What Kind Of Role Should Cumberbatch Take Next?

Sherlock is on hiatus, 12 Years A Slave has won the Oscar and is through being promoted, we've all heard him voice Smaug... we're going to have to find new ways to keep Benedict Cumberbatch in the spotlight, guys. He's got the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game coming up, but he's also looking towards the future. According to Cumberbatch he'd one day like to break out of his typecasting to play a character who's not a genius.

"I am so ready to play a really dumb character," he said to T Magazine in a recent interview. "...I always seem to be cast as slightly wan, ethereal, troubled intellectuals or physically ambivalent bad lovers."

Cumberbatch has, of course, been working since long before he found fame in Sherlock, and it's true: Sherlock himself is an ethereally acerbic genius, Julian Assange is much the same, and he played Stephen Hawking in Hawking in 2004. It's that quintessential posh British thing: When you see that face and hear that voice, there's an automatic instinct of "oh, I bet that person's read a lot of books."

Cumberbatch has also, of course, already played characters that, you know, weren't that smart: Little Charles Aiken, whom he played in August: Osage County, isn't exactly seen as the sharpest tool in the box. And I'd hardly call Smaug ethereal.

Still, we can get what he's going for, and I counter it with this: If Benedict Cumberbatch wants to bust out of his smarty Shakespearean genius box, someone should really cast him as the lead in a relatively conventional romantic comedy. Sherlock co-star Martin Freeman's done a few (albeit with mixed results), and god knows that's a genre that could use some busting open. So, Hollywood heavyweights, instead of going for a Gerard Butler or a Josh Duhamel next time, why not give a Cumberbatch a call? He might just be interested.