As Emmy nominations approach, Vanity Fair’s HWD team is once again diving deep into how some of this season’s greatest scenes and characters came together. You can read more of these close looks here.

Patrick Melrose, Patrick Melrose

When a fan asked Benedict Cumberbatch during a 2013 Reddit A.M.A. what literary character he’d most like to play, he offered a definitive answer: Patrick Melrose, the brilliant, damaged vortex around which Edward St. Aubyn’s devastating quintet of autobiographical novels swirl. The books—and now Patrick Melrose, the gorgeously harrowing Showtime limited series based on them—trace the life of this charismatic upper-class Englishman as he tries to wrestle free from the damage imposed on him in childhood by his monstrous father and learn how to lead a meaningful adult life.

When Cumberbatch rhapsodized about the character on a recent phone call, he spoke so quickly that my ear could hardly take it all in. Which was appropriate enough, since Patrick Melrose wraps himself in language, using words as a both a shield and a life raft. “They are very, very funny novels,” Cumberbatch said, “and there are very funny bits which turn on a knife’s edge, 180 degrees, into tragedy.”

As an example, Cumberbatch pointed to a scene in the first episode in which the drug-addled, twentysomething Patrick views his father’s corpse at a funeral parlor. He unwraps the body, which has been discreetly covered with tissue paper, turning a grim moment into an exaggeratedly comic scene. “He starts having this dialogue with somebody who's not there, thanking them for the present of his dead dad—and then he’s fully triggered into this memory of the trauma of being raped by his father. . . . That happens in the space of about 20 seconds him on the page,” said Cumberbatch. “When you get prose as deep and rich and profoundly revealing of a character’s nature, you’re really spoiled as an actor. So much of your background research, your development of deeper psychology, and internal-thought processes and psychology—it’s there on the page. And this man’s salvation comes through a huge amount self-examination. So I just always, always went back to the book on pretty much every level.”

HOW HE CAME TO LIFE

St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels have been picking up fans since he published the first in the series, Never Mind, in 1992. (The fourth installment, 2005’s Mother’s Milk, was nominated for a Booker Prize). So much of their pleasure derives from St. Aubyn’s prose that adapting them for the screen seemed like a doomed undertaking. Yet screenwriter and novelist David Nicholls bravely took on the challenge—which wound up consuming more than half a decade. The resulting limited series covers Patrick’s life from sensitive child to middle-aged parent struggling to break the cycle of abuse, with his debauched, twentysomething years serving as fodder for the intense opening episode. Certain essential qualities run through Patrick’s entire life, Nicholls pointed out in a separate interview: “The desire to be better, to be less separate from the world, to be less ironic and sardonic, less disengaged.”

Nicholls said he always had Cumberbatch in his head as he wrote Patrick Melrose, even before the actor independently expressed interest in an adaptation. The two men had worked together on Starter for 10, the 2006 British film based on Nicholls’s novel, in which Cumberbatch played a supporting role as the prissy captain of a university quiz-show team—an amusing but two-dimensional character, the kind of work Cumberbatch was beginning to find frustrating and limiting. “Benedict was clearly something special, but everyone also had the sense that he is one of those clowns who could also play Hamlet,” Nicholls said.