It’s not every day shoppers spy Hollywood A-listers racing out of their supermarkets with panic etched across their faces.
But pedestrians outside a Co-op were confronted with just that as a panic-stricken Benedict Cumberbatch filmed key scenes of a BBC drama in and around the chain’s Crouch End branch.
In the television adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel The Child in Time the 41-year-old actor plays Stephen Lewis a father whose toddler daughter goes missing with the scenes in which she disappears shot in the supermarket and along Crouch End Broadway.
In previews ahead of the programme’s broadcast Cumberbatch can be seen racing out of the shop with passersby in the street looking on in shock.
In an interview for the BBC Cumberbatch described the Co-op sequence as “harrowing because the situation is unthinkable for any parent”.
“There was a point when I was worried I was getting a bit too upset in these scenes, which is hard to avoid,” the Sherlock and Imitation Game star said.
Movie location firm FilmFixer – which runs Haringey Council’s film office – organised the Crouch End shoot which saw two cameras mounted in the Broadway to capture the action and one outside the Co-op for close-ups of a tense looking Cumberbatch.
A real Met police officer was also on hand to reassure members of the public alarmed by the scenes filmed with 30 cast and crew in the morning before the store’s opening and for a few hours in the streets on the afternoon of Sunday, April 23.
FilmFixer director Karen Everett said: “ As Benedict left the supermarket, he walked with the flow of the public, no pedestrians were stopped for the filming so some people going about their normal business found themselves walking alongside Benedict Cumberbatch.”
Earlier in the production crews shot over three days inside Hornsey Town Hall, building sets to create the interiors of government buildings.
“So Haringey saw some quite significant filming for this production,” Ms Everett said.
The drama – co-starring Trainspotting’s Kelly Macdonald as wife Julie, directed by Julian Farino and produced by Cumberbatch’s own company SunnyMarch TV – will be on BBC1 on Sunday, September 24 at 9pm.
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