Benedict Cumberbatch on stepping into "massive shadow" of David Attenborough for new climate documentary

Benedict Cumberbatch has had a number of mightily impressive roles in his acting career – from Sherlock Holmes to Hamlet to Doctor Strange – but his latest film How to Live on Earth sees him taking on a very different challenge.

The film – which is produced by the award-winning Open Planet Studios – finds the popular actor stepping into the footsteps of Sir David Attenborough to present and narrate a campaigning environmental documentary,

And speaking to Radio Times ahead of the project's release on YouTube, Cumberbatch admitted he was "obviously worried" about living up to such a broadcasting legend.

"That['s a] massive shadow," he said. "But it's such a different personality, they've asked me to come in with my own and all the quirks of that. Also it's a different role. It's really to foreground the three experts within the film."

Those three experts are Xiye Bastida, a climate justice activist, Dan O'Neill, a field biologist, wildlife filmmaker, and explorer, and Sam Kass, a former White House chef and senior policy advisor on nutrition.

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The film is split into three strands – How to Value Nature, How to Feel Human, and How to Feed the Future – with each of the aforementioned experts taking the lead on one of those sections. And Cumberbatch said this approach really sold him on the project.

"I think all of them carried surprise and innovation, and also contextualised things that I felt certain of or supported myself," he said.

"So, whether it's how to feed Earth and what the better practices are, whether it's how to connect to nature, how to feel human, and the benefits of that, both psychologically and physically and then how to value nature.

"I'm not an economist, but I can see where we've gone wrong with our economy, since 200 years ago in the post-industrial revolution, pre-market capitalism has been this thing where profit has been made private, and we've socialised cost. It's been borne out by society.

"So, to right that wrong and create a market value for nature, to invest in it, to see that it's something better to let live, to service us, whether it's in terms of waterfall or carbon sinking or all the nourishment, the food, the livestock, the biodiversity that's essential to ecosystems and are part of it to survive.

"To monetise that is, I think, the way we really turn the key and the whole thing starts cascading into a positive future. So that was a real hook for me, but also the tone of it."

The tone is more positive than the doom and gloom that is – with good reason – the main currency of many documentaries about the climate emergency.

And producer Jonnie Hughes acknowledged that it can be difficult to strike the right balance between warning and hope.

"It wasn't so long ago that it was very hard to make a film with a positive ending," he said. "But that's totally changing. It's actually responsible to talk about how bad things are, but at that point you then have to pull it out of the nosedive, and we can do so with concrete examples.

"Groups that are out in the Maldives restoring entire corollary systems, or groups in the US that have managed to get funding to take down dams and restore an entire river system, and everyone's benefiting as a result.

"So there are concrete examples out there. Hopefully, they'll become more normal, more routine."

For his part, Cumberbatch explained that taking part in the documentary had opened his eyes to the incredible work that was ongoing around the world, to look for solutions and avert some of the worst possible outcomes of climate collapse.

There was one particular story, which showed Indigenous activists attempting to protect salmon from hydroelectric dams, that had an especially profound impact on the actor.

"Every time I watch the salmon story and see those tears, it has the same effect on me," he said. "I find it so moving.

"This was initiated for a different reason, and then nature returns within a year, and it blows him away in the moment when he's describing it, and you really feel that. And that connection is really important and it's joyous."

He also explained that he thinks the way the world has responded to the climate catastrophe in general is something akin to the seven stages of grief – and that collectively we've moved from denial to despair.

"In order to bring people's vision round, to stop the denial by exemplifying the crisis, we've created an overwhelm that then results in despair," he explained.

"This [film] is about the fact that out there in the field there are people doing things that have had real, quantifiable, unifiable impact that really do project a picture of hope. It's there. It's scientifically proven. We can scale this up.

"And the more we work with nature and not against it, the more that becomes a reality. And that's the key for me about how positive the essential messaging of this film is."

How to Live on Earth is streaming now on YouTube.

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