Is 'Journey's End' next up for Benedict Cumberbatch?
Ho-Hum. Another day, another day that Benedict Cumberbatch is being linked to a starring role in a proposed new film. According to the Sunday Times, the Sherlock star has been targeted to play the lead role of the hero Captain Stanhope in Journey’s End, a new film based on the R.C Sherriff’s 1928 play about a group of officers in the last year of the conflict.
The storyline, which is set entirely in a trench on the western front, focuses on a group of public school officers struggling with the pressures of trench warfare in 1918, the final year of WWI.
While Cumberbatch starred as the idealistic Christopher Tietjens in the BBC series Parade’s End, others mentioned in the same breath of potential stars are Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne both of whom have also had memorable roles in previous WWI efforts with Hiddleston playing Captain James Nicholls in Steven Spielberg’s film version of the stage play War Horse and Redmayne starring as Stephen Wraysford in the recent BBC adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ novel Birdsong, which also aired on PBS in America.
It won’t be the first time that Journey’s End would hit the big screen. A 1930 version was banned by Nazi Germany in 1933. The recently rekindled interest is due to a letter from Prince Andrew to the head of Warner Bros UK Josh Berger asking to him reconsider reclaiming the rights to the project and the story which the Prince said was of significance to the UK as we reach the war’s 100th anniversary.
Unfortunately, as with each project that comes Benedict’s way, my main thought is to wonder just how much longer this puts off the next set of Sherlock. And people wonder why it takes two years between series…
