Although Benedict Cumberbatch's portrayal of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate garnered widespread acclaim, the actor had a harder time impressing one critic in particular: Assange himself.
"I tried to justify my reasons for doing the project," Cumberbatch, 37, told press at a Toronto International Film Festival roundtable earlier this month. "It mattered to me a lot that he felt so passionately, but I wanted to persuade him that it wasn't necessarily going to be as bad as he feared it would be."
Cumberbatch said an older draft of The Fifth Estate script had leaked to the 42-year-old Assange, who described it as "a mass propaganda attack against WikiLeaks, the organization and the character of my staff." (The film is partly based on the tell-all book, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website by former spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg, with whom Assange famously clashed.)
Director Bill Condon, 57, rejected Assange's assessment outright.
"It's in no way an attack on WikiLeaks," he told Mashable in an interview at TIFF. "It's a celebration of WikiLeaks and what it set out to do. It is occasionally critical of Assange, and one of his tactics is to kind of conflate the two ideas so that anything that might be critical of him becomes, as he says, 'a propaganda attack.'"
Still, WikiLeaks isn't backing down. The website recently posted what it is calling a "mature version" of The Fifth Estate script, along with a memo that condemns the film as "irresponsible, counterproductive and harmful."
Assange, who founded WikiLeaks, also criticized Cumberbatch's portrayal, specifically calling out the British actor's Australian accent.
"We're all used to foreign actors trying to do Australian accents, and it's so grating on the ear," he said in a video interview. "When you hear someone trying to do — a Brit trying to do an Australian accent and your own accent, I can't tell you how grating it is."
For his part, Cumberbatch reportedly had issues with Condon's direction for The Fifth Estate.
"On a lot of the stage direction, we collided paths because Bill did seem to be setting him up as this antisocial megalomanic," he told Vogue for its September issue.
Cumberbatch's co-star Daniel Brühl, who plays Domscheit-Berg, conversely had a much easier time interacting with his real-life counterpart. Domscheit-Berg invited Brühl, 35, to his house several times to discuss his relationship with Assange.
"He seemed to be very open and unrestrained, and I could tell how important that moment in his life was, and how he still suffers from the fact that this intense friendship relationship just collapsed and ended up in a disaster," Brühl told Mashable. "I realized this was maybe or probably a significant moment in his life, and he was willing to do anything — leave his job, whatever — to support WikiLeaks."
Brühl added that a flaw in Domscheit-Berg's behavior was "wanting to be bigger than he is."
Both actors described their characters as "complex," saying they strived to portray them accordingly.
"It was important to me to portray him as a three-dimensional human being, and not get into a slagging match about whether he was good or bad," Cumberbatch said. "The kind of perception of him in a tabloid sense is very two-dimensional."
While the actor declined to characterize Assange in a simplistic, clear-cut way, one thing he was unambiguous about was his involvement in the upcoming Star Wars film — Episode VII — which will be directed by J.J. Abrams.
"No offer — it's all rumor, it's all gossip. No one's being offered other than the people we know are being offered," Cumberbatch said. "Would I like to do it? I've said many times of course I would, but J.J.'s worked with me before. He knows where I live, so it's all up to him."
Image: Jason Merritt/Staff/Getty Images
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