It was a Wimbledon week when millions of television viewers clung to the edge of their seats after each day’s play to watch the drama of a young British star struggling to stave off defeat. The player was Ben Whishaw, the lead actor in the BBC’s five-night series Criminal Justice.
The series, built around Whishaw’s haunting performance as a suspected murderer caught in the coils of the criminal justice system, attracted audiences of 5m and critical acclaim: “Spellbinding” (The Times), “I don’t know if I can bear the strain” (The Guardian), “Gripping” (The Independent).
Despite compelling supporting turns by the likes of Bill Paterson, Pete Postlethwaite and Lindsay Duncan, it was Whishaw’s aching vulnerability that held the eye as a near-perfect stormof incriminating evidence blew him helplessly towards a courtroom verdict last Friday.
Rakishly thin, his blue eyes flickering with hurt and bewilderment, the 27-year-old actor played a 21-year-old charged with the murder of a girl he impulsively picked up in his father’s cab. After having sex with her, he awakes to a murder scene and begins his descent into a legal hell of coppers, lawyers and fellow prisoners. Truth, the drama suggested, is not the object of our adversarial system.
Gawky and disarmingly shy, Whishaw seemed an unlikely candidate to achieve overnight stardom in 2004 when his sensational Hamlet at the Old Vic was hailed by critics as a performance that earned him a place among the immortals. Depicting the Danish prince as an angst-ridden figure, stricken with clinical depression, Whishaw electrified Trevor Nunn’s production. One reviewer declared that Whishaw, “with his light, tremulous voice, painfully thin body and the kind of cheekbones that will have adolescent girls swooning in the stalls, presents the most raw and vulnerable Hamlet I have ever seen”.
His name was ranked with those of John Gielgud and Peter O’Toole, who became stars at 26 on the strength of their Hamlets, and Kenneth Branagh, who made his mark in the role at 28. Yet Whishaw, one year out of drama school, was only 23. Until then the most notable thing about him was that he liked to breed cats.
It was a remarkable ascent from a Bedfordshire village to the role regarded as theatre’s Mount Everest. Nunn, who revealed that all the women in the production were “deeply concerned” about Whishaw’s wraithlike stature, predicted he would go on to scale other heights.
Inundated with offers, he has become one of Britain’s busiest thesps, specialising in doomed and feral youths. Along the way he learnt to resist the siren voices of Hollywood: “I’ve been out to Los Angeles a couple of times. I feel completely terrified, totally flummoxed, like I don’t understand what the hell is going on. I’ve no desire at all to go back there.”
By his own admission he inhabits each role somewhat obsessively: “I find it totally consumes me. I get twitchy when I’m not doing it. When you have a character to work with, you carry them around in a strange way – they make you look at the world in a different way.”
It was the same when he played one of seven Bob Dylans in Todd Haynes’s 2007 biopic I’m Not There. “I do think Dylan’s incredible,” he said. “I sort of fell in love with him. I became obsessed.” He was also cast as Keith Richards in Stoned, the 2005 film about the ill-fated Rolling Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones, but hardly had to lift a picking finger.
He promises to spring a surprise this autumn in the eagerly anticipated film remake of Brideshead Revisited, playing Sebastian Flyte, the role distinguished by Anthony Andrews (with teddy bear) in the 1981 television series. “Our version will probably upset a lot of people,” Whishaw predicted.
The part had been coveted by the actor Matthew Goode, who settled for the role of Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons in the original) after conceding: “I wasn’t pretty enough. They gave it to Ben because when the camera settles on him you just gasp at his beauty.” (He added: “I mean, I have a girlfriend and all, but still . . .”) No foppish Hugh Grant, Whishaw is the product of a comprehensive school and at first sight his casting as the embodiment of aristocratic privilege in Brideshead seems perverse. However, in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Sebastian is a petulant, wayward alcoholic – perfect material for a Whishaw makeover.
Born on October 14, 1980, Whishaw grew up in the Bedfordshire village of Langford with his twin brother James, to whom he was quite dissimilar. His father Josie Whishaw played football for Stevenage before settling on a career in IT while his mother sold cosmetics in John Lewis. His parents were “not into the arts in any way”, he said. “I really have no idea where it comes from.”
From the time he was little he put on plays and acted out stories. As a precocious teenage actor he joined a youth drama group in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, and by the age of 16 had played Hamlet twice. The following year he was studying for his A-levels when he was spotted and cast by the novelist William Boyd, making his directorial debut with The Trench. His co-star was Daniel Craig, the current James Bond.
Then he landed a leading role in the film My Brother Tom, giving a performance as an abused teenager that won him a “most promising newcomer” award. From the moment he decided to pursue an acting career, however, the telephone stopped ringing: “I didn’t get an audition and I didn’t get a job.” As a fallback he started an art course before deciding to persevere with acting. He entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, helping to fund the £3,000 course with his own savings.
It was at this time that he added “cat breeding” to his CV: “When I was at drama school I was living with a friend and we took in two stray cats – a mother and her kitten. We weren’t consciously breeding cats, but they did breed. At one point we were looking after 11 cats in our two-bedroom flat.”
With praise ringing in his ears for his performances of Konstantin in Chekhov’s The Seagull and Stanley in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, he graduated in 2003. Then a funny thing happened. The American actor Kevin Spacey, who was working on Beyond the Sea, his film about the singer Bobby Darin, asked to meet new performers out of drama school. Impressed by Whishaw’s description of what acting meant to him, he told his casting director: “Look, I know you’re not here to cast for the Old Vic, but I have to say that if I were to have a company at the Old Vic, this is the kind of actor that I’d want.”
Spacey had not yet been installed as the Old Vic’s artistic director and Whishaw went to the Hamlet audition there with humble expectations. He knew the casting director and wangled a meeting with Nunn. Having played the Dane twice before he was able to trot out Hamlet’s first soliloquy with ease. “So I did that and then he said, ‘Do it again as though you’re five years old’. So I did.”
Whishaw consolidated that triumph two years later in Perfume, the film of Patrick Süskind’s cult 1985 novel, playing an 18th-century Parisian psychopath with a highly developed sense of smell who murders young girls to steal their scent. Enigmatic and brooding, Whishaw gives a remarkable portrayal of a killer led by his own nose.
He learnt a lot from co-star Dustin Hoffman, cast as a washed-up Italian perfumier. On the first day of filming, Whishaw went straight into a scene where he had to knock on a door. “When the door opened I was completely dazzled. All I could think was: I can’t believe I’m standing in front of Dustin Hoffman.”
Fearful of his responsibilities, Whishaw suffered stomach pangs at each cry of “Action!” until the American actor cured him with some advice. “There’s no one out there to watch you,” Hoffman said. “The film is dead, you don’t have to worry. You can f*** it up or be dreadful, because the rubbish shot won’t be in the film.”
Television filming disabused Whishaw of the notion that actors were all “oddballs” like himself. The realisation that acting was just “a business”, he confessed, shattered his illusions.
Interviewers often wonder who Whishaw really is – the edgy character before them with spidery fingers and jerky movements or the calm figure who walks away. It’s gratifying to learn that he puzzles how much of himself goes into his acting: “I vacillate between different points of view, but I tend to think that it’s always you and the characters you play are only bits of you. Or who else are they?”
Truth, the drama suggested,is not the object of our adversarial system.
When has it ever been?Our system claims to give all plaintiffs the best chance.It actually gives only the lawyers the best chance - of earning stupendous fees. Plaitiffs are incidental, bit players in the money-making machine
eric campbell, harrogate , uk
Have just watched the five hours of this drama on bbci. I thought it was really gripping , and seeing it in one go , so to speak, it was even better.
Young Ben was excellent, as were all the other actors.
Thankyou for such good drama.
Mrs. A. Maidens, Humberston Grimsby, England
I will look forwards to seeing this guy act into my old age, it will be a bloody pleasure.
Jen Smith, Marlow, UK
When was the last time a BBC Drama stirred up nation's passions? What better actor to play Ben Coulter in Criminal Justice? I cried my eyes out and hands up anyone else?
Any judges, barristers, lawyers, prison officers grabbing a tissue or just grabbing their pay-cheque?
Robin, London, England