Benedict Cumberbatch talks Doctor Strange, and how he’d fit into Avengers: Infinity War

Vital as he may be as the latest addition to Marvel’s medium-spanning, culturally dominant cinematic universe, Benedict Cumberbatch is not ready to fabricate a story of lifelong devotion to the second-tier superhero Doctor Strange.

“I don’t think I had ever read the comics,” he says. “I think the nearest that I’d come to knowing Strange was some artwork from a Pink Floyd album (1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets) where he featured.” And he was initially lukewarm about the idea of headlining Marvel Studios’ next big franchise when it was first put to him.

“I remember having a conversation on the roof of Bad Robot [the production company owned by J. J. Abrams] when we were doing Star Trek,” the 40-year-old Oscar nominee best known for his role in the BBC’s Sherlock series recalled in Hong Kong earlier this month. “One of the journalists said, ‘You’d make a great Doctor Strange.’ I went, ‘Doctor who?’ And he went, ‘Well, that as well!’. And I said, ‘No, no, I mean, I don’t know what you mean by Doctor Strange.’”

When Cumberbatch went back to study the comics, all he initially picked up was “certain characters’ traits”, he says. “You know, he’s an intelligent man, he’s arrogant, and there’s a certain sort of Englishness to the character. … He’s not dissimilar to certain traits of certain characters I’ve played before. So I wasn’t that interested.”

It was only after Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige offered him the part, and director Scott Derrickson allayed his concerns over the story’s seemingly dated East-meets-West elements, that Cumberbatch began to feel right about donning the cloak as the “master of black magic”.