By 
Ben Whishaw is in the market for a new way to unwind. When the pandemic took hold in early 2020, he returned from filming in Chicago to London, where he lives with his partner Mark Bradshaw, a composer for film and TV, and, as a distraction from the news, pursued an interest in developing photos. He wasn’t very good at it, but there was something appealing about the way it demanded his total attention. “I’m thinking, maybe I should go climbing?” he says tentatively on a Zoom call from Paris, where he is shooting Passages, the new film from American indie director, Ira Sachs. “Very good for the body. It uses all of you,” says Whishaw. “In fact, I’m going to find a climbing wall and go immediately.”
Climbing is ripe with metaphors for Whishaw’s approach to acting, a career that he treats as a series of challenging moves, coupled with a determination not to look back-wards. When we speak in December, he still hasn’t seen No Time to Die, the third film in which he plays Q to Daniel Craig’s 007.
“I hate watching myself,” Whishaw says. “I’m always so disappointed. I know you just have to get over it and I’m not the only person in the world, but that’s how it feels to me. I do think if you were really satisfied, if you watch some-thing like, ‘Fuck, I’m so good in that,’ then that would be pretty weird.”
Even at 41, there is a teenage restlessness about Whishaw, dressed in a black hoodie and hiding behind contorted arms when reaching for the right words. He has kind eyes but a serious face, though the seriousness is often dispelled by bouts of laughter. He has spent the morning working on a Russian accent and at one point stops to apologise as he can hear the Slavic intonation he’s been practising invading his head. In real life, the actor, whose credentials include studying at Rada and, to great acclaim and aged just 23, playing Hamlet at The Old Vic, rarely strays far from softly spoken RP.
Whishaw is best known for his roles as national treasures, such as James Bond’s bespectacled quartermaster, or voicing marmalade-sandwich connoisseur Paddington Bear in the two recent films. For his next project, he takes on the most beloved British institution of all: the NHS. He plays former doctor Adam Kay in the BBC’s adaptation of his bestselling memoir This is Going to Hurt, a darkly comic look at the pressure on NHS workers, which had a huge impact — and dizzying sales — when published in 2017.
Such were the restrictions of filming under Covid guidelines, Whishaw only met Kay once. Given the personal nature of the story, he wonders if that was for the best. Altered slightly from Kay’s book, the series finds our protagonist haunted by a potentially fatal mistake he makes while exhausted and overworked. The TV adaptation reverses the events of the book, so that the trauma that comes at the very end of the memoir instead opens the TV series, meaning it haunts him in hallucinations. What the screen version retains is the gallows humour that many doctors rely on — such as affectionately referring to obstetrics and gynaecology as “brats and twats”— in order to get through their shift.
The story takes on renewed significance after the pandemic. It made Whishaw see the staff of the NHS not as distant heroes, but ordinary people. “We go into hospitals like children and give ourselves over to [doctors] as though they’re something bigger than human, and how could they be? These people are capable of making mistakes, of having bad days. The hours are completely impossible, the stress is some-thing I can’t even conceive of — and all while dealing with situations that are life and death.”
Whishaw, who grew up as a non-identical twin in rural Bedfordshire, would not have made it as a medic. He was “terrible at science and maths, absolutely appalling”. Instead, he is a supremely gifted actor, for whom inhabiting the tortured has become something of a calling card: his CV includes Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited in 2008, and a forlorn John Keats in Jane Campion’s Bright Star the following year. It was on that film that he met Bradshaw, who wrote the score. More recently, there was disgraced Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe’s troubled lover Norman Scott in A Very English Scandal, also on the BBC, for which he won an Emmy, and an airport security officer on the verge of a breakdown in thriller Surge.
“I don’t actively seek out those things,” he says. “I’d love to do something where... well,” he pauses, head in hands. “Actually no, I wouldn't. I’m interested in the things that are difficult about life and I think it’s important to be disturbed by things sometimes.
“We live in times where everything is binary, isn’t it? And that’s not how I experience life. People are messy and strange, and sometimes we don’t know ourselves very well.”
In This is Going to Hurt, we see more of Kay’s life outside the hospital than the book offers, showing how traumas often follow doctors home. The series also shows Kay hiding the relationship with his boyfriend from his family and colleagues. “This is set in 2006, which isn't that long ago, but it was different in terms of how gay people were accepted,” Whishaw says. “I remember blatant homophobia: people shouting at you, throwing shit at you and trying to start a fight with you. It was common, normal. I’m not saying that doesn't happen anymore because sadly I hear about it, but it definitely started to get a bit better.”
In addition to Passages — about a gay relationship thrown into chaos when one man has an affair with a woman, played by the beguiling Adèle Exarchopoulos — Whishaw will next appear in Women Talking, about a group of abused women in an isolated religious colony in Bolivia, alongside Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand and Claire Foy. Then there’s the third Paddington movie, undeniably the most eagerly awaited of all given its beloved predecessor at one point last year overtook Citizen Kane as the highest-rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes. By the time you read this, Whishaw will have started recording the accident-prone bear’s voice. “They could so easily not have been good, couldn’t they?” he says fondly of the franchise. “But they’re touching and hilarious, and that’s really hard to do.”
Does Whishaw take stock of how well things are going for him? “I just go on to the next thing,”he says. “You have to keep pushing yourself and keep exploring.
“As I’m getting older, I see that you’re kind of formed by certain things and our brains are calcified. I don’t want to get stuck. The best thing you can do is just start again and be really shit at something. I’m thinking maybe I’ll learn Russian?”
This is Going to Hurt airs on 8 February at 9 on BBC One and BBC iPlayer
