Benedict Cumberbatch speaks up about the terrible experience of being abducted and held captive in South Africa…

Benedict Cumberbatch is sharing a horrific encounter he experienced 20 years ago while working abroad.

Speaking with Variety ahead of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival debut of his film The Thing with Feathers, the 48-year-old actor described being abducted and kept for hours in South Africa while filming the BBC drama To the Ends of the Earth in 2004.

“It gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one,” Cumberbatch told the publication. “It made me impatient to live a life less ordinary, and I’m still dealing with that impatience.”

According to Variety, Cumberbatch and his mates went diving and had a tire blowout on the way back. While stuck, they were seized by six men who looted them and forced them to drive about for hours before leaving them tied up outside and fled.

The Doctor Strange actor stated that the “near-death” incident “turbo-fueled” his desire to pursue high-risk activities like skydiving.

“It made me go, ‘Oh, right, yeah, I could die at any moment,'” he said to Variety. “I was throwing myself out of planes, taking all sorts of risks.”

“But aside from my parents, I didn’t have any genuine 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 his wife of over ten years, Sophie Hunter.

“I’ve delved into the depths, and it has reassuringly revealed what lies beneath.” And I’ve accepted that that’s the conclusion of our narrative,” Cumberbatch said.

The actor’s new film, The Thing with Feathers, based on Max Porter’s book Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, stars Cumberbatch as “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,” according to a synopsis.

Cumberbatch, whose own boys are Kit, 9, Hal, 7, and Finn, 6, told Variety of parenthood in an interview, “The minute you have kids, this sense of time sinks in far more profoundly.”

“My youngest is turning 6 tomorrow, and I’m like, ‘I will be in my 60s when he’s 21,’ you know?” He continued about Finn. “That’s insane. Time passes swiftly. So there’s a significant shift in priorities, and it causes you to value what you do with your life in a whole new way.”

“It does weigh on me,” Cumberbatch said about time passing. “When you become a parent, your thoughts turn toward mortality.”

 

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Публикация от Variety (@variety)