Just before his rise to fame, Benedict Cumberbatch revealed he once had a terrifying experience in Africa. While reflecting on his career with Variety, Cumberbatch spoke about how he was abducted and robbed while filming the British miniseries To the Ends of the Earth in South Africa.
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The actor said he and some friends were driving home from a diving excursion when one of the tires on their vehicle blew out. As they were trying to change the tire, the group was abducted and robbed by six men. He and his friends were forced into the vehicle and drove around for hours.
The captors eventually pulled the car over and got the group out, making them sit “execution-style.” However, instead of killing Benedict Cumberbatch and his friends, the men fled the area. The actor admitted the situation changed him in “fundamental” ways.
“It gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one,” he explained. “It made me impatient to live a life less ordinary, and I’m still dealing with that impatience.”
The experience also made him become an “adrenaline junkie,” causing Cumberbatch to see out intense situations.
“The near-death stuff turbo-fueled all that,” he pointed out. “It made me go, ‘Oh, right, yeah, I could die at any moment.’ I was throwing myself out of planes, taking all sorts of risks. But apart from my parents, I didn’t have any real dependents at that point. Now that’s changed, and that sobers you.”
“I’ve looked over the edge; it’s made me comfortable with what lies beneath it,” the actor noted. “And I’ve accepted that that’s the end of all our stories.”
The Older Benedict Cumberbatch Stated Gets, the Less of a “S—” He Gives
Meanwhile, Benedict Cumberbatch spoke about how his past comments about his career and projects seemingly impacted him because they were taken out of context.
“The older I get, the less of a s— I give,” he said. “There’s this whole other audience that have these expectations of you, feelings about you, judgments of you. That’s theirs, and you can’t change that or shape it. I’m still discovering who I am. So how the f— are they supposed to know me?”
“I’m not Brad, I’m not Leonardo, I’m not a typical movie star,” he added. “People were scrambling for ‘Why is he at all attractive to us?’ But for me to guess and try to understand that is so f—ing weirdly navel-gazing. I’m not sitting around thinking, ‘Why am I sexy?’ I worry about myself in the mirror as I age, like every other f—er does.”