In a wide-ranging interview with Esquire this week, Benedict Cumberbatch surprisingly revealed that he wasn’t at all sure about taking the role of Doctor Strange in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “I kind of had my doubts about it, from just going into the comics,” said the actor. “I thought: ‘This is a very dated, sexist character.’”
Apparently the studio ultimately sold him on its vision of the big-screen Strange as “very much a character of his time”. And indeed, the arrogant alpha-male medic we first meet in 2016’s Doctor Strange is pretty quickly transformed into a near saintly figure whose only interest is in serving the greater good as the Sorcerer Supreme.
That’s why it was such a surprise to see Strange apparently returning to his old boorish self in trailers for the forthcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home, in which the superhero can be seen apparently ushering in the mean-old Multiverse by casting a dangerous spell aimed at restoring Spider-Man’s secret identity. It seems so out-of-character that some people have even speculated this new version of Strange might have turned to the dark side.
But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. For it’s hardly the first time Marvel has shown us the arrogant male hero brought low by the consequences of their own hubris.
First there was Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man, who in his own conceit thought he could build a hi-tech defence barrier to stop the Earth being invaded by aliens but failed to spot the potential for said supercharged artificial intelligence to gain consciousness and turn on its creator. Then there was poor old Thor, who has had to cope with the consequences of his own epic fails over and over again, from the destruction of Asgard to the deaths of pretty much his whole family. It appears Strange is now being set up as the next overreaching, over-confident male to fall from grace. (Let’s not even mention bumbling Star-Lord or loser-boy Ant-Man.)
Messing up, it must be said, is very much part of the Marvel hero’s DNA. When the comic book publisher emerged as a rival to DC in the 1960s, it was because its superheroes had very real and human failings in comparison to more old-fashioned, untarnished golden-age figures such as Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. Where the Man of Steel’s only real problem was kryptonite, Tony Stark is so prone to screwing up in the comics that he has at times descended to the status of an out-of-control drunk, a clone-creating mad scientist, even a callous proponent of superhero concentration camps.
Even so, it is beginning to seem as though Marvel loves stories of toxic masculinity almost as much as the Hulk likes smashing up invading alien spaceships. Given the studio’s apparent determination to keep returning to the theme, can it really be coincidence?
If superhero movies are the new westerns, then the MCU’s equivalent must surely be the 1971 Robert Altman revisionist classic McCabe & Mrs Miller, in which Warren Beatty’s swaggering gambler meets his doom in the mud of the Pacific north-west after failing to spot that he long ago reached the end of a supremely lucky streak. It is a movie with no discernible hero, no one the audience is primed to root for.
If this is where Marvel Studio finds itself after more than a decade of storytelling, we should perhaps give the superhero mega-saga credit for presenting a more complex picture of human behaviour than any big-screen fantasy series before it. Moreover, if Cumberbatch really did sign on to play a reconditioned, modern take on Doctor Strange, rather than a master of cavalier pomposity, he might find he’s not quite out of the woods yet.
We should also not be too surprised if the studio’s spandex-sporting toxic males continue to drive the narrative into darker and darker territory – especially as the forthcoming No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness are already looking distinctly moody. It seems that, much like our own real-world leaders, they just cannot help themselves.
