‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Director Says Benedict Cumberbatch Only Thinks He Read The Entire Script

Few people at Marvel have actually read the entire Avengers: Infinity War script, and that number might have just become even smaller.

Avengers: Infinity War co-director Joe Russo and producer Trinh Tran spoke to Channel NewsAsia and were asked about Doctor Strange actor Benedict Cumberbatch saying he was one of the few to have read the entire script. Russo threw some doubt on that claim, saying “He thinks he read the entire script”.

“We wrote fake scenes,” Russo said. “Fake drafts of the script and delivered them to the actors,” seeming to suggest that could very well have happened to Cumberbatch.

“Different versions so people didn’t know what version they were reading,” Tran said.

So it seems there’s a chance that Cumberbatch could’ve been fooled as well, though odds are he did get to read much more of the actual script than his fellow heroes, and that was only because of his role in the film.

“Well, that’s a loaded question, because I’m not supposed to have read the script,” Cumberbatch told EW, “But I have. It’s just mind-blowingly epic. What I thought is, this just doesn’t stop. Once it starts, it does. Not. Stop. It’s just this horrible, brilliant, terrifying, at times funny, at times very moving, relentless action. It’s like everyone’s constantly in crisis, and catching up with themselves, and it’s really breathless to read a script like that. This isn’t a slow burn. You’re really thrown in helter-skelter. [Laughs] It’s got a lot of facets to it, but I think the main one for me was just how utterly relentless the events and action were.”

“Well, it’s not Marvel’s practice to hand around the whole script of any particular one of their enterprises, especially a film as big as this, and as secret as this,” Cumberbatch said. “I kind of had to have a bit of an overview to understand what I was doing in it. Maybe I’m just a bit more stupid than the other actors involved. I just need a little bit of special care. And they were very sweet, and chained me to something immovable whilst I read it, and unchained me after I finished reading it.”

Marvel Studios’ Black Panther is now playing in theaters. Avengers: Infinity War hits theaters on April 27, 2018. It is followed by Ant-Man and The Wasp on July 6, 2018, Captain Marvel on March 8, 2019, the fourth Avengers movie on May 3, 2019, the sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming on July 5, 2019, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in 2020.