Benedict Cumberbatch in Zoolander 2
(Paramount Pictures)

‘It got complicated’: Benedict Cumberbatch knows his non-binary ‘Zoolander 2’ character was upsettingly offensive

Benedict Cumberbatch was riding a high going into 2016. He was a wildly popular actor and sex symbol, and also noted for being a nice person. But then he threw a bucket of cold water on all that by taking a role widely seen as being offensive to non-binary people.

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Cumberbatch played a character called “All” in the Ben Stiller comedy sequel Zoolander 2. This person was presented as being spacey and annoying, and was subjected to jokes about their genitals. There was quite a bit of blowback at the time, with some people actually starting a petition asking audiences to boycott the movie. “By hiring a cis actor to play a non-binary individual in a clearly negative way, the film endorses harmful and dangerous perceptions of the queer community at large,” it stated.

Cumberbatch didn’t respond to these criticisms at the time. But as the discourse around non-binary people came out into the open and evolved, he seemed to regret the role. In a 2022 interview, he said that in the current era the role would “never be performed by anybody other than a trans actor” and went on that he thought the storyline was “more about two dinosaurs, two heteronormative clichés [Stiller and Owen Wilson’s characters] not understanding this new diverse world. But it backfired a little bit.”

It did, and some people are still displeased to this day that Cumberbatch chose to mock the non-binary community at a time when they needed visibility. Now, Cumberbatch has spoken out once more about Zoolander 2.

In a Variety interview that was released Jan. 22 but has only started doing the rounds now, Cumberbatch says he “had to apologize quite a lot” for his performance as All. “It’s a difficult one to talk about,” he said. “I loved that group of people [his fellow cast members] and it was a chance to sort of be part of something that the first time around was iconic and I was a huge fan.”

“Then it got complicated, and it got misunderstood, and I upset people, and I respect that. So I probably wouldn’t do that again now.”

It’s still not quite an apology, though. In this respect, Cumberbatch is borrowing a page from the book of Eddie Redmayne, who played the role of a transgender woman in The Danish Girl and never managed a real “sorry” for it.

“I made that film with the best intentions, but I think it was a mistake,” he said in an interview with The Times in 2021, via Deadline. “The bigger discussion about the frustrations around casting is because many people don’t have a chair at the table. There must be a leveling, otherwise we are going to carry on having these debates.”

Yes, it’s good that both Cumberbatch and Redmayne expressed regret—but in a world where transgender and non-binary rights are being rolled back under the Trump administration, they really need to do more than that.


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Sarah Barrett
Sarah Barrett (she/her) is a freelance writer with The Mary Sue who has been working in journalism since 2014. She loves to write about movies, even the bad ones. (Especially the bad ones.) The Raimi Spider-Man trilogy and the Star Wars prequels changed her life in many interesting ways. She lives in one of the very, very few good parts of England.