Benedict Cumberbatch has recalled the terrifying moment he and two friends were kidnapped by armed robbers after their car broke down a remote road. The 48-year-old Sherlock star was filming the BBC mini-series To the Ends of the Earth BBC when he and Emmerdale actress Denise Black, who also featured in the series, and another friend were robbed and kidnapped by a gang of six armed men.
The trio were forced into the back of their kidnappers’ car and forced to drive round for hours, he revealed. The dad of three, who was in his late 20s at the time, said the incident fundamentally changed him and “gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one”. Opening up about the ordeal to Variety magazine, the London-born star also said he was still dealing with the impact of what happened.
“It made me impatient to live a life less ordinary, and I’m still dealing with that impatience,” he told Variety. At the time, the actor had only appeared in a handful of TV shows before landing the lead role of Edmund Talbot in the BBC’s adaptation of William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth novels, alongside Denise, Jarred Harris and Sam Neill.
The incident also turned him into something of an adrenaline junky with a passion for extreme sports and daredevil activities like skydiving. “It made me go, ‘Oh, right, yeah, I could die at any moment’,” he said. “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.”
Benedict, who took part in Running Wild With Bear Grylls: The Challenge in 2023, married his long-term partner, theatre director Sophie Hunter, in 2015 and they now share three children – Christopher, nine, Hal, seven, and six-year-old Finn. Being a husband and father, he said, has had a ‘sobering’ effect on his adrenaline-junkie ways.
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“I’ve looked over the edge. It’s made me comfortable with what lies beneath it. And I’ve accepted that that’s the end of all our stories,,” he shared.
When he opened up about the incident to The Hollywood Reporter back in 2013, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art graduate said the trio were like “sitting ducks” after their car tyre blew, and he genuinely feared for his life as they were frisked for money, drugs and weapons.
“I was scared, really scared. I said: ‘What are you going to do with us? Are you going to kill us?’ I was really worried that I was going to get raped or molested or just tortured or toyed with in some way, some act of control and savagery.”
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