This isn't an April Fool's Day joke, and similar tactics didn't work out so well for Donald Glover when he made it publicly known that he wanted to be Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man. But that isn't stopping Patrick Dempsey from launching a campaign to play Doctor Strange.

The actor is hoping to play the character in either a TV series or a feature film in a move to distance himself a little bit from his popular Grey's Anatomy character.

Here is what Patrick Dempsey had to say.

"I've been lobbying for that. There's a whole bunch of people [among the 'Grey's Anatomy ' crew] who are into comics and Marvel, too, on the set and they're like, 'Doctor Strange, that's the one you should do.' It would be fantastic. It'd be a great TV show, especially for HBO or something like that. I don't know if I'd necessarily do another show, a drama, that's 24 episodes again. HBO you're at 13 and I think that's much better. It's just so hard to sustain the quality after three years if you're doing 24, 25 episodes a year. It all depends on who you have as a writing team - it's how you set it up, what's the tone and making sure you're not locked into this one-season success [mentality], you can't be afraid to think beyond that.""

Marvel has tried to launch a Doctor Strange movie for the past couple of years, but the character doesn't have the same kind of notoriety as some of the major Marvel heavy hitters such as Thor and Captain America. A live action adaptation is currently gaining some momentum, with Marvel President Kevin Feige putting Doctor Strange on the short list of characters he wants to see in the flesh, with Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer already hired to write a script.

Patrick Dempsey says that Kevin Feige knows he is lobbying hard for the part.

"He knows what's going on. There was stuff going on. At Comic-Con they were talking about me playing it and there was a rumor that I'd been cast. I mean, it's something that's kind of out there and, you know, I've been looking at that. It would be a fun one to do. Hopefully, doing something like 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon' is about to show myself in an action situation where I'm not mister-weepy-doctor guy, you know, not McDreamy. You have to change that in people's view. I'm still hungry for other things. I'd love to play Doctor Strange."