Benedict Cumberbatch apologizes “quite a lot” for playing non-binary Zoolander 2 character

Cis actor Benedict Cumberbatch is once again apologizing for playing a non-binary character in Zoolander 2, which was not a ridiculously good look. "I’ve had to apologize for that quite a lot. It’s a difficult one to talk about,” Cumberbatch said when the character, named All, came up in a look back at his career for Variety. "I love that group of people and it was the chance to sort of be part of something that the first time around was iconic and I was a huge fan of. But it got complicated and it got misunderstood and I upset people. I respect that, so I probably wouldn’t do that again now."

There was a lot of pushback against Cumberbatch's casting when the Ben Stiller-directed sequel came out in 2016, including an online petition urging audiences to boycott the film for its "offensive representation of non-binary individuals." All was skewered and satirized as much as anything else in the Zoolander-verse, with Stiller and Owen Wilson's Hansel asking them if they were a "male or female model" and if they "have a hot dog or a bun." "Cumberbatch’s character is clearly portrayed as an over-the-top, cartoonish mockery of androgyne/trans/non-binary individuals. This is the modern equivalent of using blackface to represent a minority," the petition, which received over 25,000 signatures, read.

As he mentioned, Cumberbatch has addressed this controversy before. In 2022, he admitted that there was "a lot of contention around the role, understandably now" during a Variety Actors On Actors interview. "I think in this era, my role would never be performed by anybody other than a trans actor. But I remember at the time not thinking of it necessarily in that regard, and it being more about two dinosaurs, two heteronormative clichés not understanding this new diverse world," he continued. "But it backfired a little bit."

The critics got their way because Zoolander 2 was an infamous flop, making just $28 million at the box office. "I thought everybody wanted this… And then it’s like, ‘Wow, I must have really fucked this up.' Everybody didn’t go to it. And it’s gotten these horrible reviews," Stiller said of the film last year. "It was definitely blindsiding to me. And it definitely affected me for a long time."