In a new interview for pARTicipate’s Bruce Dennill, Benedict talks about producing the film, his role as Lt Col Stuart Couch and more. Read the full interview below:

Benedict Cumberbatch has acted alongside many Hollywood greats, but the English actor was “geeking out” when it came to working with Jodie Foster in The Mauritanian. Benedict did not plan on starring in the film. He thought he would stay behind the camera as a producer. The script, however, developed over time and the role and moral dilemmas faced by US military prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch in the Guantanamo Bay-set film expanded and intrigued Cumberbatch. In this interview he discusses [the film’s protagonist] Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s horrifying story, working with Foster, battling illness on the South African set and having to wear a skull cap after the late decision to play Lt Col Couch.

To promote The Mauritanian, which is getting released on Amazon Prime in the UK this week, Benedict Cumberbatch did a new interview for The Independent in which he opened up about thinking he had COVID-19 while filming the movie, his views on the Guantánamo prison and his career as a producer.

Benedict Cumberbatch: ‘Joe Biden? I’m going to plead with the guy to shut Guantanamo’

The actor talks to James Mottram about his Bafta-nominated film about an inmate of the infamous US detention camp; working with Jodie Foster and The Serpent’s Tahar Rahim; and why he worries he may have been Covid’s ‘patient zero’.

At the beginning of last year, when news began to emerge of a mysterious, deadly new virus that was spreading across the globe, Benedict Cumberbatch was struck by a horrible thought. At the end of 2019, he had flown to South Africa to shoot new film The Mauritanian, but as he arrived, he tells me, he fell sick. “I was incredibly ill, to the point that when all this Covid stuff suddenly broke in the new year, I was thinking, oh my god was I actually patient zero. I was so ill – it was borderline pneumonia.”

He had to plough on regardless, “throwing up between takes”, as shooting commenced. The film was being produced by the independent film and TV company he jointly owns, SunnyMarch. They had recreated Guantanamo Bay in Cape Town, and they were working on a story that had possessed Cumberbatch for six years.

In an interview to USA Today, he also spoke about meeting the real Lt. Colonel Stewart Couch and getting his accent right. Read more below:

A pivotal scene in “The Mauritanian” places the drama’s two biggest stars – Benedict Cumberbatch and Jodie Foster – head to head as opposing lawyers meeting unofficially. It’s a legal version of Al Pacino’s cop meeting Robert De Niro’s robber in “Heat,” set in the surreal location of a gift shop near Cuba’s notorious Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

It was Foster’s first scene and first day on the set in Cape Town, South Africa, which effectively stood in for the incongruent Caribbean paradise that surrounds Gitmo. But it was Cumberbatch who struggled as cameras rolled.

“I was getting sick in between takes,” Cumberbatch remembers, calling from a car somewhere outside of London. The 44-year-old “Doctor Strange” star thinks he was in the final stages of a terrible flu he picked up on the flight to South Africa. Or something. “I was really ill, I think it was just a really severe flu. But it was really nasty. I hadn’t been that ill for quite a long time. Like maybe once in my life. Horrible.”

In the pre-COVID era, Cumberbatch was intent on battling forth. “The Mauritanian” (in theaters Friday, on demand March 2) represented a five-year quest to bring Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s remarkable story to the screen.