You not may have heard about this little movie called Doctor Strange coming out in two weeks, but it's getting some pretty positive reviews on the internet. It follows Stephen Strange, a man who sets out to learn the ways of the mystic arts and eventually become the defender of our planet from inter-dimensional threats. Along the way to becoming a powerful sorcerer, he also gets totally ripped. Doctor Strange has as muscular a body as any superhero, and actor Benedict Cumberbatch recently described what his hero training regime was like.
You eat very well, you get trained by brilliant people, you work out and you do yoga, you have a physio if you injure yourself, you do stunts, you do running, you have someone editing your diet. It's all handed to you. It's not that hard. You just really have to apply yourself. We're lucky. People would kill for that kind of experience. As long as you do it sensibly, it's safe. There are good ways of doing it and there are bad ways of doing it. You can do a body-building thing where you're destroying your body to rip new muscle or you can do it the way I did it, which is quite diligently, over a long period of time, with a healthy diet.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Benedict Cumberbatch detailed his own personal workout routine for becoming a superhero. Every actor in the MCU has to go through hell and back to get their superheroic physique (Chris Hemsworth wasn't born jacked like that), and Cumberbatch was no different. Instead of hitting the weights for hours on end, Cumberbatch went with a slower but focused approach, consisting of a steady diet and exercise over a long period of time.
Benedict Cumberbatch calls this the Shakespeare diet because he first started training while he was performing Hamlet in London. He'd do an hour of training in the morning, and then rehearse Hamlet all day. Then once the show was up and running, he'd train in the morning, go to the studio to rehearse Doctor Strange, and then go back to perform Hamlet. According to Cumberbatch, "Hamlet was like a three-hour cardiovascular [workout]," and he got into peak physical condition during that time; all the stunt work on Doctor Strange didn't hurt either.
You don't think of Doctor Strange as someone who needs his body to be Captain America levels of fit, but I suppose it just comes with the territory. Strange is pretty anti-physical -- his punches come from his thoughts more than his fists. This live action version of Doctor Strange seems more hands on his comics counterpart. We know that in the film Strange is instructed in martial arts alongside magic, so he can basically beat you up in any plane of existence.
Doctor Strange is bowing in theaters in just a few short weeks on November 4.
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