Ben Whishaw has had such a weird year that you can’t blame him for being shoulders-shrugging-emoji-guy about it. Still, he’s lovely enough to give articulating the weirdness a try – starting with providing the voice of Paddington for that teddy bear’s tea party with the Queen. “I didn't act with Her Majesty, but I was so amazed,” he says. “I thought she did such a brilliant job. But yeah. Strange. What a strange year it's been.”
The strangeness started with This Is Going to Hurt, a medical drama starring Whishaw as an overworked, fried-eyed junior medic on an NHS labour ward in 2006. But airing in January 2022, the comedy-drama proved timely, as it absorbed our pandemic anxiety and anguish for a health service on the brink. The cast and crew felt the series reflect the mood, as they filmed the BBC seven-parter during COVID, says Whishaw. “It was right in the forefront of our minds, our experiences at the time. It's not all that often that you work on something that feels as pressing and as relevant to the moment as this project was.”
Created by Adam Kay and based on his best-selling memoir about working as a junior doctor in the NHS, This Is Going to Hurt sees Whishaw play the overworked, overwrought Adam on the obstetrics and gynaecology ward (or as he refers to it, “Brats and Twats”). The cynical, often hilarious humour cuts as deep as the show’s brutal assessment of the NHS. The series depicts a painfully under-resourced system populated by fatigued, uncared-for staff unable to provide basic care to themselves and others, which endangers the lives of all involved. The show is funny, and Whishaw is incredibly good at playing a not-entirely sympathetic young doc who makes quite catastrophic mistakes. Ultimately, it is quite a frightening watch.
“You don't want to think about the fact that the people who are treating you in the NHS are also human beings,” says Whishaw. “Somehow, that's just not something you can hold in your mind as the truth. The show is so much about the kind of fragility and fallibility of people who are working within that system, and how inhumane the system is, really. It definitely brought it home to me in a way that I would probably not have wanted to think about otherwise.”
This Is Going to Hurt took a scalpel to the messy reality of working on an NHS labour ward. “I remember thinking, ‘oh my God, can we actually show this?’,” says Whishaw of the show’s visceral labour scenes. “It's extraordinary to say it felt so extreme, as there's nothing more natural; it's how we all arrive here. But, nonetheless, there’s a sense – particularly with men – of averting our eyes from this reality.”
Over the past 12 months, Whishaw has found himself an unexpected conduit for people dealing with reality as the Paddington sketch, recorded for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations, later became an articulation of people’s grief for the monarch. “People have such affection for that character and obviously for the Queen. He's somehow just a channel for people to feel certain things,” says Whishaw, trying to make sense of it all. “It's a connection to a gentleness that otherwise people maybe struggled to access.”
The whole Paddington thing is strange, Whishaw admits, but while he might feel slightly ridiculous talking about this bear in too serious a fashion, it is also a huge part of his creative life; in the last three years, he’s recorded Paddington’s voice for almost 200 episodes of the animated series. “it's a massive part of my life now. And I do love it,” he smiles. “It's another thing that I never imagined I would be doing. But it is a real pleasure.” He doesn’t know why, he says. But then, in his way of giving thoughts a go, he does. “It's like, well, it's an escape, isn't it? From, I suppose, reality.”
All of this: the Queen, the Bear and being party to that other great British institution, as Q in the James Bond franchise, puts Whishaw in danger of becoming a bit of a national treasure himself. Put to him, it’s the one thing he is definitely sure he is not. “I don't think that, no. I don't think I am. I don't think anyone really knows who I am,” he maintains. He gets stopped for photos, or people wanting to tell him how good he was in that show off the telly, but that’s the level of his fame, he says, and that suits him. “I just want to be an actor. I like it when people don't really quite know who you are, or they go, ‘oh, the guy who was in that’.”
We move on to talk about 007, inevitably. Where does that go next? Will he be back as Q? He shrugs. “I could imagine, honestly, that they might just be recasting the whole thing,” he ventures. That said, if he did return, he’s certain about one thing. “They switched the dynamic when I took over as Q to him being younger than Bond. I would really enjoy being older than Bond. I'd like to be the older guy, crotchety and impatient. That would be really fun.”
