Anyone keeping an eye on up-and-coming actors out of England will have a lot to enjoy in Steven Spielberg's War Horse, the epic hitting theaters at the end of this year, just weeks after Spielberg's other new film The Adventures of Tintin comes out. The film stars Jeremy Irvine, who was playing a spear carrier with the Royal Shakespeare Company when Spielberg picked him to play the lead, a boy who enlists as a soldier in World War I solely to be reunited with his beloved horse.

Also on board are actors with more familiar film credits, and they're at the center of the first official image from the movie, which ran alongside an interview with Irvine in The Daily Mail. Check out Benedict Cumberbatch (of TV's Sherlock, Four Lions and Atonement), Patrick Kennedy (also of Atonement) and Tom Hiddleston (playing Loki in this summer's Thor) as soldiers on horseback in the image below.


In addition this week's Entertainment Weekly boasts five more images; they're not online yet, but The Film Stage scanned them for all our benefit. Check out three of them below and click over to The Film Stage for the rest. It's also well worth reading The Daily Mail's interview with Irvine, if only so you can get a head start on knowing who he is before the movie hits December 28. And if you're in New York, you can get another head start-- the play version of The War Horse, also adapted from Michael Morpurgo's novel, is opening on Broadway at the Lincoln Center on Tuesday.