Ben Whishaw’s Banner Year: The ‘Black Doves’ and ‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ Star on Refusing to Be Pigeonholed and Playing Characters Whose Sexuality Isn’t Their ‘Defining Characteristic’

variety.com:

Alex Ritman Ben Whishaw isn’t averse to juggling multiple and very different projects, but even he admits there was a point last year when things reached near farcical levels.

Around the same time he was shooting Netflix’s pulpy spy thriller series “Black Doves,” playing a contract killer with a conscience alongside Keira Knightley, he was recording the voice of Paddington Bear for the marmalade lover’s latest family adventure, “Paddington in Peru,” while also rehearsing for his lead role in a new West End adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s bleak tragicomedy “Waiting for Godot.” “And all in one week!

It was one of the strangest gear switches ever,” he says, speaking to Variety from his apartment in East London during a rare and brief period of rest for one of the U.K.’s most in-demand talents. “But it is nice to inhabit so many different worlds.” Whishaw’s latest gear switch takes him to a different world entirely — to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s — for “Peter Hujar’s Day,” having its international premiere in Berlin.

The film, the 44-year-old’s second with director Ira Sachs after “Passages,” sees him play the titular photographer — whose work was only celebrated posthumously after he died of AIDS in 1987 — in an unorthodox biopic spanning just 24 hours and based on a taped conversation between Hujar and his author friend Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall) in which she asked him to recall the events of a day, however mundane.