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First official photos of Benedict Cumberbatch as Marvel’s Doctor Strange revealed

Larry Bartleet

The superhero film will be released on November 4, 2016

The first official photos of Marvel’s new superhero film, Doctor Strange, have emerged, showing star Benedict Cumberbatch in costume as the ‘Sorcerer Supreme’.

The film began shooting in November and finishes in March, with Cumberbatch’s costars including Rachel McAdams, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Tilda Swinton. In the film Cumberbatch’s character, a surgeon, “discovers the hidden world of magic and alternate dimensions” following a serious car accident.

Appearing on Entertainment Weekly’s latest cover in costume as the surgeon-turned-superhero, Cumberbatch said, “I’m still in the infancy of learning all that [gesturing and spell-casting]. It was like, okay, I’ve got to keep throwing these poses, these spells, these rune-casting things, everything he does physically. I’m thinking, there’s going to be a huge amount of speculation and intrigue over the positioning of that finger as opposed to it being there, or there. And I’m still working on that.”

Other roles in the film have been kept secret until now. Marvel president Kevin Feige said that McAdams will play “a fellow surgeon that has a history with Strange and is his sort of lynchpin to his old life, once he steps into he role of a sorcerer. She is someone he connects with at the beginning, and reconnects with, and helps anchor his humanity.”

Chiwetel Ejiofor will play Baron Karl Mordo, one of the comics’ villains, while Tilda Swinton will play a mysterious character known as The Ancient One. Feige says that Mads Mikkelsen’s character is “a sorcerer who breaks off into his own sect. He believes that The Ancient One is just protecting her own power base and that the world may be better off if we were to allow some of these other things through.”

See some of the film’s new photos and concept art below:

Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Deliver Us From Evil) is directing from a script by John Spaihts (Prometheus). Marvel has scheduled the film for release on November 4, 2016.