Benedict Cumberbatch talks about a terrible experience he had while working overseas 20 years ago.
Ahead of his film The Thing with Feathers’ 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere, the 48-year-old actor told Variety about how, in 2004 while filming the BBC drama To the Ends of the Earth, he was kidnapped and held captive in South Africa for hours.
Cumberbatch told the publication, “It gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one.” “Living an unconventional life made me impatient, and I’m still coping with that impatience.”
Variety claims that after going diving with his friends, Cumberbatch experienced a tire blowout on the way back. Six men grabbed them while they were stranded, robbed them, made them drive around for hours, tied them up outside, and ran away.
The “near-death” experience, according to the Doctor Strange actor, “turbo-fueled” his urge to engage in risky sports like skydiving.
“It made me realize that I could die at any time,” he told Variety. “I was taking all kinds of risks, including throwing myself out of planes.”
However, at the time, I had no real dependents save my parents. The actor, who is now married and has three boys with his wife of more than ten years, Sophie Hunter, stated, “Now that’s changed, and it sobers you up.”
“I’ve explored the depths, and it has comfortingly shown what’s underneath.” And I’ve come to terms with the fact that that’s the end of our story,” Cumberbatch stated.
According to a synopsis, Cumberbatch 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” after “the sudden and unexpected death of his wife” in his new movie, The Thing with Feathers, which is based on Max Porter’s book Grief Is the Thing with Feathers.
“The minute you have kids, this sense of time sinks in far more profoundly,” Cumberbatch, whose own boys are Kit, 9, Hal, 7, and Finn, 6, said in an interview with Variety about motherhood.
“You know, my youngest is turning six tomorrow, and I’m thinking, ‘I’ll be in my 60s when he’s 21.'” He went on to talk about Finn. That’s crazy. Time flies by. As a result, your priorities drastically change, and you begin to value your life’s work in a completely different way.
Regarding time passing, Cumberbatch remarked, “It does weigh on me.” “When you become a parent, you start thinking about death.”
