Benedict Cumberbatch’s “near-death” experience in South Africa still affects him 20 years later.
In an interview with Variety published Wednesday, the Dr. Strange actor opened up on the harrowing time he and his co-stars got abducted by six men while working on the BBC miniseries To the Ends of the Earth in South Africa in 2004.
“It gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one,” Cumberbatch shared. “It made me impatient to live a life less ordinary, and I’m still dealing with that impatience.”
The two-time Academy Award nominee then credited the “near-death” experience in fueling his insatiable appetite for adrenaline, where skydiving and extraneous sports became his preferred means to unwind for a while.
“The near-death stuff turbo-fueled all that,” Cumberbatch explained. “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,” he continued, referring to the three sons he shares with his wife, Sophie Hunter. “Now that’s changed, and that sobers you. 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.”
At the time of the abduction, Cumberbatch and his co-stars, Theo Landy and Denise Black, had gone scuba-diving in Sodwana Bay in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, according to a 2016 Vanity Fair profile with the actor. As they were returning home at night, their car suddenly got a flat tire, forcing them to pull over, where six armed men jumped and robbed them. They then forced them into their car, with Cumberbatch even getting stuffed in the trunk at one point, and drove them to an area under a bridge.
After a few minutes of silence, the trio realized that the men had left them there, untied themselves and walked along a highway until a local lent them a phone to call for help.
“I was definitely more impatient to live a life less ordinary,” Cumberbatch told Vanity Fair. “I wanted to swim in the sea that I saw the next morning. If you feel you’re going to die, you don’t think you’re going to have all those sensations again—a cold beer, a cigarette, the feel of sun on your skin. All those hit you as firsts again. It is, in a way, a new beginning.”
