In Culture
Hawking (2004): the BBC Drama with Benedict Cumberbatch
Before The Theory of Everything there was Hawking, the 2004 BBC television film that gave Benedict Cumberbatch his breakout role. A guide to the drama and where to watch it.
Last reviewed 28 May 2026 · How we research
A decade before The Theory of Everything, the BBC made its own dramatisation of Stephen Hawking's early life. Hawking, directed by Philip Martin and screened in 2004, gave a then-unknown Benedict Cumberbatch his breakout role as the young Stephen, and remains a quietly admired piece of television drama in its own right.
What the film is about
The drama covers a tightly defined chapter of Hawking's life: the early 1960s, from his arrival as a PhD student at Cambridge to the first years of his motor neurone disease diagnosis. Two stories run in parallel. One is Hawking's, as a brilliant but unfocused student suddenly told he has two years to live, who finds in physics a reason to keep going. The other is the contemporary work of the radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, whose accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background would settle the Big Bang debate that occupied Hawking's earliest research. For the academic story those years tell, see Hawking's PhD thesis and the singularity theorems that grew out of them.
Cumberbatch as Hawking
The performance is the film's centre. Cumberbatch was twenty-seven at the time, and the role required him to play Hawking as a healthy young man at Oxford, then watch as his body began to fail him. The drama earned a BAFTA nomination, and Cumberbatch's career took off shortly afterwards. Watching the film now, with the knowledge of what was to come both for him and for Eddie Redmayne ten years later, is part of the pleasure.
Why it matters
The 2004 Hawking sits as a useful complement to the better-known Theory of Everything. Where the 2014 film covers Stephen and Jane Hawking's whole marriage, the BBC drama focuses with greater detail on the science and the moment of diagnosis. Anyone interested in the cosmology of Hawking's early career will find the BBC version closer to the working-physicist story.
Where it sits in his story
By 2004 Hawking himself was the most famous living scientist in the world; that the BBC chose to dramatise his early years, rather than his celebrity period, says something about which part of his life carries the most narrative weight. For the screen record of Hawking's appearances, see the media library and the page on his TV and film appearances.