Much digital ink was spilled over the casting of Tilda Swinton as Marvel’s Ancient One. To their credit, it’s something neither Scott Derrickson nor Swinton herself shied away from during the film’s production cycle, tackling cries of whitewashing head-on. Whether their rationale was actually convincing enough is something we’ll leave to you, though.
Putting that sticky situation to one side for now, there’s a hushed excitement swirling around the imminent Doctor Strange, but thanks to revelations about the mid and end-credits sequences, sequel chatter is already finding its way onto the interwebs. One possibility that hasn’t necessarily been considered, though, is a prequel movie involving The Ancient One, and that’s something that Swinton herself is absolutely on board for.
Per The Playlist:
“I am constantly dropping hints to Kevin Feige that I finally think he’s beginning to realize I’m not joking about a prequel,” Swinton says. “I want a prequel of the setting up of Kamar-Taj with Mordo, The Ancient One and Wong. That’s what I want and I’m telling you here right now.”
When asked how Swinton and the film’s costume designers settled on the look for The Ancient One, Swinton revealed that,
“It was my suggestion that I be bald. We looked at all sorts of possibilities with the look and it just felt too laid down and too sort of hokey somehow, all the things we went for,” Swinton says. “And I just love the idea that it’s incredibly ancient and gender-free to be bald, but also very supersonic and modern. I thought it looked great. I thought if maybe she had these scars on her head it might show a history and the savagery of that history that she survived all sorts of really gnarly things over the centuries. We’re never going to know what, but she’d earned her stripes as it were.”
We’re now mere days away from the release of Marvel’s Doctor Strange and at least based on early Twitter reactions, it looks as though the wait for Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sorcerer Supreme has been worth it.
