Benedict Cumberbatch may have shot to mainstream attention by playing the title character on ratings-grabbing TV thriller Sherlock before boarding the Marvel Cinematic Universe and portraying a superhero in Doctor Strange, but he’s always been regarded first and foremost as an Actor with a capital ‘A’.
The son of two accomplished stage and screen talents, the boarding school-educated Englishman was an arts scholar, studied drama at university and continued his training at the prestigious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, winning plenty of acclaim treading the boards during the early years of his career before the role of Sherlock Holmes catapulted him to international fame.
However, outside of his brief appearance in Sam Mendes’ 1917, Cumberbatch hasn’t dived back into full-blown dramatic territory for close to four years, but that’s all about to change when Cold War thriller The Courier arrives next month.
The true-life historical drama follows the 44 year-old’s British businessman Greville Wynne, who assisted the CIA in infiltrating the Soviet Union’s nuclear program by teaming up with a confidential Russian source to provide intelligence that ultimately ended the Cuban Missile Crisis. The first images have now been revealed from director Dominic Cooke’s espionage tale, and you can check them out below.
Two-time Golden Globe winner Rachel Brosnahan and Chernobyl‘s Jessie Buckley co-star alongside Benedict Cumberbatch in a movie that already looks like it’ll appeal to fans of Steven Spielberg’s similarly-themed Bridge of Spies. Coincidentally, Merab Ninidze plays roles in both, although his part in The Courier will be much more substantial as he portrays Oleg Penkovsky, the military colonel code-named Ironbark, which was the project’s original title before it was changed to something much less obscure and more accessible.
