“At Comic-Con in San Diego, women were quite audible when the wolf appeared in the clips,” says Penguins co-director Eric Darnell, who also shared helming duties on the “Madagascar” film series that began in 2005.

But, obviously, witnessing their idol in the flesh is always preferable. Not to worry, Cumber-fans. In "The Imitation Game" (Nov. 28), you get the full Benedict, as it were, when he stars as code-breaking World War II hero Alan Turing—a role that has been gathering Oscar buzz for weeks after making the fall festival rounds.

Because of his heavy schedule, Cumberbatch (who just announced his engagement recently) did some early press for the 20th Century Fox/DreamWorks release while attending this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Joining him was Tom McGrath, the co-director on the three previous “Madagascar” adventures who reprises his role as Skipper, the macho leader of the black-and-white foursome in the franchise spinoff.

The resulting chat, though entertaining, was a little disjointed, not unlike Skipper’s penchant for paranoia-induced conspiracy theories. The fact that a human-size costumed version of Skipper was waving his flippers about in a nearby room just added to the unusual atmosphere.

Therefore, I turned to Darnell and Simon J. Smith, his “Penguins” co-director who originally hails from England, to provide some coherent basic intelligence on these two talented gents. That includes how McGrath originally came up with the penguins for the first “Madagascar” outing and why they thought one of hottest actors in the world would deign to be a secret-agent foil to a flock of waddling scene stealers.

“He invented the penguins,” says Darnell of McGrath. “We both had come off other movies that were penguin-related before we started up to do “Madagascar.” I was doing a penguins movie for DreamWorks—with the Beatles actually. And we couldn’t quite get it together. And Tom was working on another penguins movie. We both had penguins on the brain. He went home one night and came back in with some story sketches he had done. It was the penguins on the boat in the first “Madagascar,” coughing up that paper clip. And breaking out and taking over the ship. We put that in the film.”