“I’ve been lobbying for that,” the 45-year-old actor said. “There’s a whole bunch of people [among the 'Grey's' crew] who are into comics and Marvel, too, on the set and they’re like, ‘Doctor Strange, that’s the one you should do.’ It would be fantastic. It’d be a great TV show, especially for HBO or something like that. I don’t know if I’d necessarily do another show, a drama, that’s 24 episodes again. HBO you’re at 13 and I think that’s much better. It’s just so hard to sustain the quality after three years if you’re doing 24, 25 episodes a year. It all depends on who you have as a writing team — it’s how you set it up, what’s the tone and making sure you’re not locked into this one-season success [mentality], you can’t be afraid to think beyond that.”
There have been many attempts through the years to make a Doctor Strange film (and the character has some live-action television history as well) but the property is clearly gaining momentum. Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, has often mentioned the sorcerer supreme as a priority character and in a Hero Complex chat last December he put the character on an intriguing short list: “I have not been shy about my love for Dr. Strange, Black Panther and Luke Cage.” Last year, the screenwriting team of Thomas Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer was hired by Marvel to come up with a script. There also have been stirrings about a Doctor Strange television series that might be a complement or an alternative to a feature film. I asked Dempsey during our interview in Malibu if he had talked to Feige or Jeph Loeb, Marvel’s head of television.
