Sherlock star Martin Freeman says he has begun to confront “annoying” fans who follow him for lengthy periods while he goes about his day.
The British actor, 53, is known for starring roles in blockbuster films including The Hobbit, as well as for his performance as Dr John Watson opposite Benedict Cumberbatch’s detective Sherlock Holmes.
Appearing on the BBC One show Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Freeman spoke about the topic of spying with his The Fifth Step co-star Jack Lowden, who also has a lead role in the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses, as an MI5 agent.
Asked if he had ever been followed, Freeman said he was “tailed, occasionally, people follow you around, sometimes, and they think you don’t know, and of course you do know”.
He agreed that “you can call them” fans and added: “It’s just people who just want to follow you around.”
“(It’s) not scary, more annoying, I suppose… it’s annoying because they think you don’t know they’re doing it,” he continued.
“And so occasionally I do just turn around and go ‘look, what do you want?’ And they’re like, ‘how did you know? (And I say) ‘Like because you’ve been doing it for half an hour and you’re not in MI6’.”
The Miller’s Girl actor said he sometimes tries to “reason with people” and explain that he’s “not a prop”.
Sherlock, based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories and created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, developed something of a cult fanbase that both Cumberbatch and Watson had expressed discontent over.
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Asked in a 2013 interview by The Independent if he found the “obsessive nature” of some Sherlock fans to be “too much”, Cumberbatch responded: “I had a friend who once squeezed her rabbit too much until it started to squeal and she thought it was kind of going, ‘I love you’, when it was really saying, of course, ‘You are the reason I’m dying.’
“But what I love about the show is that there are lots of people who weren’t outside the hotel today equally excited to see it and are just waiting for it as a quality piece of television,” he said.
“The problem, of course, is he [Sherlock] uses social media and it gives a platform for this fan fiction, which is really creative but it’s not really what we’re doing… [online fan fiction that imagines Watson and Holmes as gay lovers]. It’s part of the love people have for the show even if a few of them are quite fanatical about it.”
Freeman added that he was often vexed by some fans’ presumptive nature: “‘Can I have a picture?’ is the same as, in my day, ‘hello’. And people do look at you askance if you say, ‘no… not today.’ It’s like you’ve just taken food away from their children.”
In 2018, Freeman appeared to reject the idea of returning for a fifth series of Sherlock, claiming that people’s expectations of the show were “not fun anymore”.
