10 Actors Who Turned Down Star Trek

The casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan Noonien Singh in the 2013 film, Star Trek Into Darkness, was controversial, with claims of whitewashing looming over the film long before its release. True enough, at first glance, it's hard to see how the character could have gone from the menacing Ricardo Montalbán, with his long white hair and jacket-with-no-shirt-underneath ensemble, to the clean-cut posh boy Cumberbatch who blends seamlessly in with the crew.

That's not to say that Cumberbatch's performance was bad, however - quite the contrary! But, early on in the film's life, Puerto Rican actor Benicio del Toro was attached to the role, and had the movie opted for a version of Khan that took more from Montalbán's aesthetic in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, del Toro's knack for cold superiority, as seen in Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, would have made him an obvious choice to play the character.

In the end, del Toro dropped out of the project, and Benedict Cumberbatch's undercover superhuman John Harrison brought a new and modern dimension to an iconic decades-old story.