The actor has been on a tour to promote his new documentary, How to Live on Earth. “The irony is not lost on anyone,” he says. “We’re living in the results of climate breakdown so stepping outside is – literally – a call to action.”
What action?
His film launches on YouTube this month and the actor hopes it is a “blueprint” for how we interact with our besieged planet in the future. It features Cumberbatch delivering monologues from the cavernous halls of the Natural History Museum in London, in between short films showing how activists, scientists and even chefs are learning a “new way to live on Earth” – one that could stop humanity damaging it.
Chefs?
Cumberbatch has spent the last two decades trying to reframe his relationship with the planet: he’s tried to live more gently on Earth and became vegan. However, this was a problem during the shooting of The Courier, in which he plays captured British spy Greville Wynne, who languishes in a Russian jail. “They said, ‘You can’t have any fibre in the last two weeks. You need to eat lean meat.’ And I was like, ‘I’m vegan!’”
Once again, I’m reminded of Sir Laurence Olivier’s advice to Dustin Hoffman on the set of ‘The Marathon Man’
No fibre for two weeks must have been tough on the bowels? “Yes, it was, but it was much less than what the character I was portraying went through, because it was a true story.” Although he went straight back on the vegetables, the extreme diet caused his blood sugar to plummet and he became unwell. “People were saying, ‘You should think about eating a little bit of meat now, because your body doesn’t really work under these conditions – you’ve lost so much weight.’”
One must suffer for one’s art, mustn’t one?
Now, Cumberbatch tries to source the meat he does eat ethically, opting for venison, which in the UK needs to be culled as the country has an overpopulation of deer.
So, he’s ditched veganism, but would he get a private jet? “No,” he says, but adds the caveat: “We just waste our energy if we’re naysaying and calling people hypocrites. The fashion industry is a bigger polluter than aviation, and the food industry massively. That’s all of us, that’s everyone.” Not just movie stars.
Well, after you!
The 50-year-old has long been an environmental campaigner. He visited the Extinction Rebellion protests in 2019 and has been dismayed by the recent government crackdowns on climate protests, with long sentences given to people who have blocked roads and smashed windows for the cause. “We should have the right in a democracy to peaceful action, even if it is direct action,” he says.
Do you need a dictionary? Smashing windows and attacking police isn’t ‘peaceful’ and we don’t have ‘a right’ to it!
Cumberbatch and company discuss some blue-sky thinking in the documentary, which to the jaded viewer could seem unrealistic.
Translation: to any normal human, not a dweller in the rarified atmosphere of the luvvies, will seem like unrealistic bollocks!
“Nature that’s alive is actually far more valuable to us than dead nature,” Cumberbatch says. “So an elephant’s tusk is not worth as much as the elephant alive, in terms of what it brings to the savannah, to make the savannah work as an ecosystem.
Imagine what it’s worth to a trophy hunter, who will pay through the nose for the chance to shoot it, which will have to be done anyway when numbers get too high, because too many elephants destroy an ecosystem very efficiently.
