Benedict Cumberbatch by Justin Lewis

Author:Justin Lewis [Justin Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781784180331
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2014-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

One of the most talked-about cast additions for Sherlock’s second series was Lara Pulver, previously Section Chief Erin Watts in Spooks. She played Holmes’ love interest, Irene Adler. ‘Irene and Sherlock just get each other to the core,’ said Laura Pulver. ‘They are so similar and so different on so many different levels. What was great was just pushing each other’s buttons and seeing what exploded.’

Irene is a dominatrix with the very same capability as Holmes of making ingenious analytical leaps and participating in mind games. ‘She doesn’t suffer fools gladly,’ Cumberbatch told the Guardian. ‘He [Holmes] has a blind spot which is female emotional intuition. He’s very good at guessing the kind of everyday circumstances in the sexes, the normal nuances of courtship. What she has is much more complicated than that.’

So this would be no conventional love story, but two complex people who have a similar worldview. Or as Martin Freeman pithily put it, ‘Holmes happens to be falling in love with someone who is as insane as he is!’

One scene between Sherlock and Irene in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’ would be much-discussed: he underwent a whipping from her. ‘It was really painful, Lara went for it,’ Cumberbatch told the Sun. ‘I don’t know how people get pleasure out of that kind of thing, I genuinely don’t.’ For her part, Pulver quipped that she was only doing what he asked her to do. ‘Benedict said, “It’s all right, Lara, you can hit me harder. I was like, “Oh can I now, Benedict Cumberbatch?”’

The whipping scenes were not the most controversial in the episode, however. For her opening scene as Irene, barely two minutes long, Pulver was naked. ‘When I read that script, I didn’t even flinch,’ she said later. ‘It was just a moment in the storytelling. For it to have become such a focus of that episode kind of shocks me. It is naive to think it wouldn’t be mentioned, and yet it still shocks me.’

‘A Scandal in Belgravia’, which opened the second series of Sherlock, was broadcast at 8.10pm on New Year’s Day 2011. British television operated a policy that nine o’clock marked a watershed in terms of content. Anything before then purported to be ‘family viewing’; anything after that time was skewed towards a more adult audience. Around 100 viewers (out of nearly 10 million) contacted the BBC to complain about the first Pulver scene. ‘That was ludicrous,’ she commented. ‘You saw more of Benedict when his sheet fell down than you did of me.’ ‘It’s not supposed to be a source of stimulation for the audience,’ argued Cumberbatch, who pointed out the counter-support for the scene.

Ultimately, it was all great publicity for the series, and as the BBC observed, pre-watershed should not mean anodyne. ‘We had lots of conversations about it,’ said drama head Ben Stephenson, ‘and I think we were right in thinking it’s a bit of a cheeky show.’ In fact, ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’ proved to be the most popular single programme in the history of the BBC’s online catch-up service, the iPlayer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.