China loves Cumberbatch. According to an Oct. 29 article on the Chinese news site Caijing, the 37-year-old Cumberbatch, whom the Chinese call Curly Fu, “is the reason a new wave of Chinese viewers have turned to British television.” (‘Curly’ describes the star’s hairstyle, while ‘Fu’ is a shortened Chinese transliteration of ‘Holmes.’) The Caijing article attributes the recent spike in the popularity of British television in China to “the Sherlock effect,” and Cumberbatch’s rising star isn’t limited to the small screen. One journalist with the Beijing-based newspaper Jinghua Timessurveying viewers of the 2013 blockbuster sci-fi movie Star Trek Into Darkness found that most had gone to see Curly Fu, a villain they declared ”impossible to hate” because they had “never seen a bad guy so handsome before.”
The enthusiasm is most avid on the Internet, where Cumberbatch is an erotic god. In the Baidu Curly Fu Bar,an Internet forum devoted to the star, fans said they loved his hair, voice, height, eyes, physique, poise, nose, the speed at which he talks, and a certain ineffable charisma. (One viewer compared him favorably to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whom he plays in the recent film Fifth Estate, writing that Cumberbatch was “much more handsome.”) Some fans cataloguing his good traits also listed his “cute wife” Watson, whom they call ‘Peanut,’ because the Chinese phoneticization of Watson, huasheng, is a homonym for the legume. Amateur cartoon adaptations of Sherlock and Watson holding hands and photo-shopped images of Cumberbatch and Freeman kissing are available on Chinese websites. On Youku, China’s YouTube, a music video that set clips of Cumberbatch’s Holmes and Freeman’s Watson sharing knowing looksto a Chinese love song hasreceived over 70,000 views.
(Besides having the best title ever, the rest of the article is great, and has some of the best quotes, my favorute being “The Cumberbatch crush isn’t just a Chinese quirk; in October The Atlantic Wire wrote that the actor “holds a strange sway over certain parts of the Internet,”)
Okay wait wait this is all very interesting but. THEY CALL DR. WATSON PEANUT?
This is amazing.
Benedict Cumberbatch Is a Gay Erotic God in China – By Liz Carter
