One of the most exciting projects being readied at the moment is Bill Condon’s adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s “A Slight Trick Of The Mind”.
Set in 1947, Ian McKellen plays a long-retired Sherlock Holmes. Holmes now lives in a sleepy Sussex village with his housekeeper and her amateur-sleuthing son.
The famous Baker Street detective is haunted by an unsolved fifty year old case involving an angry husband and his unstable wife, a case of which he only remembers fragments. Speaking with Empire recently, he briefly discussed the project:
“it’s a charming book. That’s going to be my next job, when I’m finished on Broadway and I’m back with Bill Condon again, who I did Gods And Monsters with, and I’ll be filming in London, which will be wonderful.
I’ve never had ambitions to play Sherlock Holmes, but this is Sherlock in a very particular place… he’s nearly 100 years old, and in retirement, and it’s more about being a beekeeper than it is being a detective.”
He was also amusingly asked whether he has seen the BBC series take on the Holmes stories starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman:
“Of course, of course! I wanted to look at this Martin Freeman chap as Doctor Watson. I’ve met Benedict a couple of times. I knew his father, Timothy Carlton, when we were both quite young, and I remember him telling me that his real name was Cumberbatch. ‘But of course I had to change it because you could never be successful with a surname like that.'”
