Matt Smith Denies 'Sherlock' Role, but Why?

Matt Smith is still most famous for playing the role of the Eleventh Doctor in BBC's cult phenomenon Doctor Who. Now that his tenure on the show's been over for a while though — and now that he's done filming Ryan Gosling's directoral debut Lost River — the question is what Smith will be doing next. We can narrow it down a little, though, Smith will not be joining the Sherlock cast.

There hadn't really been any solid rumors that Smith was going to appear on Sherlock, but nevertheless, Smith fielded a question on the topic during an appearance at WonderCon:

Listen, there's no room for me on Sherlock. They've got Benedict [Cumberbatch] and Martin [Freeman], that's quite enough peculiar Englishmen for that show. There's no room for another.

While one could argue that you could only very rarely have enough peculiar Englishmen in your life, there's really only a few things that would lead to Smith being on the show. One of those is Steven Moffat, showrunner of both Sherlock and Doctor Who. The other is the ginormous crossover of the Sherlock and Doctor Who fandoms, and that such an appearance would surely make the Internet pass out and very possibly crash tumblr. But it's important to remember another couple of things. One is that Matt Smith auditioned for Sherlock early on, and was almost cast as John Watson — the show would be very different were that the case, so what he says about the show "not having room" may be at least tangentially rooted in that. The other is that, in his post-Who life, Smith might want to step out of the expectations and very specific types of attention that follow him through roles that fall so perfectly into his Doctor Who era. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, for example, aren't clamoring for roles in Who: They're taking roles that excite them, and which span a wide range of types and genres. It's no doubt that Smith would kill it on Sherlock. But then again, maybe it's time for him to kill it outside of the Moffatverse.