Benedict Cumberbatch has some serious range. The dude can play Marvel superheroes and tragic Shakespearean figures and "slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals." Obviously someone thinks he can add a grouchy green character from a classic Christmas story to that list. Cumberbatch has just been announced as the new Grinch in an upcoming movie that retells Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the book that became a TV special that became a Jim Carrey movie.
As Slashfilm reports, the casting announcement came at Universal's presentation during the ongoing Cinemacon in Las Vegas where the studio showed off an animation test to demonstrate how the Grinch will look and movie in the animated movie. According to them, he basically looks like a 3-D version of the old-school cartoon. The movie is scheduled to open in November of 2017.
It's not the first voice acting Cumberbatch has done. He voiced Smaug in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and voiced a secret agent wolf in Penguins of Madagascar. He also voiced Severus Snape and the British prime minister in an episode of The Simpsons. And of course, the big one will be his role as the voice of Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, which comes out this week.
There's also his uncanny resemblance to one of the greatest cartoon characters of all time, Butthead, from MTV's Beavis and Butthead. We're still holding out hope he'll sign on if they ever get around to making a live-action movie version.
