The Cumber backlash!
FOR all his impassioned liberal views, it seems Benedict Cumberbatch just cannot stop offending the political correctness police.
After being censured for talking about ‘coloured’ people on US television in January, the Sherlock actor has been criticised over his portrayal of a transgender supermodel in the comedy film Zoolander 2.
His ‘cartoonish mockery’ has led to demands to boycott the film, a sendup of the vanity of the fashion world.
Ironically, Cumberbatch, 39, married to theatre director Sophie Hunter, is
‘Dangerous perceptions’
an outspoken supporter of liberal causes and stunned a London audience last month when he criticised the response to the Syrian refugee crisis and said: ‘**** the politicians!’
Only a short trailer of the new film, a sequel to the 2001 movie starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, has appeared before its release next February. But it has already been enough to prompt calls for a boycott of the film on the grounds that it is ‘transphobic’.
The two-minute trailer reveals that Stiller and Wilson’s clueless male model characters are now washed-up has-beens.
When Derek, Stiller’s character, asks if the androgynous-looking All is a male model or a female model, Cumberbatch’s character replies pretentiously: ‘All is all.’ ‘He’s asking, “Do you have a hot dog or a bun?”,’ says Wilson’s character, Hansel. All lets out a girlish giggle then says: ‘Oops.’
An online petition calling for a boycott of the film has 8,000 signatories while Twitter protesters attacked the All character as ‘transphobic’.
According to the petition, Cumberbatch’s character is the modern equivalent of blacking up and the film-makers should have recruited a real transgender model to play All.
By hiring an actor to portray a transgender character in a ‘clearly negative way, the film endorses harmful and dangerous perceptions of the queer community’, the petition adds.
Neither Paramount Pictures nor Cumberbatch have yet commented.