Here's Your Very Early First Look at Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange

"I felt really self-conscious," says Benedict.

Sadly, confirmed god-level actor Joaquin Phoenixwill not be playing Doctor Strange in Marvel's aptly titled Doctor Strange. The tiny indie studio has instead enlisted the Sherlock-centered powers of Benedict Cumberbatch for a film that will most certainly bear no further resemble to that near-perfect BBC series. Nearly a full year ahead of Doctor Strange's release, Entertainment Weekly asked Cumberbatch to try on his new digs for their kind-of-a-big-deal First Look issue.

"I’m thinking, there’s going to be a huge amount of speculation and intrigue over the positioning of that finger as opposed to it being there, or there," Cumberbatch tells EW of the awkwardness of adjusting to the Doc Strange life. "And I’m still working on that. We haven’t played any of those scenes yet. I felt really self-conscious. But, then, by the end, it was great. It’s like anything, you just have to experiment."

Doctor Strange, which also stars Tilda Swinton and Rachel McAdams, only just started principal photography last month and isn't scheduled to wrap filming until March 2016. With a release date set for Nov. 4, that gives everyone roughly 10 months of exponentially obsessive speculation until we see just how much justice Cumberbatch will bring to the story of Earth's favorite guardian against threatening mysticism. So far, so good.

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