There are a handful of actors that I would be content to just sit and let them read the phone book. We’re talking the likes of Nicola Walker, Suranne Jones, Bill Nighy and, obviously, Benedict Cumberbatch. Judging from the amount of hours I have spent watching and re-watching Sherlock, MI5, Scott & Bailey, Doctor Foster, The Worricker Trilogy and State of Play, you’d think I had come to the conclusion that there are only four actors in England and they are in everything.

If Sherlock wasn’t enough to advance the name of Benedict Cumberbatch into the mix, all the evidence anyone needs for his instant inclusion into this exclusive club is the upcoming film, Jack the Ripper.

Clearly, this isn’t the first Ripper adaptation but it may be the most interesting. Previous adaptations, more often than not, spent time trying to figure out the identity of the Ripper and became as predictable as each adaptation trying to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.

The upcoming film reads a bit more cerebral as it appears to spend time exploring the socio-political context of 19th-century shadowy streets of Victorian London, highlighting the class struggles and societal turmoil that allowed the Ripper to evade capture while challenging audiences to see the killer as a human being with disturbing, yet relatable motives.

Directed by David Fincher and based on the Jack the Ripper murders in London’s Whitechapel district in 1888, the upcoming film sees Cumberbatch not only portraying Jack the Ripper but also takes on the role of a surgeon involved in the investigation.

The dual role immediately brings back memories of attending the 2011 Danny Boyle production of Frankenstein at the National Theatre in London where Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller brilliantly switched off the roles of the Monster and Dr. Frankenstein on a nightly basis.

Scheduled for a 31 October release, one can pretty much determine that with Benedict Cumberbatch in not one but two roles, audiences are in for an intense, psycological thriller that will, hopefully, thrive on a character driven storyline and not how each victim was killed.

Fingers crossed.