Unbreakable Joy, the Virtual Gala for Africa organized by GEANCO, was broadcast last night, October 24, and featured some guests like Benedict Cumberbatch, David Oyelowo, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Whitney Cummings. A couple of days earlier Benedict had recorded a message inviting the public to the online event:
Benedict’s part begins at 59:17, but we’d like to invite you to watch the whole event if you can:
As reported exclusively by The Hollywood Reporter, Sunnymarch will produce the adaptation as Claire will star and executive produce. Read more:
Continue readingClaire Foy and Benedict Cumberbatch are teaming up to adapt the timely novel Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy.
The novel was highly sought-after by a number of production banners and streamers as it offered a layered female protagonist in a unique setting but it was Cumberbatch’s shingle, SunnyMarch, that secured the screen rights.
Foy will star and executive produce while Cumberbatch will produce along with SunnyMarch’s Adam Ackland and Leah Clarke.
The book, published by Flatiron Books in August, is both an intimate and epic story of a woman’s search for redemption on a world facing a slow death by climate change.
The tome focuses on a woman named Franny Stone who is tracking what may be the final migration of Arctic terns. When she hustles her way onto a small vessel of misfit fisherman and embarks on an odyssey through stormy seas, her dark past of love, loss, crime and motherhood unfolds in a ode to the wild places in and around us, and the extreme lengths one will go to for the people they love.
For the sixth year in a row, Benedict has donated shoes to the Small Steps Project’s annual Celebrity Shoe Auction. For this year’s edition he has chosen a pair of limited edition Golf Wang Converse Grinch shoes, designed by Tyler, the Creator.
The date for the auction is yet to be confirmed. Pictures of Benedict’s past donations can be found here, here, here, here, here and here. If you wish to know more about Small Steps Project, you can find all the information about their team and their wonderful work on their website.
We’ve got a date! This year’s auction will take place from 13 to 22 November:
And there’s more: Benedict has actually donated a second pair of shoes – Vivo Barefoot black and grey tracker snow boots in a size EU45M, to be exact! According to the SSP website:
We’re very lucky to have Benedict as one of our regular supporters and this year, due to popular demand he has donated two pairs to the 2020 celebrity shoe auction with are perfect for Christmas presents!
Now that’s just lovely, isn’t it?
Yeardley Smith, the actress who plays Lisa Simpson in ‘The Simpsons’, told in a recent podcast that an upcoming episode of the show will feature Benedict playing a parody of The Smiths’ lead vocalist Morrissey:
Following up on @Yassammez’s tweet #lrt… There’s an episode in the upcoming new season of The Simpsons where Benedict Cumberbatch voices a character loosely based on an aged Morrissey. Hear the full mention of it from the podcast below.
— thelostsmiles (@SmilingBenedict) October 16, 2020
Spoiler: Yeardley Smith loves B 🥰 pic.twitter.com/1O1GEhgeSs
No more details were given yet. Benedict had his first cameo on the show back in 2013, in which he played both the Prime Minister of the UK and Severus Snape.
Benedict gave a brand new interview for Magic Radio on their ‘Prince’s Trust Day’, in which he talked about the work The Prince’s Trust has been doing during the COVID-19 pandemic, what he was up to during lockdown and why Doctor Strange’s cloak of levitation is definitely not a cape.
You can listen to it below:
Benedict is the voice of Don’t Take Them for Granted, an art installation dedicated to medical staff and all those in the pandemic’s front line. Check out the video below:
The artists involved explained how and why the project came to be:
Continue readingDon’t Take Them for Granted is a public project initiated by the UNFINISHED community that includes images and texts captured by artists Cristian Movilă and Capucine Gros, between March and August 2020. The photographs and writings document over 70 hours documenting the fight against COVID-19, captured right in the heart of the intensive care units of Bucharest’s main public hospitals: Institutul Național de Boli Infecțioase “Prof. Dr. Matei Balș” Hospital, Spitalul Militar ROL 2, and Spitalul Universitar de Urgență.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Doctor Strange is set to replace Iron Man and Nick Fury as the new Peter Parker’s mentor in the next installment. Read more below:
Continue readingThe good and strange doctor has been caught in the spider’s web.
Benedict Cumberbatch is putting on the cloak of levitation and will reprise Marvel supernatural hero Doctor Strange for the latest Spider-Man movie installment, starring Tom Holland and being made by Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures.
The move puts Cumberbatch in the mentor role that was previously occupied by Robert Downey Jr., who played Tony Stark/Iron Man in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and by Samuel L. Jackson in Spider-Man: Far From Home, the latter reprising Nick Fury. The role gives Holland a chance to play opposite seasoned actors, gives Peter Parker a father figure and gives the movies extra star power while tying them to the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe.
This Spider-Man project already has some unexpected ties going for it, as it is bringing back Jamie Foxx as Electro, the actor-character combo last seen in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which featured Andrew Garfield as the web-slinging hero.
October is off to a great start for this fandom! We got yet another new interview with Benedict, this time for Esquire magazine! Please check it out below:
Continue readingBenedict Cumberbatch Is Diving (and Disconnecting From the Chaos) in Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Newest Watch
By Nick Sullivan
Benedict Cumberbatch has been busy during the ongoing strangeness of 2020, with a number of major film projects in the pipeline, including Jane Campion’s much-awaited The Power of the Dog, filmed in New Zealand at the beginning of the country’s effective lockdown. Two-thirds through the filming, Cumberbatch took a quick break to film a short for legendary Swiss watchmaker Jaeger-LeCoultre, uniting filmmaking with his other love, diving.
The Jaeger on his wrist in the film is the new Polaris Mariner Memovox, the latest in a long line of very elegant dive watches from the storied brand, that surfaced just this morning. Where most classic dive watches generally err on the side of beefy, the Polaris is refined, with all the functionality of a true ISO6425-certified diver but with its unidirectional dive timer fitted inside the watch instead of on a chunky bezel, which makes for a far sleeker case. We caught up with Cumberbatch over Zoom to find out more.
Diving has long been a thing for you. Why is that?
I’ve always been interested in it, ever since watching [1988 movie] The Big Blue and, you know, trying in a vain, kind of amateur attempt to just go deeper and stay under for longer, just to get something off the ocean floor—or just for fun.
But your experience is more with a scuba tank on your back?
I’ve done a fair bit of it, yes. I just love the submersion, the quiet, the isolation, the sort of focus and sense of achievement. I’d done free diving in the way you do with it with a scuba mask, to get something on the bottom. Sometimes with flippers, but never with weights. Originally this was pitched as an idea to incorporate things that I enjoy doing and the environment that I was in at the time. So diving seemed like the natural option, but I meant scuba diving. It was misinterpreted, in fact, but I’m thrilled about that. I got to learn something new.
And then it had weirdly coincided with meeting someone in Italy who is a free diver who took me in a pool to teach me how do the breathing. Not at any great depth, but just how to maintain that kind of discipline and use it underwater. And then along came this pitch for the advert.
In an extensive interview, Benedict talks about the newest Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris Mariner Memovox watch, meditation and his next projects, like Doctor Strange 2, The Courier and The Power of the Dog.
Also, check out some new photos from the watchmaker photoshoot:
Continue readingDiscover the launch of the Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris Mariner Memovox with the long-time friend of the Maison Benedict Cumberbatch. We caught up with the Marvel superhero on Zoom where he spoke at length about his passion for watches, meditation and diving. Excerpts below.
WTI: You spent some time in a monastery in Darjeeling. What did you learn from the monks about the concept of time?
BC: Yes I did live in a Tibetan monastery, it was a converted Nepali house near Darjeeling in West Bengal which is funnily enough on the eastern side of India. It’s an amazing piece of land above a tea plantation. It’s about 4000 metres elevation so the air is quite light and there were clouds rolling in the windows like dry ice. This house had a converted room at the top which was a Buddhist temple. Their idea of ritual and structure to the day was fascinating, but the deeper lessons were about impermanence – everything is constantly shifting and changing including your relationship to time. In a moment of meditation you could spend 10 minutes doing something that affords your life hours of benefit, or stretches of 10 minutes into what feels like an hour. Time passes and what you do in any given life is concentrated on a moment. You realise that you are constantly being seduced into thinking about the past or worrying about the future and that true happiness is attainable to all of us if we are in one moment of time – which is the present.
WTI: What is the first idea that comes to your mind when I ask you about time?
BC: I never have one idea. But sadly, I wish my life was that simple. You know, I played a character that had the time stone around his neck until late and that’s how this watch and the company came into my orbit. Time, in that regard, means a lot of things especially in the Marvel Cinematic Universe which you guys know about. But for me, time is about treasuring the value of it and the ever shifting nature of it. Especially now, I think all of our inner clocks and gravity have been shifted by what’s going on globally. And if there is anything positive to be taken from this, it’s about being given a lens by which to view and review your priorities. So, that’s a big old wormhole to go down. But I’d say the first idea that comes to my mind when talking about time now is the value of it, how precious it is.
The October issue of Total Film magazine features a new interview with Benedict about The Courier! Please check the scan out below:
Here’s a transcription for those who may need it:
GENTLEMAN SPY
Continue readingTHE COURIER | Benedict Cumberbatch plays a real-life secret agent in amateur-espionage thriller.
Like 99.9 per cent of the buildings in London, Hornsey Town Hall has recently been converted into flats (£774,950 for a two-bed, if you’re interested). But in November 2018, the Grade II-listed modernist structure provided the perfect backdrop for Cold War story The Courier. “We did an awful lot there,” smiles director Dominic Cooke during a catch-up almost two years later. “It stood in for bits of London, bits of Moscow… we wrung every bit of juice out of that building that we could!”
Though not a space designed for filming – down a corridor no wider than an armchair, Teasers carefully tiptoes between bunched cables while admiring the original Art Deco light fittings – today Hornsey Town Hall is home to one of the world’s biggest film stars: Benedict Cumberbatch. In The Courier, he plays Greville Wynne – the real-life British businessman recruited by MI6 to transport information from Soviet double agent Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) to London at the height of the Cold War.
“As a genre I find spy movies a bit cold,” admits Cooke. Instead the Hollow Crown director, who made his feature debut with 2017’s On Chesil Beach, was drawn to the warmth of Tom O’Connor’s script. “It’s a hybrid between a spy movie and a platonic love story,” explains Cooke of the forged-in-fire bond between Wynne and Penkovsky. “The film it reminded me of was Brief Encounter. They knew they were doing something very important together, so they were fuelled by the danger and secrecy.”
Also starring The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Rachel Brosnahan as CIA spook Emily Donovan and Jessie Buckley as Wynne’s wife Sheila – who didn’t know a thing about her husband’s unusual side hustle – the key piece of casting for Cooke was Soviet war-hero-turned-defector Penkovsky. “I really wanted a genuine Russian-speaking actor for the role, so [the producers] reluctantly allowed me to go off to Moscow,” Cooke recalls. “Merab actually came in for another part, but he was so good I said, ‘Look at Penkovsky.’ These days, you need authenticity.”
The Decade of the Cumberbatch is a two-part special made by Benedict Cumberbatch Central to cherish the last decade and to look forward for the years that are about to come.
Benedict Cumberbatch Central will not post any paparazzi photos that aren’t related to Benedict Cumberbatch’s work, nor are we going to post paparazzi photos that invade his privacy (i.e photos of his children), regardless of where or when they were taken. Benedict works hard to keep his personal life out of the spotlight and we should respect that.
