Haven't seen Doctor Strange yet? Well, stop reading now! Still here? In the final act, Stephen Strange travels into the Dark Dimension and comes face to face with Dormammu, but if he looked familiar, it's because Benedict Cumberbatch played a key role in bringing him to life. Talking to IGN recently, director Scott Derrickson revealed who played the villain (he's not listed in the credits). "The voice was a British actor whose name I don't know, and Benedict – Benedict did the facial capture for it."
Asked whether this was done to leave the door open to a bigger name star being cast somewhere down the line (similar to Josh Brolin being cast as Thanos), the filmmaker replied: "No, no, it wasn't that at all. We knew it was an all CG character, but as we were in production Benedict brought it up as an idea. He said, 'What would you think about me doing it?' I said, 'Let me think about it, you know. It's an interesting idea, because I did fancy the idea that as this other-dimensional being he's not moving through the Dark Dimension, with a countenance, with eyes and a face, eyes and a mouth, and a human visage – why would he? He takes that form on to communicate with Strange."
"The more I thought about it the more I liked the idea," Derrickson continued when talking about the unorthodox casting decision. "Because no one understood Dormammu better than Benedict did. I also wrote that role to be a kind of ultra-inflated version of Strange. He is an ego run amok; he is this cosmic conqueror where everything, where literally everything in the multi-verse is about him.There's something interesting about this confrontation of this little, tiny guy who has this power of time and this monstrous conqueror who is trapped by a clever gambit. There's something about that worked well, and I didn't think anybody to interact with Benedict than he, himself."
That's a pretty fascinating approach, though some fans will likely be disappointed that Dormammu doesn't really resemble his comic book counterpart. Instead, he's essentially a giant head made of energy from the Dark Dimension, but reading between the lines here, it definitely sounds like we could see a more faithful version of the iconic bad guy if and when he makes his presence felt on Earth.