The first known portrayal of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective par excellence Sherlock Holmes on film is a 30-second piece of silent footage dating to sometime around 1900 named Sherlock Holmes Baffled. Whether the mutton-chopped Victorians behind the camera knew they were kicking off a century-long tradition that would see hundreds of actors playing their hero is unclear, but every year, more Sherlocks have appeared on stage, TV and in film.
There’s a new Holmes joining their ranks this week, as Henry Lloyd-Hughes dons the deerstalker for Netflix’s The Irregulars. To mark the occasion, we took a look back over some of the standout Sherlocks (good and bad) of the past and considered where Lloyd-Hughes’ take might fit with his predecessors…
11. Will Ferrell in Holmes & Watson
A dire excuse for a comedy that won four Razzies and – thank God, in a way – lost a lot of cash at the box office, Holmes & Watson was inflicted upon the world in 2018. It was all the more painful for the fact the year should have been a sort of annus mirabilis for its Watson, John C Reilly, who starred in The Sisters Brothers and the masterful Stan & Ollie the same year. Just as terrible, if not worse, was the shift that Will Ferrell put in, which was sphincter-clenchingly unfunny. Reilly and Ferrell had collaborated before, on the cultishly entertaining Talladega Nights and the mostly passable Step Brothers. Whatever changed here – perhaps the absence of Adam McKay directing? – Holmes & Watson was as fiendishly bad as its villain Moriarty (who, incidentally, was played by Ralph Fiennes. And, no, he wasn’t very good either).
10. Sir Michael Caine in Without A Clue
Michael Caine did technically play “Sherlock Holmes” in a 1988 film called Without A Clue, though in this case, Holmes was a drunk hired to pretend to be a detective concocted as a front for the real genius behind the cases he solved: Ben Kingsley’s Dr Watson. At the time, the New York Times declared the film “appallingly witless”, which is as damning a verdict as can be delivered for a character defined by, well, his wit. While it’s not that bad, it’s hardly held up as one of Caine’s greatest outings either…
9. Jeremy Brett in Sherlock Holmes
Dripping in more acid than a Haight-Ashbury love-in, Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes was a staple of British TV in the 1980s. Over 40 episodes of Sherlock Holmes (bonus points for a straightforward title), Brett’s was very much a bread-and-butter performance of the character, as he deduced the living daylights out of a series of cases in cut-glass English while generally being mean to everybody and sucking on a pipe. It’s not hard to see why Brett might be considered the definitive televisual Holmes, at least by the generation brought up on Granada, which produced the series. A solid, if somewhat vanilla Holmes.
8. Christopher Plummer in Murder By Decree
The late Christopher Plummer played a sympathetic and humanised take on Sherlock Holmes in 1979, in a film called Murder By Decree in which Holmes and Watson investigated Jack The Ripper. The film relies heavily on the unlikely but admittedly sexy theory known as the Royal Conspiracy, which posited that the Ripper was the royal physician Sir William Gull, who murdered five women to cover up an affair between Queen Victoria’s grandson, the Duke Of Clarence, and a Whitechapel prostitute (anyone who has read Alan Moore’s graphic novel masterpiece From Hell will be familiar with the details). Stuffed full of Masonic conspiracies and fortune tellers, Murder By Decree is one for those whose republican leanings might have been piqued by recent events.
7. Henry Lloyd-Hughes in The Irregulars
A solidly mid-table entry into the Premier League of Sherlock adaptations, the stars here are its titular gang, the Baker Street Irregulars, those urchins who act as Sherlock’s network of informants in some of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. Here, they’re reinvented as a rather modern handful of teenagers who spend their time investigating paranormal shenanigans. Meanwhile, their Sherlock has the dismissive vibe of a louche hipster, a sort of tattooed layabout older brother who idolises Russell Brand (he’s very much a supporting character here and doesn’t even show up until episode four). The Irregulars shares the same irreverence that Bridgerton recently demonstrated, including a willingness to overlay a hip-hop soundtrack onto shots of period London and cast non-white actors in petticoats. As far as young adult TV goes, the series hardly reinvents the wheel, but it does drastically reinterpret elements of the Holmes canon for a new generation. If that appeals, so will this.
6. Sir Ian McKellen in Mr Holmes
The classic approach to making a particular take on Holmes and his enablers stand out is to flip a character in some dramatic way (“Holmes is a woman! Moriarty is a child! Lestrade is a computer!”) or take him and drop him into an unfamiliar environment (“Sherlock in New York! Sherlock in the Arctic! Sherlock in space!”). Mr Holmes did both, but much more subtly: Sir Ian McKellen’s portrayal of the detective introduced us to an aged Sherlock Holmes who, past 90, tries to solve one final mystery during his retirement in post-war Sussex. Watson, meanwhile, is now a successful author after fictionalising and sensationalising Holmes’ cases decades earlier. Despite the potential for this all to descend into pastiche, McKellen pulls it off with aplomb, giving one of the genuinely heartfelt and human interpretations of a traditionally ice-cold, unfeeling character.
5. Henry Cavill in Enola Holmes
Enola Holmes gave Henry Cavill a chance to have a stab at Sherlock and his few scenes in the film were a lot more interesting than they might have been on paper. Cavill brought an affectionate, older-brother energy that worked nicely alongside both Millie Bobby Brown’s excitable titular wunderkind and Sam Claflin’s ramrod panjandrum Mycroft. Whether that’s accurate for Sherlock, who’s traditionally more of a misanthrope, is up for debate, but let’s doff our deerstalkers to Cavill for bringing something new to the role.
4. Jonny Lee Miller in Elementary
Jonny Lee Miller is not the only Trainspotting alum to play Sherlock Holmes. Astoundingly, Ewen Bremner, aka Spud, AKA the man born to have the smack scared out of him by Robert Carlyle’s psychopathic Begbie, cameoed as Holmes in ITV’s Houdini And Doyle back in 2016. But over seven seasons of Elementary, it was Miller who carved out his own memorable modern-day take on Holmes, a recovering English opiate addict in New York, with a little help from Lucy Liu’s “Joan Watson” and Natalie Dormer’s “Jamie Moriarty” (remember what we said about flipping the characters dramatically?). Cursed to coincide with the ultra-popular modern-day BBC adaptation of Sherlock (see below), Elementary never quite made the splash it could have in the UK, but given the Gatiss/Moffat phenomenon appears to have wrapped up for good, it could be the methadone Cumberbatch superfans need to finally kick their Sherlock addiction.
3. Robert Downey Jr in Sherlock Holmes
The blockbuster Sherlock, Downey’s take on the character was as engaging as he was flippant (he was also extremely lucrative, making more than $1 billion over two films). The Golden Globe-winning shtick here was a sort of “Queen’s English Iron Man” – Tony Stark if he went to Eton. And broadly, it worked, given Downey is the perfect balance of annoying and charismatic to keep things fun. Every time his smart ass gets whacked by an East End bruiser in a bare knuckle fight, it’s secretly a bit satisfying to watch, even as you’re still rooting for Holmes in the long run. Add in the fact that Downey can pull off the lazily jaded humour of an addict – he’s been there himself, after all – and Guy Ritchie’s trademark whiplash editing and the Downey Holmes franchise deserves its plaudits. Roll on the planned third instalment this December.
2. Basil Rathbone
In 14 films produced between 1939 and 1946, Basil Rathbone brought to Sherlock Holmes a patrician elegance and verve worthy of Errol Flynn (who, incidentally, Rathbone starred opposite in The Adventures Of Robin Hood in 1938). Combining withering Victorianisms and a sprinkling of the glamour and production value of Golden Age Hollywood, Rathbone’s time playing Holmes spanned two distinct eras: his first two films, produced by 20th Century Fox in 1939, were set in the original late-Victorian milieu that Conan Doyle created, but the later ones, courtesy of Universal Pictures, were contemporary to the 1940s. In three of them, Rathbone’s Holmes even set his wits against Nazis, tracking down and apprehending thinly fictionalised versions of the Gestapo and Lord Haw-Haw. It would become the role that defined his life and career; with Nigel Bruce beside him as his Watson, Rathbone made the role his and all on-screen Holmeses to play the role since have done so in his shadow.
1. Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock
The perfect combination of genius and arrogance, Sherlock’s Sherlock reintroduced an entire generation of British teenagers to Conan Doyle’s creation, expertly updating the franchise without it ever feeling forced (the series also represented Andrew Scott’s break into the mainstream, for which we will be eternally grateful: without his twisted, preening Moriarty, there’s no sexy priest). The series would have been impossible without the inspired casting of Benedict Cumberbatch, whose icy but ultimately sympathetic Sherlock displays traits many might associate with someone on the autistic spectrum. He’s not indifferent or disdainful to the feelings of others, like earlier versions of the character, but he does find them hard to interpret, and it’s an important difference. And then there was the writing. Never mind water cooler moments, the series, masterfully orchestrated by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, gave us water cooler hours, all culminating in that stupefying jump from the roof of St Bart’s in "The Reichenbach Fall". For the first time since 1893, when Conan Doyle “killed off” Holmes for the first time, the entire nation was talking about Sherlock Holmes.
The Irregulars is out now on Netflix.
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