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"Although Benedict Cumberbatch's portrayal of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate garnered widespread acclaim, the actor had a harder time impressing one critic in particular: Assange himself.\nSee also: WikiLeaks in 'The Fifth Estate': Reality Is More Compelling Than Fantasy\n\"I tried to justify my reasons for doing the project,\" Cumberbatch, 37, told press at a Toronto International Film Festival roundtable earlier this month. \"It mattered to me a lot that he felt so passionately, but I wanted to persuade him that it wasn't necessarily going to be as bad as he feared it would be.\"\nCumberbatch said an older draft of The Fifth Estate script had leaked to the 42-year-old Assange, who described it as \"a mass propaganda attack against WikiLeaks, the organization and the character of my staff.\" (The film is partly based on the tell-all book, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website by former spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg, with whom Assange famously clashed.)\nDirector Bill Condon, 57, rejected Assange's assessment outright. \n\"It's in no way an attack on WikiLeaks,\" he told Mashable in an interview at TIFF. \"It's a celebration of WikiLeaks and what it set out to do. It is occasionally critical of Assange, and one of his tactics is to kind of conflate the two ideas so that anything that might be critical of him becomes, as he says, 'a propaganda attack.'\"\nStill, WikiLeaks isn't backing down. The website recently posted what it is calling a \"mature version\" of The Fifth Estate script, along with a memo that condemns the film as \"irresponsible, counterproductive and harmful.\"\nAssange, who founded WikiLeaks, also criticized Cumberbatch's portrayal, specifically calling out the British actor's Australian accent.\n\"We're all used to foreign actors trying to do Australian accents, and it's so grating on the ear,\" he said in a video interview. \"When you hear someone trying to do \u2014 a Brit trying to do an Australian accent and your own accent, I can't tell you how grating it is.\"\nFor his part, Cumberbatch reportedly had issues with Condon's direction for The Fifth Estate. \n\"On a lot of the stage direction, we collided paths because Bill did seem to be setting him up as this antisocial megalomanic,\" he told Vogue for its September issue.\nCumberbatch's co-star Daniel Br\u00FChl, who plays Domscheit-Berg, conversely had a much easier time interacting with his real-life counterpart. Domscheit-Berg invited Br\u00FChl, 35, to his house several times to discuss his relationship with Assange.\n\"He seemed to be very open and unrestrained, and I could tell how important that moment in his life was, and how he still suffers from the fact that this intense friendship relationship just collapsed and ended up in a disaster,\" Br\u00FChl told Mashable. \"I realized this was maybe or probably a significant moment in his life, and he was willing to do anything \u2014 leave his job, whatever \u2014 to support WikiLeaks.\"\nBr\u00FChl added that a flaw in Domscheit-Berg's behavior was \"wanting to be bigger than he is.\"\nBoth actors described their characters as \"complex,\" saying they strived to portray them accordingly.\n\u201CIt was important to me to portray him as a three-dimensional human being, and not get into a slagging match about whether he was good or bad,\" Cumberbatch said. \u201CThe kind of perception of him in a tabloid sense is very two-dimensional.\"\nWhile the actor declined to characterize Assange in a simplistic, clear-cut way, one thing he was unambiguous about was his involvement in the upcoming Star Wars film \u2014 Episode VII \u2014 which will be directed by J.J. Abrams. \n\u201CNo offer \u2014 it\u2019s all rumor, it\u2019s all gossip. No one\u2019s being offered other than the people we know are being offered,\" Cumberbatch said. \"Would I like to do it? I\u2019ve said many times of course I would, but J.J.\u2019s worked with me before. He knows where I live, so it\u2019s all up to him.\u201D\nBONUS: 13 Iconic Movie Quotes With Internet-Obsessed Twists\n\n\n\n13 Classic Movie Quotes Updated for the Digital Age\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n1. The Godfather\n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n2. Gone With the Wind\n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n3. The Graduate\n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n4. Terminator 2: Judgment Day \n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n5. The Wizard of Oz\n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n6. The Sixth Sense\n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n7. Star Wars\n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n8. Love Story\n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n9. Oliver!\n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n10. Sunset Blvd.\n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n11. Titanic\n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n12. Pulp Fiction\n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n13. Jerry Maguire\n\n\n\nImage: Imgur, Paul Gale\n\n\n\n\n\n\nImage: Jason Merritt/Staff/Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/09/29/benedict-cumberbatch-the-fifth-estate-julian-assange/>