Stephen Fry cast as Mycroft in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes 2

In a stroke of rather brilliant casting, the awesome Stephen Fry (ALICE IN WONDERLAND, V FOR VENDETTA) has been cast as Mycroft Holmes, the older, smarter, and infinitely lazier brother of Sherlock in SHERLOCK HOLMES 2.

During the Danny Baker Show on BBC Radio’s 5 Live, Fry revealed that he would be starring in director Guy Ritchie’s upcoming HOLMES sequel:

“I’m playing Mycroft in the sequel to the Sherlock Holmes film Guy Ritchie directed with Robert Downey Jr., and that sort of part is fun, but just once in a while to play a genuine all round sort of lead figure with complexity and tragedy and wit and all the sort of things that Oscar [Wilde] had was a once in a lifetime thrill.”

I absolutely love this description of Mycroft, taken from Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans (via Wikipedia):

“Heavily built and massive, there was a suggestion of uncouth physical inertia in the figure, but above this unwieldy frame there was perched a head so masterful in its brow, so alert in its steel-gray, deep-set eyes, so firm in its lips, and so subtle in its play of expression, that after the first glance one forgot the gross body and remembered only the dominant mind.”

Apart from knowing that arch-nemesis Moriarty will be the sequel’s antagonist, not much else is known about the film. But with Mycroft/Fry in the equation now, I already can’t wait to hear the what’s sure to be hilarious banter between him and Robert Downey Jr.

SHERLOCK HOLMES 2 – which stars RDJ, Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, and Noomi Rapace – opens December 16, 2011.