Benedict Cumberbatch has been a fan-favourite choice to take on the role of Doctor Strange for years, making the official announcement that he’d landed the part one of the most exciting casting reveals in some time for fans. However, you may be surprised to learn that the actor didn’t exactly have a gameplan when it came to playing the Sorcerer Supreme.
“No, it’s not something that I had on my bucket list, as they would say. I have to play Stephen Strange!!!”
Interestingly, the Sherlock star’s past ended up playing a role in why he said yes to Doctor Strange, as he spent time teaching English to Tibetan monks in the state of West Bengal in eastern India as a 19 year old.
“It was a very unfair exchange. Basically, they taught me reams, fathoms, more than I could possibly begin [to teach them]. I became interested the meeting point between Western logic and Eastern mysticism.”
That gave him some interesting background knowledge when it came to knowing what to expect from Strange’s journey to Tibet then, but it turns out that the more he learned about the character, the more he wanted to play him. In fact, Cumberbatch dropped some very interesting hints about what we should expect from the surgeon’s story as he evolves into a sorcerer.
“I knew it was on their slate, I knew it was coming up, so I got invested in it and I was interested. What happens here in this origin story is, Strange realizes the power he has within his body is not about his body. It’s something that’s beyond the causal-temporal-linear-reality that he knows so well as a [surgeon]. We come from this very causal world into this mystical, magical world of other realms and sorcery.”
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