Permit me to take this opportunity to admit two things: that I’d totally forgotten about the existence of The Fifth Estate, and that I’m ill-acquainted with the work of Benedict Cumberbatch. I like the guy! Don’t get me wrong! But I’ve only made it through half of the first episode of Sherlock and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Four Lions make for a really small sample size. Maybe, given that 2013 looks to be the year of the Cumberbatch, I should go back and watch The Other Boleyn Girl, re-watch Atonement, and catch up on Sherlock so I can join the legions of fans foaming at the mouth for the show’s third series.
As to excuses in support of the first confession, well, I have a few. The Fifth Estate, which details the rise and scandal of WikiLeaks and examine founder Julian Assange, marks the lowest-profile film Cumberbatch will grace with his presence this year, which is to say that it’s only just started principal photography and therefore doesn’t have much by way of the currency of hype. I don’t know if anything Bill Condon does these days can really be labeled as “low profile”, either, and that has little and less to do with his Twilight success. Condon’s a great filmmaker. If he wants to give Assange the Social Network treatment, he has my blessing.
This is the part where I try to dodge any sort of personal bias regarding WikiLeaks, and simply say that I’m deeply interested to see what an artist like Condon might mine out of Assange’s story and what conclusions he might draw about the moral issues bound up in 2010’s US diplomatic cables leak. In the meantime, we have our first image of Cumberbatch as Julian Assange, with Daniel Brühl as Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who you may not recognize as Inglourious Basterds‘ Frederick Zoller behind that beard. The Fifth Estate will hit theaters on November 15th of this year.
(Source: Badass Digest)