Bumbledink Bandercoot. Butterscotch Humperdink. Bimblepimp Cummerbund. Once I start getting his name wrong, I find it very very hard to actually make myself say “Benedict Cumberbatch.”
I’m guessing people are having less and less trouble with his name these days. He’s gone from being a well-respected but still-lesser-known actor to being a guy who is being trusted to carry some serious weight in some very big movies. He’s the bad guy in “Star Trek Into Darkness,” opening this weekend, and much of the speculation about the film has focused on which role he’s actually playing. Once the film’s been out for a few days, we’ll have a conversation here about the role he plays and how that fits into “Star Trek” history (or doesn’t), but for now, I understand that not everyone knows, and they don’t want to know until they see it in the film.
So for that reason, if you don’t know yet and you don’t want to know, then bookmark this interview and come back after you see the movie. It’s not like that’s all that Guy Lodge talked to him about at the recent press day for the film, but they certainly give more away than you may be comfortable knowing.
I am curious to see how Peter Jackson makes use of that voice of his as Smaug in the two upcoming “Hobbit” movies, and how much of Cumberbatch himself ends up in the character. So far, the “Hobbit” tends to be one of the best examples of letting the actor really drive the performance via performance capture, and I’m excited to see if that’s true of Smaug as well.
I still think the work he’s been doing as “Sherlock” is also very special, and I’m dying to see how the series can continue after the place they left it at the end of the last series of three 90-minute episodes. His work with Martin Freeman is so fun, so prickly, so very indicative of everything I love about Sherlock Holmes, that I believe we’ll be studying this as a particularly great incarnation of one of the most enduring characters in all of fiction.
“Star Trek Into Darkness” is in theaters everywhere now.