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sunnysam-my · 8 months ago

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Is Benedict Cumberbatch actually ableist/anti-autism?

Every now and then I hear people mentioning it. When I learned for the first time about what he said and done I was shocked. He may not be my favourite famous person or actor, but he's a well respected man who played many roles I'm fond of. I was deeply upset about this, but one question was lingering in my mind. What about the context? Did he actually said that? Did he still hold those negative opinions or was it just the times. On top of that, how much does non-actors understand what's like to be an actor. Oh, and let's not forget that all of those accusations came from written articles and interviews with him which create catchy biased headlines and commentary.

I happened to be an autistic and a disabled actor myself, so I dig deeper and here it is. Allow me to be the devil's advocate.

First I remind you all that in 2013 the terms like "low functioning" or other subtypes of autism were changed, so it's no suprise that the outdated terms were still being used.

Starting off in 2011 when Cumberbatch played Frankenstein's 'Creature' and Frankenstein. I've seen some people confused whether he played Victor Frankenstein, the mad scientist, or the 'Creature', Frankenstein's creation who wasn't even given a name. He played both, exchanging it with the other actor, Jonny Lee Miller. This isn't as uncommon as people think, although it's not popular either.

Benedict mentioned that the he went with Jonny to see how autistic people act. He also did his own research into stroke survivors as well in general people who had to re-learn how to use their bodies. That's because that's the research they needed to accurately portray a character freshly born in a body of adult and immediately abounded by his creator, who is trying to learn how he and people work.

The part of this video that's important to this conversation is from 00:00 to 01:20.

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I recommend also watching this video for a better inside of the character if you don't know the book. This is important because the Creature being autistic coded is not a bad a thing. He is not a monster. You missed the whole point of the play and book.

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The Creature is a child in a adult body. The tragedy of "Frankenstein" is that all he wants is to be loved and cared for, but because of his deformations, scary physical appearance and mental disability everyone fears him and threats him as an 'it', a scary dangerous monster. IF YOU THINK THE CREATURE IS A MONSTER YOU ARE BEING ABLEIST.

Clips of The Creature being born are shown while the actors look mildly embarrassed watching themselves on screen. Madeline: I wanted to talk about the immense physicality of this show – you are both learning to walk as adults and it really comes through in those clips and how did you go about doing that? Jonny: We worked with a movement coach Toby Sedgwick, the incredible Toby Sedgwick. We started work the 3 of us (Danny, Benedict and Jonny) and also with Toby and Nick before the rest of the company joined us and it was sort of like a going back to school process really for me and Benedict. We worked on movement in various ways. Movement techniques of using different materials and different substances and it was quite embarrassing and quite a great way to get to know each other and to sort of drop everything immediately… Benedict: Like our clothes! Straight away. Jonny: Two guys pretending to be oil and glass who don’t really know each other very well at all. There’s a lot of water in there as well. Benedict: We talked a lot about about what we were doing as far as the world that influenced Danny and Nick in terms of wanting to do this project. We went to two extraordinary schools for autistic children and there is an element of the movement that reflects that but also as Jonny was saying it’s an evolution of a man who is fully formed so it’s an evolution with a fully grown body, it’s as if a man is born again as an elephant. Sort of backwards. It’s about not knowing anything about what they’ve got but being capable of doing much more than a child so it was about how to stagger that progression and having certain barriers to being fully evolved with certain autistic movements. Madeline: You do see the development of the Creature as he moves on and gets older and learns. […]

Unfortunately the link to the website this transcript was on no longer works, it was taken over, however you can view it using the Wayback Machine.

So, no, in this situation he absolutely was not ableist. That was just actors doing their job, making no offensive comments. And again The Creature is not a monster! He's practically mentally disabled with a development disorder if you tried to diagnose him like a real person. The entire history is about him fighting for his right to be alive and happy despite of how weirdly he looks or behaves.

Two other similar takes on this (Twiter/X) (Carrd)

In the 2014 interview for the Irish Times about his role in "The Imitation Game" as Alan Turing and other achievements he commented further about the role in Frankenstein.

For his award-winning turn in Danny Boyle's Frankenstein, he studied autism so that he might grasp how a fully formed man, with no infancy or childhood to reference, might behave.

“I went to schools and met people, some of whom are very high functioning on the autistic spectrum. I met a 17-year-old who had the mental age of a one and a half year old. Everything was just about bodily functions. Smell. Sexual arousal. Shitting. Whatever. So when I hear people use diagnostic labels casually – Sherlock is autistic, Turing is autistic – it really upsets me.”

He pauses for a nanosecond, then continues to talk: “And it upsets me those 17-year-olds were coming to the end of their care. Because after that they’re supposed to head into employment and earn revenue for their government. Ha. Because from early on you’re empiricised in that Orwellian sense.”

He smiles: “Sorry. I’m getting political.”

A lot of people leave out the last part, which is incredible frustrating considering he talks about a very real problem disabled people experience. As soon as we turn 18 we are suddenly supposed to figure everything out on our own and be useful to society or we'll be thrown out. It's ironic how people who accused him of being ableist here got this negative part so spread out, but not the really important part. The part where he cares for that 17-year-old who society would rather ignore, because they just didn't fit that perfect picture. The part he brings attention to an awful thing that happens every day.

The same year he said, as written in Metro:

Many are drawing parallels between Turing and Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, suggesting he’s specializing in characters who exist somewhere on the autism spectrum. But Cumberbatch wants them to cut out that nonsense. “Though Sherlock is an immediate comparison, they’re so different. Sherlock is a sociopathic show-off, and Alan was anything but that,” Cumberbatch tells Metro. “I don’t think he was on the spectrum. I think a lot of people are very lazy with that.” It’s a suggestion Cumberbatch has heard raised again and again, and he’s frankly had enough of it. “I think it’s a really dangerous thing to toy with that,” he says. “People talk about me doing that quite a lot and that being a good thing for people who are on the spectrum, which is great. But I don’t go into a job going, ‘Is this autism? Is this Asperger’s? Is this some other form of slight learning difficulty or disability?’ I’m very wary of that, because I’ve met people with those conditions. It’s a real struggle all the time. Then these people pop up in my work and they’re sort of brilliant, and they on some levels almost offer false hope for the people who are going through the reality of it.”

What Cumberbatch is actually saying in both of those is that he is sick of people seeing a genius played by him and immediately stereotype him as autistic, ignoring the fact that it's a very broad disability. Because that's what autism is, a disability. Fun fact, you can have autistic or ADHD traits/symptoms, but you won't get diagnosed if they aren't disabling you on daily basis. The lowest level of autism is "requiring support". There is nothing wrong with admitting your autism is making you disabled. There's nothing wrong with being disabled.

He isn't trying to play a autistic character, he just plays what he thinks is right. People see the geniuses he plays and immediately go "😮🫵 Autistic!" and compare them despite how different they are.

However, the way he says it stinks of that "You can't headcanon everyone autistic, that's a serious condition!" mindset that's oh so present in neurotypicals. I can only assume that what he was trying to say is that it's not good to portray disabilities as superpower, without mentioning the struggles they come with, but even if that was the intention it was poorly phrased. It did come out as disrespectful and in my personal opinion we can be truly mad at that, because we're not something to pity or describe so… oddly?, like that comment about the 17 year old.

I disagree with Turing not being autistic irl, more specifically with thinking people's reasons to say that are lazy, unless he was talking about Sherlock or the movie version of Turing there, in which case, eh 50/50. For example, here's a great article about exactly that, it compares the real life Alan and the movie version and if it is even good to 'diagnose' historical figures. However the movie version makes him more socially awkward, so this could be just being upset as people took another fictonal white, awkward genius and slapped "autistic" on that. It's funny how when characters like this are canonically autistic then it's a stereotype, but when it's a headcanons then suddenly it's okay and you shouldn't disagree with it. Sheldon from Big Bang theory is a great example of that.

To quote another article about how Turing in the move was changed:

The Imitation Game isn’t a plea for greater tolerance of homosexuals, but of people on the autistic spectrum. Its cause is neurodiversity, not sexual diversity. That’s why Turing is portrayed as someone who struggles with ordinary human interaction. He’s literal-minded to a fault and is incapable of understanding jokes. He’s nothing like the real Alan Turing, who was warm, charming and funny; instead, he’s exactly like the main character in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. To make a point, the filmmakers have invented a largely fictional character — a mathematical genius with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s as if they decided that presenting Turing as a victim of the persecution of homosexuals is old hat. So instead, he’s portrayed as a martyr to another, more fashionable cause. His crime isn’t being gay, but failing to be neurotypical.

Now, I’m all for giving more respect to people on the autistic spectrum — my half-brother Christopher is on the autistic spectrum — but not because they’re ‘special’. The Imitation Game commits a similar error to Rain Man, which seems to argue that Dustin Hoffman’s character should be valued and cherished not because he’s a human being with the same needs as the rest of us but because he’s exceptional with numbers. It’s patronising nonsense, and as an argument for neuro-diversity doesn’t bear scrutiny. It won’t surprise you to learn that Christopher isn’t any good at maths.

You can say that I'm being too biased towards the Benedict here, but I think it's only right to give the man a benefit of a doubt, especially how people jumped him after Frankenstein, and say "Hey, was that a horribly phrased thought? Hell yeah, but the meaning could not be so simple as people think." You're assuming the worse here, and I do understand why, considering how we're usually treated, but maybe let's try to assume positively too. At least let's try to be neutral.

I'm not going to dictate if he's ableist or not, that's up to you to decide how you feel, I just hope you can make an educated opinion and that this helped clear anyone's mind, because it did for me.

Oh, and also, this doesn't mean he's a good person now, because he's been a dick to so many people and had horrible opinions on so many topics. This is purely about the ableist accusations.

#ableism #benedict cumberbatch #anti Benedict Cumberbatch #frankensteins monster #mary shelly's frankenstein #Youtube #frankenstein the modern prometheus #the creature #Frankenstein #cancel culture #autism spectrum disorder #autism #bbc sherlock #sherlock holmes #ableist #alan turing #the imitation game

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