Henry Cavill on Enola Holmes and returning as Superman

The last time I met Henry Cavill, we were in Manhattan Beach, in the southwest of Los Angeles, in the kind of bar where everything in sight is marble and glass and Botox, for his GQ cover interview.

Remembering, he says: “Oh my goodness me, yes! Many moons ago. Jesus! A dog’s age!”

In this, Cavill is correct, as it was 2013, back when David Cameron was Prime Minister, Boris Johnson had just begun his second term as London mayor, and “pandemic” was mostly known as a brand of crack on The Wire. More specifically for Cavill, he was about to make his debut as Superman in Man of Steel. And even more specifically for everyone else, the interview would end up being one of Cavill’s first steps to being anointed the internet’s nerd-king, and the fantasy boyfriend for everyone who's into cosplay.

He spoke warmly about how his favourite activity with his brothers was playing a first-person-shooter game online death match together. He rhapsodised about Skyrim, a fantasy role-playing game he’d been ploughing through in single-player mode (“Goodness me, that’s a great game”). He informed me that, when director Zack Snyder called him to offer him the part of Superman, he didn’t answer the phone, as he was playing World of Warcraft at the time, and so let it ring out (“and I saw it was him… but you can’t pause World of Warcraft, it’s live”), a story that he would be asked to regurgitate in countless talk-show appearances since. It was my solemn duty, for the story, to personally inform Snyder of the tale (“Haha, that’s awesome!” he said. “So he was like, ‘Who the fuck is this bothering me? I’m playing World of Warcraft!’”).

Since then, despite a career that has often seen him starring in blockbusters in various flavours of leading-man beefcake – though mostly CIA-agent beefcake (The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission Impossible – Fallout) and superhero beefcake (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League) – he has also grown more comfortable in showing himself to be what he actually is: a huge nerd in an even huger man’s body.

Partly, he did this by finally combining his two personas – blurring the line between leading man and cosplayer – in playing Geralt Of Rivia, a cat-eyed monster slayer in Netflix’s wildly successful 2019 fantasy The Witcher, the second season of which he’s currently filming. Cavill, naturally, had played the 100-hour game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the 2015 RPG based on the same high-fantasy Polish books, two-and-a-half times over. He tells me that he kept “both of my swords and a set of armour” from the first season's filming, which he plans to put on display.

During lockdown he has, like almost all of us, tried baking, or rather baked his first ever cake, as evidenced by an Instagram post of a baked good that appears to have been first dipped then fire-hosed in icing. “It was surprisingly good,” he says, “I’m mega into details, and as far as I’m aware, when it comes to baking, it’s all about having the measurements right. And it turned out really well.” What about the icing? “The icing I could have done better on.”

But what lockdown mostly gave him was time to ponder, and to finally realise what made him truly happy.

This turned out to be painting miniature Warhammer models of aliens and supernatural monsters, one of which he then posted on Instagram.

“It’s one of my dirty-secret hobbies,” he says. “And one that I kept to myself for many years. But the thing about lockdown, it gave me a lot of time to reflect. Because I don’t get a lot of time off. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes me happy. And this kind of stuff makes me happy. So why not? Why not share it? I’m a geek. Everyone knows that now. And there’s no point in being, like, just slightly less of a geek. So I thought, let the world know.”

He’s painted countless figures during lockdown, he says, but few to his satisfaction. Most have ended up as “test miniatures”, where he’s been painting using different styles, and different techniques, “but none of them really landed until maybe three weeks ago.”

Hold up, I say. So how many has he actually painted? “Three.” Three? “That’s just the madness of my brain and how it works. I don’t like not getting it right.”

As if to prove Cavill is now living his best – i.e. geekiest – life, lockdown also saw him build a gaming PC on Instagram, which may not sound thrilling, but it ignited the internet all the same.

Everyone from tech website The Verge (“Because you definitely want to watch Henry Cavill build a gaming PC”) to the august Forbes (“Of Course You Want To Watch The Witcher’s Henry Cavill Build a Gaming PC”) got involved. IGN.com showed you how you could build your own (“Build Superman’s Gaming PC: What’s Inside Henry Cavill’s Beastmode Gaming Rig”). YouTube commentators racked up hits in the millions just by posting videos in response to it. Hell, we even wrote about it.

Did he imagine it would get that reaction?

“I did not, no! I thought it was going to be quite niche. I thought that those fans that are very forgiving of me, and like the various things that I like, would probably like it. But I did not think that the internet was going to grab hold of it the way it did.”

“Not just yet. But with the new graphics cards that just game out, and hopefully some new CPUs that are coming out in the near future, I might do a little bit of an upgrade for the computer.”

Celebrity computer-building enthusiasts: watch this space.

All of which perhaps explains why Cavill’s latest role – that of Sherlock Holmes in Netflix’s Gen Z-friendly, bouncily fun Enola Holmes, starring Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown as Sherlock’s younger sister – is perhaps not as unlikely as it sounds. After all, what is Sherlock if not the ultimate detail-obsessive nerd?

Cavill’s Sherlock is very much a supporting part in the film – which mostly follows Brown’s burgeoning detective Enola as she attempts to track down their missing mother, played by Helena Bonham Carter – and it’s due to that his Holmes is a slightly different one.

“He’s going to be the Sherlock we know in the sense that to the rest of the world he can be aloof and cold, but with Enola he had to have an emotional connection. That was key – and something different than we’ve had in previous Sherlocks.” It was, he says, “a lot more emotional to begin with, so we pared it back, and we said, ‘alright, let’s not make it too emotional’.”

And yet, it’s this very point – Cavill playing a Sherlock Holmes with emotions – that has led the Conan Doyle estate to sue Netflix, arguing that Cavill’s depiction of Holmes isn’t based on the earlier Sherlock stories, which are in the public domain, but the later stories in which he starts to display more emotion, which are still under copyright.

“I mean, honestly, I don’t have a take on it,” says Cavill when I mention the lawsuit. “It’s a character from a page which we worked out from the screenplay. The legal stuff is above my pay grade.”

Still, I say, it must be the first time someone has sued for damages because of his acting.

“Haha, honestly, nothing surprises me any more.”

Cavill will again be seen as Superman in the famed “Snyder cut” of Justice League, which is being released as a four-episode mini-series on HBO Max next year, with The Hollywood Reporter even reporting that most of the main cast – including Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, Ben Affleck’s Batman and Cavill’s Superman – will be filming re-shoots from next month. But Cavill pours cold water on this.

“They are doing their own thing out there, putting the movie together from the footage they shot,” he says when I ask if Snyder has been in touch. “I’ve not been in comms with them about it.”

Though he didn't take part in any re-shoots, other reports that surfaced just before we spoke suggested Cavill had recently signed a new three-film deal with Warner Bros. to reprise his Superman role after Cavill himself pitched a new storyline. Is there any truth to the rumours?

“Well, I think it’s important that this should be about Enola Holmes,” he says. Which, you will notice, isn’t exactly a “no”, and is despite the fact Cavill has been more than willing to discuss subjects such as Warhammer figures, gaming PCs, The Witcher, baking, and the Synder cut of Justice League.

That sounds very much, I say, like a way of saying “no comment” without actually denying it.

He grins slightly. “I said what I said.”

Finally, I say to him, when we spoke all those years before, we discussed how, as a 22-year-old, he auditioned for Bond, and apparently came close to landing it.

Now he’s a more Bond-appropriate age of 37, and with Daniel Craig stepping down, would he still be interested were he to get the call?

“If Barbara [Bond producer Barbara Broccoli] and Mike [co-producer Michael G. Wilson] were interested in that, I would absolutely jump at the opportunity,” he says. “At this stage, it’s all up in the air. We’ll see what happens. But yes, I would love to play Bond, it would be very, very exciting.”

Enola Holmes is available on Netflix now

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