Martin Freeman recently talked with The Independent about the loads of success he is having lately with the Hobbit movies, as well as his past role in the hit FX series Fargo.
Right now, Martin Freeman and fellow Sherlock actor Benedict Cumberbatch are busy shooting the next series of Sherlock for the BBC. But Martin Freeman says that the popularity of the show has almost become its undoing in terms of how difficult it is to get the scenes shot.
“It started the other day,” Freeman said of the people gathered to watch the show film. “Not hundreds, but scores, of young women mainly. When we’re [filming at] our stand-in for Baker Street, it is hard to do your job. And I don’t love it,” he says. “I don’t love it.”
Freeman acknowledges that the observers are not screaming during shoots, but still they mike the work difficult in other ways.
“It’s like trying to act at a premiere,” he says, “It really is. I wasn’t in The Beatles. But I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s such a heightened sense of excitement, so every time we come out there’s applauding – and it’s like, ‘No, can you n–’ Or, if we do anything – ‘Cut!’ – applause… It’s like, ‘No, this isn’t a gig…'”
Freeman says that he and Cumberbatch are trying to do what they have always done in terms of working with the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, but the crush of spectators make it tough.
“While at the same time there are hundreds of people taking pictures of you and holding up placards,” he explains. “Of course you want to be gracious with it. And I obviously very much appreciate, as do we all, the fact that people love it. But also, yeah, it doesn’t make you doing your job any easier.”
But he does concede that doing the short-run of episodes for each series of Sherlock is easy overall.
“By American standards it’s nothing!” he exclaims. “Even by Downton [Abbey] standards it’s pretty short! It’s not eight months of our year, and it’s not every year. It’s so intermittent. That’s what for me makes it do-able. I don’t know about Ben but certainly for me it would soon lose a lot of its appeal if we were schlepping that around for eight months of the year, every year. A bit of the sheen would have gone off it.”