There’s about 350 things I’d rather do than watch GREY’S ANATOMY. If I feel the need to see something with Patrick Dempsey, I’ll watch the 1989 classic LOVERBOY. Yes, I said classic.
So it seems McSexypants or McNugget or whatever they call him on that show, is interested in playing the one and only Doctor Stephen Strange. A few days ago, Dempsey shared his thoughts with Hero Complex, “I’ve been lobbying for that. There’s a whole bunch of people [among the ‘Grey’s’ crew] who are into comics and Marvel, too, on the set and they’re like, ‘Doctor Strange, that’s the one you should do.’ It would be fantastic. It’d be a great TV show, especially for HBO or something like that. I don’t know if I’d necessarily do another show, a drama, that’s 24 episodes again. HBO you’re at 13 and I think that’s much better. It’s just so hard to sustain the quality after three years if you’re doing 24, 25 episodes a year. It all depends on who you have as a writing team — it’s how you set it up, what’s the tone and making sure you’re not locked into this one-season success [mentality], you can’t be afraid to think beyond that.”
There hasn’t been much on giving Doctor Strange the big screen or small screen treatment since last year when screenwriters were chosen. Deadline gave the heads up last June that CONAN THE BARBARIAN writers Thomas Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer were hired to pen the script. It was undetermined at the time if it would be for a feature film or television series. Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, mentioned back in December that Dr. Strange, Black Panther and Luke Cage were priorities of his. Hero Complex asked if Dempsey had spoken to Feige or Jeph Loeb, Marvel’s head of television:
“He knows what’s going on. There was stuff going on. At Comic-Con they were talking about me playing it and there was a rumor that I’d been cast. I mean, it’s something that’s kind of out there and, you know, I’ve been looking at that. It would be a fun one to do. Hopefully, doing something like ‘Transformers’ is about to show myself in an action situation where I’m not mister-weepy-doctor guy, you know, not McDreamy. You have to change that in people’s view. I’m still hungry for other things. I’d love to play Doctor Strange.”
Would Dempsey make a good Dr. Strange?