What happened to Ben at Harrow? I fear the worst. What did they do to him? :( And how do you know? Is there any proof? Skeptic here, just fucking interested.
But when Oscar-nominated director Andrew Birkin came to the school (Harrow) to film Ian McEwan’s sex-fuelled novel The Cement Garden, a young Cumberbatch refused to audition. “I was really prudish at that age and I didn’t want to take my clothes off,” he said. “I was terrified and I didn’t want anyone seeing what I looked like.”
But when you look at the details? The whole casting call claim falls apart. As an astute Nonny noted:
“Ned Birkin was in the movie and so was Charlotte Gainsbourg. The only other male child in the movie was 6 years old, way too young for Ben to play.“
It’s a given that the lead roles would go to Ned, who is Andrew’s son and Charlotte his niece. So why exactly was he trying to ‘cast’ teens more than twice the age of the only available part? Why did BC find it necessary to bring that up? What was up with his weird comment about sexual experimentation? It’s almost as if he was trying to convince himself that nothing bad happened to him. Well, I think the opposite is true and I am hardly the only one either. One Nonny who works in the MH field noted BC’s panicked reaction when Caitlin Moran read some Johnlock slashfic. He was so upset that both MF and AA had to calm him down, that’s very typical of people who were abused as children.
Andrew Birkin also worked very closely with Kubrick around the time that BC was still a young lad…
I think it is possible that I may have found a director who is even worse than the Oscar-winning A+ list director that has been in this space frequently or even Woody Allen. The director of which I am speaking is an Oscar winner, but not for what you might think. It is shocking actually he does not have more Oscar wins.
I do hope this is in some small part due to his raping and abusing women throughout his career. Although the number of actresses he abused is in the dozens, I am going to focus on just a few of his more notorious crimes.
He raped three tweens during a casting process and gave the role to the tween he said was the one who was the best in bed. He later ordered her to sleep with the much much older foreign-born co-star on the movie who would go on to have an A-list career. That co-star injured her severely and production had to be stopped for a week to allow her to recover.
The director kept her around for a couple of years under the guise of getting her more roles, but the real reason was he could send her out to find other tweens and early teens to bring back to his place where he would get them drunk or slip them drugs and then rape them. He often filmed these rapes and would film the actress with the other tween and teen females.
In the movie for which he is most famous he had friends of one of his children come to the set with the child. All of the friends were probably no older than 7 or 8. He molested a dozen of them at least during the filming of the movie and filmed many of them. When he died there were hundreds of hours of footage which was some of the most extreme versions of child porn anywhere.
Stanley Kubrik/Peter Sellers
There is no reason to believe that things were any different with Andrew. With regards to McEwan? Virtually all of his novels hinge on subjects like incest, pedophilia etc. to a disturbing degree. Even critics have noted this: “Will these tales of incest ever cease? Well, my true guess is no, for they sure do captivate…” Captivate who?
Its interesting too that Andrew Birkin left Harrow (some sources indicate “dropped out”) to become a runner for a local film studio where Kubrick was filming. Kubrick hired Birkin for menial tasks but in a year he became a location scout, then was promoted to Asst Director of Special Effects by Kubrick. Kubrick was working on the singular 2001: A Space Odyssey. He sent Birkin w a cameraman to film material for the “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” sequence. The cameraman quit allegedly bc of Birkins recklessness. The next year Kubrick made him Asst Director. Its difficult to ignore the sequence of possible sexual abuse and coercion here. Birkin leaves Harrow and is promoted in 2 years to Asst Director w no experience or relevant education; Birkins son David goes to Harrow; David befriends Benedict Cumberbatch – the same child who refused to audition for Andrew Birkin. Years later, David and friend Sophie acquire their profitable and attractive mark – Cumberbatch. If he isnt a victim here, then I have spent the last 35 years working in Psychiatry and learned nothing.
