DOCTOR STRANGE: Benedict Cumberbatch Reveals What Drew Him to the Role



Actor Benedict Cumberbatch is Doctor Strange. But he never pictured himself in the role, especially since he hadn't had prior knowledge of the character. Meanwhile, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige told Entertainment Weekly that he and his team wanted the British actor for a while, and they even accommodated the release of DOCTOR STRANGE to work around the actor's busy schedule.

“He was someone that we were very interested in for a very long time,” Feige said. “[But] he kept getting more and more popular! [Laughs] Which is not [essential] for us. Chris Pratt was not popular when we cast him inGuardians. That’s not a prerequisite needed for us casting [someone]. But he kept getting more popular, and more popular, and he kept getting busier, and busier, and it looked like the timing wasn’t going to work.” So we looked at some other actors for a while and ultimately decided, ‘We have to try and make it work with Benedict and with his schedule.’ Which is why we shifted the production schedule around. He finished Hamlet here in London, and I think had a day off, and then went to Kathmandu, Nepal, to shoot the first day of Doctor Strange.”

Also speaking with EW, Cumberbatch revealed that his time teaching English to Tibetan monks, as a teenager, helped peek his interest in the role and journey of Stephen Strange.

“It was a very unfair exchange," Cumberbatch said of teaching English to the monks. "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. 
“I knew it was on [Marvel's] 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.”