The role Benedict Cumberbatch wants to delete from history: “It’s a difficult one to talk about”
There are a lot of movies that haven’t aged well. Most of them, actually. But that doesn’t mean that they are all considered cinematic pariahs. When you see an Alfred Hitchcock movie that objectifies its female lead or talks down to her, it’s usually fairly easy to overlook the cringe-ness given the context of the period and the artistry surrounding it. It might not make you feel great, but it won’t outright ruin the movie for you.
Then, there are the films that have aged so poorly that it’s impossible to compartmentalise the ickiness of the period from whatever merits the movie might contain. Benedict Cumberbatch knows this all too well. After rocketing to fame in 2010 in the series Sherlock, the actor became a Hollywood A-lister, appearing in movies like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 12 Years a Slave, and The Imitation Game, for which he earned an Oscar nomination.
Around the time that he was well and truly part of the celebrity zeitgeist, he was offered a role in the starry comedy Zoolander 2. The 2016 follow-up to Ben Stiller’s 2001 niche favourite was decidedly more glitzy than the first, with a cast including Penelope Cruz, John Malkovich, and Skrillex, and featuring cameos from the likes of Katy Perry, Lewis Hamilton, and Stephen Hawking.
Cumberbatch was enlisted to play All, a non-binary model who washed-up models Derek Zoolander (Stiller) and Hansel McDonald (Owen Wilson) are shocked to discover is the biggest name in the fashion world. In the film’s defence, the joke in the scene is about how out of touch and behind the times Derek and Hansel are, but the fact that Cumberbatch, a straight, cis man, is playing a non-binary character for laughs is deeply uncomfortable and surely should have been to the people making the film less than a decade ago.
“I’ve had to apologise for that quite a lot,” the actor said in an interview with Variety. “It’s a difficult one to talk about. I love that group of people and it was the chance to sort of be part of something that the first time around was iconic and I was a huge fan of.” Despite the opportunity and the fun he had working on the film, he acknowledged that it was likely a mistake.
“It got complicated and it got misunderstood and I upset people,” he said. “I respect that, so I probably wouldn’t do that again now.”
Even people who had not “misunderstood” the intentions behind casting him in the role found it offensive. An online petition was circulated after the trailer was released in 2015, calling the character an “over-the-top, cartoonish mockery of androgyne/trans/non-binary individuals.”
If a non-binary actor had played the role, or better yet, a non-binary fashion model, the joke probably wouldn’t have landed anyway. There were very few laughs to be had anywhere in the script, no matter how many famous people were there to speak the lines. The film tanked at the office and left a stain on Cumberbatch’s filmography.
