He’s been Paddington, Keats, and now a doctor in This Is Going to Hurt. He talks about his off-stage shyness and why he wasn’t delighted by the reveal of Q’s sexuality in No Time to Die
B en Whishaw, quite apart from being one of the best British actors we have, is an expert dunker of his biscuits in tea. I’ve seen it: he’s a McVitie’s ninja, with a method all his own. We meet one afternoon in the offices of a London film company and I get the chance to observe his distinctive work first-hand, as digestive after digestive gets taken up by Whishaw, then dipped (sometimes double-handed) into a cuppa that he props on a table in front of him. Each biscuit gets submerged for so long, you suppose there’s no chance of it ever coming out whole. Each biscuit later re-emerges, sodden, milliseconds from ruin, still intact.
He has played Hamlet, Sebastian Flyte, Ariel, Paddington, James Bond’s gadget man Q; all manner of bold fictional characters behind which to hide an innate, real-world shyness. In February, Whishaw will appear in the BBC’s adaptation of Adam Kay’s bestselling medical tell-all, This Is Going to Hurt – another cocksure character, another place to hide. “I find it hard meeting people for the first time, ” Whishaw shrugs. “I find it anxiety inducing. I get a shaky, unsettled feeling in my belly. Just warning you now!”
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And it’s true that the actor, with his wiry limbs crossed at sharp angles, the focus of his green eyes often darting away to the middle distance, comes across as socially nervous. Even so, he’s compelling company, and before the end of our conversation he’ll have spoken with careful thought and bracing honesty about sexuality; self-knowledge; LGBTQ+ casting in the film industry; his frustration with the Bond franchise, all sorts. Along the way I start to notice that, actually, there are telling parallels between the way Whishaw approaches a one-on-one interaction such as ours and his perilous technique for dunking biscuits. Whenever the conversation takes a turn, he’ll start out strong. Ideas. Confessions. Then he might lose faith and check himself (“God. I’m waffling … I have no idea
What I’m saying, Tom”). Then, right when all looks lost, the biscuit doesn’t break apart, he regathers his efforts, he comes at some idea anew, and often winds up making a point that is richer and subtler than the one he started with.
I ask whether being good at acting has ever helped him with his social anxiety. Can’t he use his proven performance skills (the playful sprite he played in 2010’s The Tempest, the complicated rogue in 2018’s A Very English Scandal) and fake it?
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I’m fascinated by the masculine and feminine energies we carry within ourselves. But for years I felt I had to deny something
“Yeah, no, ” he chuckles, darkly. “I don’t find acting helps. A nightmare situation for me would be to have to make an impromptu speech at someone’s wedding. Whenever I feel like someone I know might be about to ask me to do it, I say: ‘Nope!’” Whishaw does an immaculate impression of a gruff, irritable old man. “‘Nope! Nope! Nope! Go away!’ ... Even the thought of reading a prepared speech terrifies me.”
He thinks some more. “I dunno, Tom! I’m probably talking rubbish. But sitting here, today, with you, I find the idea of my words being put down in print for ever a frightening thing. Today I could have one set of thoughts. Tomorrow another. The black-and-white of things – it clams me up.”
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T he Bedfordshire village of Langford, where Whishaw grew up with his twin brother James and their parents, could be black-and-white in outlook. “There was definitely a keeping-up-appearances thing going on.” He was a timid young man with many unanswered questions about himself, confused about his sexuality as well as the gender norms he seemed to be expected to conform to. Some refuge was found in drama workshops at a nearby youth theatre. From about 14, he started taking regular train trips to London, mostly to watch plays.
“Total theatre nut. I was about 16, I think, when I saw Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. I remember how much I loved
In London. I could feel there was another life here, another way of living. Answers. Experiences. A different community of people.” His mum Linda, who worked in retail, and his dad Jose, who worked in IT, were not artistically inclined, but they supported their son’s decision when he said he wanted to audition for drama schools in the capital. He left home at 18 when he got into Rada and moved into student digs in the north of the city. Whishaw recalls coming back to Langford for weekend visits, “and I couldn’t wait to leave again. I remember driving back on Sundays with a friend and feeling London encroaching, surrounding me – this incredible feeling of potential and possibility.”
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As a fresh new drama grad in 2003, he raced out on an implausibly blazing start to his acting career. He was in the original cast of His Dark Materials at the National, then almost right away (ludicrous, best-case-scenario stuff) he got to play Hamlet in a production by Trevor Nunn at the Old Vic. Critics immediately ranked him alongside the greats. Nunn and his team let Whishaw share three of the week’s nine performances with an understudy, to lessen the load on such a newbie: he was just 23. In his personal life, Whishaw remained a confused, scared and overwrought young man. It came naturally to him to portray a confused, scared and overwrought Danish prince on the London stage. “I do remember feeling like I knew what I was doing in that one, ” he says.
Screen work came plentifully in those early years, too. At the same time as playing Hamlet, he was filming a supporting role for Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker on the comedy series Nathan Barley. (Whishaw played the much-bullied office receptionist, Pingu.) The German director Tom Tykwer came to see him at the Old Vic and cast him as the lead in his 2006 adaptation of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume. In 2008 he was the rake, Sebastian, in Julian Jarrold’s big-screen Brideshead Revisited. He toured the world to film and promote these films and whenever he returned to his home in London, he remembers, he felt as excited as he’d done as a Langford teenager, riding in on that southbound train.
Even so, despite the stimulation of the city and its massive human and cultural diversity, he had not yet finished reckoning with who he was. “I’m fascinated, now, by the masculine and feminine energies we carry around within ourselves, ” he says. “But for years I felt I had to deny something. Because that ‘something’ was perceived as weak by the world I grew up in. Even when that ‘something’ felt quite good to me.”
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He didn’t feel comfortable coming out as gay to his family and friends until he was about 26 or 27, he says. “I remember sexuality weighing on me [before then]. That was really unresolved for me.” In 2008, while starring as John Keats in Jane Campion’s biopic Bright Star, Whishaw began a relationship with the film’s Australian composer, Mark Bradshaw. They married in a civil ceremony in 2012, though it took another year before Whishaw made any sort of public statement confirming this (and then in a terse few sentences that were issued through a publicist). He has never liked to talk about Bradshaw in interviews. Today, when I ask what he’s learned about himself during a decade of marriage, he stares at the ground for five, six, seven seconds before answering: “Um. Lots of things.”
Another five, six, seven seconds. “I suppose I don’t feel like I’ve got to a sort of plateau of serenity, or any sort of marvellous equanimity, about everything. I don’t feel I’ve got
Yet.” He ponders some more, then says: “I wonder if having children does something towards that? I think it does. I see it in my brother James. I see that if you have to think about something other than yourself, that’s extremely powerful and it changes a person. I don’t have that experience.” He laughs. “I’m still very self-absorbed. And that’s OK, I suppose.”
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What social life he has beyond acting, he keeps pretty private, too. No Twitter, no Instagram. Today, over a T-shirt that in its bright blue swirls gestures to one of David Hockney’s swimming pools, Whishaw wears a gold necklace inlaid with dark stones, made by a friend of his, a jewellery designer. When I ask what sort of people he likes to surround himself with, as friends, he says: “Direct people. I dig direct people. It’s really exhilarating to me when people don’t pussyfoot around or hide who they are through timidity or politeness.”
I ask Whishaw about his coming out – whether he always knew who he was on the inside and felt too timid or intimidated to present himself in a
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