Eep! First official peek at Benedict Cumberbatch as Marvel’s Doctor Strange

Our fangirl hearts have been Sherlock-ed since the first episode of, well, Sherlock, and so we just about busted out of our skin when we heard that Cumberbatch was not ONLY going to play a Marvel superhero (!!!) but he was going to play the TITLE superhero in Marvel’s upcoming Doctor Strange.

For those of you who don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of comic books, Doctor Stephen Vincent Strange is a brilliant-but-egotistical doctor who is involved in a terrible car accident, a tragedy that sets him on course to become Sorcerer Supreme, a wizard responsible for protecting Planet Earth from all the magical bad guys.

Yes, there’s been the occasional blurry paparazzi pic, but Entertainment Weekly just released the first official pics and they. look. SICK.

These are REALLY early peeks, considering the movie JUST started filming in November and actually hasn’t even finished shooting yet (production is set to wrap in March). In fact, Cumberbatch actually used the Entertainment Weekly shoot to get some practice in.

I’m still in the infancy of learning all that,” Cumberbatch told EW. “It was like, okay, I’ve got to keep throwing these poses, these spells, these rune-casting things, everything he does physically. I’m thinking, there’s going to be a huge amount of speculation and intrigue over the positioning of thatfinger as opposed to it being there, or there. And I’m still working on that. We haven’t played any of those scenes yet. I felt really self-conscious. But, then, by the end, it was great. It’s like anything, you just have to experiment.”

Cumberbatch is VERY excited to get a handle on his magic-making (and VERY excited for the special effects).

“These gestures are ways of creating the magic. It’s a beautiful thing, it’s balletic, it’s very dynamic,” he explained. “And once the boys in the backroom get to work on it, there’s going to be crazy s–t going on.”

He promises us a TON of action with this one (which, like, we maybe kind of expected because it’s a Marvel superhero movie, but still?)

“There’s all sorts of craziness [in Doctor Strange],” says Cumberbatch. “Falling, flying, jumping, fighting, punching, getting punched. It’s really rough and tumble.”

So excited, too excited, check out the rest of the photos/peeks over here.

(Image via Shutterstock)