There’s something about good actors also being good mimics. There’s some connection between being good at one and also being good at the other. It makes a certain kind of sense, especially given accent work and how being able to mimic would make mastering an accent easier. So when you tell me that Benedict Cumberbatch is good at impressions, it’s like—well of course he is, he’s a super good actor. He’s good at all of that stuff.
But The Batch is REALLY good at impressions. While promoting The Imitation Game, MTV’s Josh Horowitz challenged him to do a series of celebrity impressions and he knocked almost all of them out of the park. He nails John Malkovich, Sean Connery, Owen Wilson, and Tom Hiddleston, and crushes it on Alan Rickman. Matthew McConaughey made me laugh with the hand waving, but I am deducting points on Michael Caine, simply because nothing and no one will ever top Dueling Michael Caines.
The Cumbercollective is a house divided over The Batch’s engagement to Sophie Hunter. Lainey has addressed the Cumhard deniers, but conspiracy theory emails keep coming in. Most of the ones I’ve gotten accuse Harvey Weinstein of engineering the whole thing to help Cumberbatch’s Oscar chances. As is usually the case when superfans get upset at their idols, the issue is really that The Object has deviated from The Fantasy. The Cumhard emails I’ve read are all efforts to explain a decision that doesn’t jive with the fan-constructed image of Cumberbatch, but that’s just it. There’s a real person behind The Fantasy, a person we don’t actually know.
So let’s just stick with The Fantasy—it will never let us down. (Assuming you’re let down at all—I’m not, I don’t give a f*ck about the marriages of people I don’t know, in fact, I don’t care about the marriages of most of the people I do know.) Whatever you may think of Cumberbatch’s engagement, we can all agree that The Batch is looking good and that these impressions are highly entertaining.
