Benedict Cumberbatch discusses a horrible encounter he experienced twenty years ago while working abroad.
The 48-year-old actor told Variety ahead of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival debut of his film The Thing with Feathers how he was abducted and held captive in South Africa for hours in 2004 while filming the BBC drama To the Ends of the Earth.
“It gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one,” Cumberbatch told the outlet. “I’m still dealing with the impatience that came from leading an unconventional life.”
According to Variety, Cumberbatch had a tire blowout on the way back from a dive with his pals. While they were stranded, six men abducted them, plundered them, forced them to drive for hours, tied them up outside, and fled.
The Doctor Strange actor claims that the “near-death” experience “turbo-fueled” his desire to partake in dangerous sports like skydiving.
He told Variety, “It made me realize that I could die at any time.” “I was risking everything, including hurling myself from airplanes.”
But aside from my parents, I didn’t really have any dependents at the time. “Now that’s changed, and it sobers you up,” said the actor, who is now married and has three boys with Sophie Hunter, his wife of over a decade.
“I’ve delved down, and it has reassuringly revealed what lies beneath.” Additionally, I’ve accepted that’s the end of our story,” Cumberbatch said.
The Thing with Feathers, Cumberbatch’s new film based on Max Porter’s book Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, describes how he plays “a young father [who] loses his hold on reality as a seemingly malignant presence begins to stalk him from the shadowy recesses of the apartment he shares with his two young sons” following “the sudden and unexpected death of his wife”.
In an interview with Variety about motherhood, Cumberbatch, whose own boys are Kit, 9, Hal, 7, and Finn, 6, stated, “This sense of time sinks in far more profoundly the minute you have kids.”
You know, tomorrow is my youngest’s sixth birthday, and I’m thinking, ‘I’ll be in my 60s when he’s 21.'” He continued by discussing Finn. That is absurd. Time goes by quickly. Your priorities significantly shift as a result, and you start to view your life’s work quite differently.
“It does weigh on me,” Cumberbatch said of time passing. “You start thinking about death when you become a parent.”
