The BAFTAs are for life, not just for awards season, and even though Stephen Fry has been wiped clean and folded away for another year, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts is still hard at work promoting those very arts and the Brits who work in them, including a young up-and-comer called Benedict Cumberbatch. If you’ve been on Tumblr recently, you might have heard of him, but he’s an actor as well as an otter lookalike, and he’s capping off an incredible year: “12 Years A Slave,” “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “August: Osage County,” “The Fifth Estate,” “The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug” and a whole new season of “Sherlock.”
Recently BAFTA, having successfully infiltrated the USA, sat down with Cumberbatch, and THR‘s Scott Feinberg walked him through the nitty-gritty of his acting work and experience, from playing Titania at his all-male boarding school (that sound you just heard was millions of fangirls fainting) to working with Meryl Streep in “August: Osage County” this year, whose non-ideological approach to acting Cumberbatch finds comforting. He’s a constantly fluent speaker on these topics and others – social media, the surprising success of “Sherlock” (easy now to forget that this was ever a surprise, but it was), the weirdness of physically acting a dragon, and more. Check it out the 1-hour talk below.