice occasionally slowed down and sank to an even lower pitch, as if his battery were running out. But Mr. Cumberbatch, in person witty and gracious in a way that most of his brainiacs are not, perked up when talking about Turing, a character he felt especially strongly about, and whose treatment at the hands of the British government still made him grimace. “People are always asking me, what’s the most difficult job you’ve ever done,” he said. “I always say it’s the job I’m doing at the moment. But there are ones that really touch a nerve or connect with you, and with Turing there was such an urgency. That was one of the main reasons to do the part — for people to understand who this man was and what happened to him, and what he achieved and how important he is to us now. It’s an extraordinary role, a great challenge for any actor, but at the same time you couldn’t ask for a nobler enterprise.” Doing publicity for the movie was actually a pleasure, he said. “I don’t in the least mind telling people what a beautiful man he was.”

About being typecast in brainy parts, Mr. Cumberbatch said, “Not such a bad fate if it’s true, but I don’t think it is.” He pointed out that he had been William Pitt in “Amazing Grace” and a plantation owner in “12 Years a Slave.” And, he could have added, a gay secret agent in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” a World War I cavalry officer in “War Horse” and a creepy candy-bar manufacturer in “Atonement.”

A lot of people have compared Turing with Sherlock, Mr. Cumberbatch went on to say — both are brilliant, at deductive reasoning especially, and both are deficient in people skills — but he thinks the deeper connection is between Turing and Christopher Tietjens, the characters he played in “Parade’s End,” the five-part 2012 BBC adaptation of a series of novels by Ford Madox Ford. Tietjens, loosely modeled on Ford himself, is a stuffy Yorkshire aristocrat clinging to Edwardian values on the eve of the Great War. He is said to be the cleverest man in London, but like Turing, he’s awkward and bumbling with people.

“He’s a brilliant man, arrogant in the face of ineptitude and moral indiscretion,” Mr. Cumberbatch said. “He’s living in a very hypocritical era, and he’s a man out of step with his own time. “That’s very true of Turing.” Mr. Cumberbatch also insisted on playing down the social clumsiness of both men. “Characters that really interest us, that reflect a true complexity,” he said and paused. “Maybe I’m talking about myself more than I should, but it seems so simplistic to talk about them just in terms of social ease or social awkwardness. I think it’s because they’re extraordinary — because they breathe a slightly more rarefied air — that they’re remarkable and therefore distinct. But they still seem to me empathetic and relatable and ultimately inspiring.”

Tietjens is described in the novels as a “meal sack with the eyes of a deep sea fish.” To play the part, Mr. Cumberbatch stuffed himself, wore a fat suit and plumpers inside his cheeks. The physical transformation was not entirely convincing, but in every other respect his Tietjens was such a proper, stiff-upper-lipped British gent that you could be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Cumberbatch was born one. (He recently announced his engagement to the director Sophie Hunter the genteel, old-school way, with an announcement in The Times of London.) In fact, Mr. Cumberbatch is the child of actors, Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton (who changed his name because he thought no one would ever hire an actor named Cumberbatch). Now in their late 70s, both are still working and even play their son’s parents on “Sherlock.” But they had another sort of life in mind for Mr. Cumberbatch, and at considerable sacrifice sent him to Harrow, probably the second-poshest (after Eton) of England’s boarding schools. (Turing, who was persecuted at school, would have been miserable there; Tietjens would have loved it — the kind of place where the boys still wear tailcoats on Sunday.) “They were trying to give me an education that would afford me the most extraordinary opportunities a child could want,” Mr. Cumberbatch said, adding that he had tried to take advantage of it. “I did toy with being a barrister for a long while,” he said. “There are similar skill sets in both professions. But then I saw that being a barrister was as precarious a profession as acting.”

In many ways “Sherlock,” which debuted in 2010 and is now by far the most watched series on British television, has been the transforming event of Mr. Cumberbatch’s career. It turned him from a journeyman character actor, mostly known for his stage appearances and made-for-TV movies, into an Internet heartthrob pursued by an enormous posse of female followers who call themselves Cumberbitches. One of them even published
a poem about him in The London Review of Books.

But for a long time, Mr. Cumberbatch flew under the radar a bit. Before hiring him, Steven Spielberg (who directed “War Horse”) had never seen “Sherlock.” Neither had Steve McQueen (“12 Years a Slave”) nor Mr. Tyldum. John Wells, the director of “August: Osage County,” gave Mr. Cumberbatch the part of the needy, vulnerable Little Charles (the polar opposite, as it happens, of all those brainy eccentrics) after Mr. Cumberbatch sent him a selfie audition on his cellphone. “He was just extraordinary,” Mr. Wells said recently, “and I was a little embarrassed I didn’t know who he was.”

When the director Susanna White hired Mr. Cumberbatch for “Parade’s End,” she hadn’t seen “Sherlock” either. She knew him mostly from his work on the BBC mini-series “To the Ends of the Earth,” in which he played a young British aristocrat traveling by ship to Australia. He was “well regarded but probably not at the top of your list,” she said recently, and in an email suggested that the reason Mr. Cumberbatch was now “so down to earth is that it took him awhile to succeed.”

“He knows what it’s like to struggle,” she said.

Ms. White hired him not so much for his star quality as for his intelligence and quick-wittedness. The script, by Tom Stoppard, was dense and complicated, she explained, and Mr. Stoppard, who was on the set a lot, was fussy about having his lines spoken the way he wrote them. Because the character of Tietjens is not immediately likable, Ms. White also needed an actor who could make the audience fall in love with him. “It was a hell of a challenge,” she said. “But he has boundless energy — he just keeps coming and coming. And he has this pure ability to inhabit a character.”

When she goes anywhere now with Mr. Cumberbatch, she said, they’re mobbed. “He’s not a matinee idol — he doesn’t have those looks — but people adore him. Everyone does: My teenage daughter. My mum, who is in her 90s. Suddenly he became huge overnight.”
 





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