Benedict Cumberbatch Didn't Clean Himself For Several Months _ The Graham Norton Show

And Jane Campion, she allowed you to kind of stay in character, but more than that, she encouraged you to kind of live your life in the way that he might have lived. Very, very much, Sian. I mean, I sort of went off to do... Basically, she was very, very secure about all the things I was insecure about, but she said, look, whatever you need to sort of feel that you have ownership of this very different lived experience to your own, let us know. And I went, um, okay. The banjo, horse riding, whittling, whistling, Ironman, we taxed on him. And this man is masterful. He's a brilliant craftsman with his hands. He lives in this very brutal, masculine world, but he has great sensitivity and craftsmanship about him, which is a kind of clue to the inner turmoil of his true self as well. But to feel that and experience that, I went off to Montana for a couple of months to learn about what it's like to live on a ranch and perform all the things you see in the film. Was it at the ranch you didn't wash or was it on the set? No, it was in the first couple of weeks of rehearsal in New Zealand. And you know, this character wears his work on him with great pride, the mud, the grime, the sweat and the blood. And he doesn't wash reportedly in the book for sort of three or four months at a time. Wow. Yeah. I mean, he does spend most of his time outdoors, so maybe the wind is sort of carrying it away. But when you haven't experienced that in the 21st century, where we're all quite clean, and this is by the way, just before a pandemic broke out, we were told to wash our hands for the sake of singing Happy Birthday twice. It's a very odd character to be playing, someone who just refuses to wash. And yet, you know, that was a very important part of trying to authenticate who this person was and just feel that on my skin. And then Jane really pulled the rug under me by saying, oh, let's go out for sushi. And I was like, no, come on, in a rehearsal room, it's fine. But now you want me to go out into the world with this biohazard of a funk around me, just like speaking of something very odd. There are people out there in the world who really want to know what I smell like. And I'm just also a little bit self-conscious about that. Daisy, this is, yeah, Daisy's going to experience this. You'll get this. That's why the lockdown was a good thing. But yeah, I was out there sort of having sushi and feeling very, very self-conscious. When the waiter just like... You served. Served, exactly.