Whilst working on big movies from MCU projects like Avengers: Endgame to big Steven Spielberg set pieces such as War Horse, there are invariably long hours on set and a lot of down time. Two MCU heroes in particular, Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston, once collaborated on said Steven Spielberg movie, and The Courier actor recently revealed the fart game the two even coerced Spielberg into. As I said, there’s a lot of downtime on sets.
During a recent interview on The Late Late Show with James Corden, Benedict Cumberbatch shared a story about an app he apparently thoroughly enjoys called the Atomic Fart Machine. He was using said app many moons ago while he was filming the Steven Spielberg film War Horse. Yes, iconic director Steven Spielberg.
There’s a very funny app called The Atomic Fart Machine. It’s great fun. It’s just all these different sounding farts. It’s a very amusingly long list and a very amusingly labelled list. Anything from ‘the backdoor classic’ to “princess” to “oh gosh, is that a wet one.’ That kind of thing. There’s a big range.
I know we’re a little ways into this tale and Steven Spielberg and Tom Hiddleston have not even entered the story, but I still think you need Benedict Cumberbatch’s narration on the different types of farts available in the game in order to enjoy what comes next. And what comes next is the story of the Hiddleston and Cumberbatch goofing off during War Horse, which came out back in 2011. In fact, as Benedict Cumberbatch notes, about a decade ago, they were filming an intense scene for Steven Spielberg’s film that involved about 80 horses and a cavalry charge on an open field, intense stuff. Yet, Cumberbatch was awaiting filming and playing with his fart app of all things, when Steven Spielberg got interested in what he was doing:
And we were in the tent with the man himself --I’d been playing on this app --and basically you have to hit the color which matches up to a fart sound… [Spielberg] went, ‘What is that?’ What game are you playing? I went, ‘Oh. Ohhh, uh, well it’s called the Atomic Fart Machine.’ So, literally myself and Tom Hiddleston -- who was in the film and we were in the tent together at that point -- were on the floor crying with laughter. Steven Spielberg was getting really riled, trying to [play] going, ‘No dammit [while making fart sounds].’ It went on far too long.
Benedict Cumberbatch is a pretty great narrator in this story, and he actually does the various fart noises as he’s telling his War Horse tale. Plus, just seeing the utter disbelief on James Corden’s face while this Spielberg story being told is pretty satisfying. So if you want to hear it from the horse’s mouth as it were, you can check out the full interview below.
Steven Spielberg may be an icon in the industry with plenty of notable stories under his belt, but in some ways the internet, and in extension its fart stories, are forever. Though now I wonder if this game is a regular pastime for Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch whenever they do end up on the same set. I'm certainly amused that Cumberbatch thought to bring it up years later.
Next up, you can catch the MCU marvels in Loki and Doctor Strange And The Multiverse of Madness, respectively, though Cumberbatch is also celebrating the release of his new movie The Courier this week. See more about what else is coming up -- and recently shifted for Disney -- with our full schedule.
