Shocking scenes from the set of “Spider-Man: Now Way Home” this week as Sorcerer Supreme Dr. Stephen Strange teleported directly onto the craft services table, ruining a perfectly good buffet. Although he was confused to discover he’s a fictional character in our universe, he found the cast and crew “very agreeable.” But there have also been reports of tension on set, after he discovered that Benedict Cumberbatch, the actor playing him, is able-bodied.
“I was suspicious at first, mainly because his name sounds like an Eldritch spell,” Strange told us. “I have severely reduced function in my hands, and have been left with chronic pain since the car accident. When I met Ben, he was calm, polite and energetic. That was a dead giveaway.”
On seeing the film, Strange had a mixed reaction. “Well, the transdimensional magic duels were all thoroughly realistic, but they took liberties with my personal life. There were no scenes of me apoplectically drooling on the couch at three in the afternoon, or crying my way through an entire catering pack of Doritos into the early hours. Not even a 20-minute scene of me fumbling to get my pain medication out of the packet. These people don’t know me at all.”
Frustrated by the film industry’s refusal to cast disabled actors as disabled characters, Strange sank into a meditative vision to find a more equitable universe. As he broke out of the magical trance, we asked Strange how many of the millions of universes he saw had cast a disabled actor to play him. “One,” he told us gravely. After Strange departed to meet the actor in question, he returned chipper and enthusiastic. “I taught him my trick of stuffing a couple of heating pads into a pair of oven mitts, just to ease the pain. We had a few laughs and fought an interdimensional monster hell-bent on sapping our power and erasing us from existence. So it wasn’t too different from dealing with the film industry.”
Oh yes.
One is better than none
[but I dare say Strange and others would have to search yet more universes].