Benedict Cumberbatch Joins Prada’s Actors-Packed Fall Campaign

FLOWER TALE: Benedict Cumberbatch is the latest actor to join the rich roster of talents from the movie industry fronting ad campaigns for Prada.

Posing in a solo image, wearing a duffle coat and facing a life-size orchid against an intense black backdrop, Cumberbatch is flanked by other newcomers to the Prada campaign set, including his costar in Jane Campion’s 2021 movie “The Power of the Dog,” Kodi Smit-McPhee. The clean-cut Australian movie star wears a tan bomber jacket and slim-fit tailored pants and is portrayed opposite a nigella blue flower.

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Chinese actor Li Xian, known for his 2020 role in “Soul Snatcher,” is also new to the squad, here portrayed in a floor-length parka facing a bright yellow calathea crotalifera flower, joining Hunter Schafer and Letitia Wright, who both appeared in previous Prada ads. The former was captured in a glossy red leather jacket matching a vermilion peony diana parks blossom. All three talents are Prada ambassadors.

Lensed by Willy Vanderperre, the campaign intends to explore “eternal, timeless values of humanity, universal emotions,” such as beauty, care and love, Prada said in a statement, with blown-up flowers used as a metaphor of “beauty between the everyday and the extraordinary.”

A video flanking the ad campaign scripted by Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Hours,” shows each talent in paradoxical conversation with the respective blooms.

Cumberbatch is poised to star in Wes Anderson’s upcoming 37-minute-long movie, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” for Netflix.

A BAFTA, Emmy and a Laurence Olivier Award winner and Academy Award and Golden Globe Award-nominated actor, Cumberbatch has most recently reprised his role as Doctor Strange in Marvel’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” movie. A London native, he was appointed a CBE at Buckingham Palace for services to the performing arts and to charity in 2015 by the late Queen Elizabeth II.

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