Benedict Cumberbatch Is Doctor Strange In Leaked On-Set Footage [Video]
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers for the upcoming Marvel Phase III film Doctor Strange.
Did you think Entertainment Weekly showing us Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange for the first time was awesome? Well, if you happen to be unable to get enough Doctor Strange, you’ll be happy to know that some on-set footage has leaked to the internet!
Apparently, a YouTube user named Sanford Dickert arrived home to his office in London when he noticed some kind of strange (no pun intended) commotion below.
Said Dickert, “I saw that someone had tried to make a small part of London look more like the Upper East Side of NYC.”
(In case you didn’t know, Hollywood is infamous for filming parts of New York in other major cities around the world.)
Sanford spent some moments absorbing the scene before it clicked just what movie he was seeing being filmed.
“It became obvious that the movie was Dr. Strange and the film crew was part of Marvel. And who do I see playing the titular character? Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor were doing their thing while filming.”
I’d advise against reading the rest of the description as it contains a major spoiler. In fact, you may want to avoid watching the video altogether in case you wish to remain spoiler-free ahead of Doctor Strange. If you don’t care about that sort of thing and really want to get a behind-the-scenes look at Benedict as Stephen Strange, take a look at the video below.
The video uploader did his best to describe the scene as he understood it. The video shows Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange, Chiwetel Ejiofor as villain Baron Mordo, and a third person in yellow. As you can see in the above video’s preview screen, the third person in the scene is stretched out on the not-New York sidewalk and may or may not be Stephen Strange’s master the “Ancient One.”
If you don’t know, the Ancient One is a centuries-old sorcerer who was, in fact, responsible for the magical abilities of Doctor Strange. Despite the character being a man originating in Eastern Asia, it’s expected that Marvel Studios will do some gender and race-bending to cast Tilda Swinton. This has caused some controversy, although one commenter at Cinema Blend had an interesting explanation for the drastic change.
“I’m calling BS. I suspect the fact that TAO is Tibetian is the real problem. China is a HUGE market for Marvel and China would never accept a main character who is Tibetian. When you make a traditionally female character male, then maybe I’ll believe this story.”
Whether or not Marvel Studios made the unexpected change to avoid angering a major market is something we’ll likely never know. What we do know, thanks to the above video is that Doctor Strange and Baron Mordo may very likely come to blows over what happened to the person who may or may not be Swinton (who may or may not be the Ancient One in this scene).
Marvel tries to explain away their whitewashing of 'Doctor Strange' Ancient One https://t.co/NmsTcNLsoP pic.twitter.com/fcWuviwRr8
— virallery (@ViralVill) January 1, 2016
In addition to the above video, there were also still images that leaked from the set of Doctor Strange. You can get a loud of Benedict Cumberbatch in character all over social media thanks to images like the one below.
Yup Benedict Cumberbatch is going be a great Doctor Strange. pic.twitter.com/Nsf1XxVBfS
— JTE (@JTEmoviethinks) February 21, 2016
Seeing Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange is a pleasant reminder of how fast the Marvel Cinematic Universe is growing. Not only do fans of Marvel have this film to look forward to in November 2016, but soon we’ll be seeing standalone films from characters like Captain Marvel and Black Panther.
In the meantime, we have the upcoming May blockbuster Captain America: Civil War to keep us pre-occupied while we wait.
[Image via Entertainment Weekly Twitter/Marvel Studios]
