CUMBERBATCH: I had many moments like that. I remember watching [Kenneth] Branagh’s Hamlet at the Barbican or The Madness of King George at the National. I remember watching things of brilliance on TV with my parents, who would scour for the good stuff. We’d often sit around, maybe with one of their friends, like Donald Pickering, and talk about it, and we’d try to get him to shut up because he’d always be going, “Oh, darling, what’s she doing?” [laughs] But it felt, to me, like an event, and it drew me out of where I was and into that world. I was also brought up in a very traditional, text-heavy, educational environment, where reading and the word and the script—”The play is the thing”—was my schooling, as well as my training. You know, I did classical theater training. It was only a year, but it reinforced what I always thought the whole deal was: theater first, then a bit of telly, and then possibly film—if you’re lucky. And hopefully some radio work to use the pipes in that medium because I do love radio. But I always came at it from text.

OLDMAN: Well, when you talk about the great actors and the great giants of writing who wrote the texts of the canon, as it were, there is something to that idea of working one’s way up from being an assistant stage manager to leading man and getting to move through those texts. You know, a student once asked Stella Adler if she thought that Marlon Brando was the greatest actor in the world, and her response was, “We will never know.” [Cumberbatch laughs] She always saw the measure of great acting in the way you’d see a conductor conduct the great symphonies or a pianist play the great concertos or a dancer dance the great choreographies. It’s easy, though, to get seduced by cinema.

CUMBERBATCH: I think what I loved in cinema—and what I mean by cinema is not just films, but proper, classical cinema—are the extraordinary moments that can occur on screen. At the same time, I do feel that cinema and theater feed each other. I feel like you can do close-up on stage and you can do something very bold and highly characterized—and, dare I say, theatrical—on camera. I think the cameras and the viewpoints shift depending on the intensity and integrity of your intention and focus on that.

OLDMAN: I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, “It was 1860 and it was winter …”

CUMBERBATCH: And you take people with you. It’s incredible, that direct feeling of communication. I have much more of a problem sitting in my own audience for a film—I always find that uncomfortable. I know most actors do, especially on first viewing. I think by the third time I saw Tinker, Tailor, it was wonderful, I could sit back and really enjoy the film and enjoy what I was part of and not get too upset about seeing myself on the screen. That’s not mock humility, or me stumbling around and mumbling, “Oh, thank you,” and looking at my feet. I’m very proud of the work I do, but I genuinely can’t involve myself with an audience as early as somebody who’s not part of the film can. So there’s that side of theater that appeals to me, where you give something and the response to what you’ve created is a communion between you and the dark that contains however many people. It’s thrilling not having a reflection other than through the people you’re communicating with. But people ask, “What do you prefer?” and I don’t have a preference. I love them both. I really do … [Oldman is disconnected] Are you there? Have I lost you? How ironic. I’ve lost you and I’m talking into the darkness…