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Watch Benedict Cumberbatch Read an Angry Kurt Vonnegut Letter on Book Burning With the Fire of a Thousand Sexy Suns

By Vivian Kane | Videos | June 3, 2014 |

By Vivian Kane | Videos | June 3, 2014 |


This weekend, as part of the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts, Benedict Cumberbatch and a bunch of other celebrities read letters from “persons famous, infamous and unknown.” The last letter of the event was from 1973, written by Kurt Vonnegut to an American school board member at Drake High School in North Dakota, who had ordered copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to be burned.

Even with a (iffy) American accent, that voice. And even in a shaky, blurry video, those cheekbones. It helps that he’s reading the words of a brilliant, articulate, impassioned man, but really, Benedict Cumberbatch could persuade me to do or think anything. He could be telling me to actually go out and burn books and I’d do whatever he said.


For an added bonus, here he is reading a sexy letter Iggy Pop wrote to a young fan. That’s some pants-meltable swagger right there.