Sir Ian McKellen Is Going To Play Sherlock. Oh, And He Used To Know Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dad.
Meanwhile...
Today in random awesomeness…
Earlier today I was reading an interview Empire Magazine did with Sir Ian McKellen. I was surprised I hadn’t heard sooner he’d be taking on the iconic role of Sherlock Holmes. More specifically, he’s playing a nearly 100-year-old Holmes in an adaptation of A Slight Trick Of The Mind, directed by Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn).
McKellen, who said he’d never had ambitions of playing Holmes, was a bit surprised when the interviewer brought up there being a younger version of Holmes in the novel as well. “You never know… sometimes they call in Michael Fassbender to be me as a young man, and sometimes they put Patrick Stewart and me through the mangle of film technology and out we come looking 20 years younger, so who knows what will happen,” he said.
But the bigger surprise of the interview was finding out McKellen knew Benedict Cumberbatch’s father. When asked if he’s watched BBC’s Sherlock, McKellen replied, “Of course, of course! I wanted to look at this Martin Freeman chap as Doctor Watson. I’ve met Benedict a couple of times. I knew his father, Timothy Carlton, when we were both quite young, and I remember him telling me that his real name was Cumberbatch. ‘But of course I had to change it because you could never be successful with a surname like that.'”
Who woulda thunk?
(via Empire, image via Patrick Stewart’s Twitter)
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