Benedict Cumberbatch regrets ‘upsetting’ people with non-binary role
Benedict Cumberbatch played a non-binary model in Zoolander 2. (Getty Images/IMDb)
Benedict Cumberbatch spoken about the regret he feels for playing a non-binary character in Zoolander 2.
The star, who played gay mathematician and computer genius Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, was cast as androgynous supermodel All – a protégé of a top designer, meant to symbolise fashion’s evolving attitudes towards gender expression – in Ben Stiller’s 2016 comedy.
“It’s a difficult one to talk about,” he admitted to Variety when asked about one of the controversial lines. “I’ve had to apologise for that quite a lot.”
After the first trailer dropped in 2015, LGBT+ activists described Cumberbatch’s character as an “over-the-top, cartoonish mockery of androgyny/trans/non-binary individuals”.
He said of working with Stiller and co-stars Owen Wilson and Will Ferrell: “I love that group of people. It was the chance to be part of something that the first time around was iconic and I was a huge fan of.”
‘I wouldn’t do that again now’
But playing All “got complicated, and it got misunderstood, I upset people”, he added. “And I respect that, so I probably wouldn’t do that again now.”
Cumberbatch, joining co-star Penélope Cruz for Variety’s Actors on Actor series in 2022, said the role had “backfired”, adding: “In this era, my role would never be performed by anybody other than a trans actor.”
In an interview with People magazine last year, Stiller recalled the negative response to Zoolander 2, saying: “What scared me the most was losing what I think what’s funny, the questioning yourself… it affected me for a long time.”
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