He was never the same again.
Benedict Cumberbatch told Variety in a new interview that he was kidnapped while filming the BBC miniseries “To The Ends of the Earth” in South Africa in 2004.
According to the article, the “Doctor Strange” star, 48, was driving home from a diving excursion with some friends when their tire blew out. The group pulled over to the side of the road, and they were robbed and abducted by six men.
The thieves drove Cumberbatch and his pals around for hours, before they let them out, tied them up and made them sit execution-style. The thieves decided to spare Cumberbatch and his friends and fled the scene.
“It gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one,” Cumberbatch said about how the incident changed him.
“It made me impatient to live a life less ordinary, and I’m still dealing with that impatience,” he shared.
“The near-death stuff turbo-fueled all that,” Cumberbatch said. “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.”
The “Sherlock” star, who was in his late 20s at the time, said he became an adrenaline junkie after the scary situation.
“Now that’s changed,” he added, “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.”
Ten years after the kidnapping, Cumberbatch married theater director Sophie Hunter. They have three sons, Christopher, 9, Hal, 7, and Finn, 6.
“The minute you have kids this sense of time sinks in far more profoundly,” Cumberbatch told Variety. “My youngest is turning 6 tomorrow, and I’m like, ‘I will be in my 60s when he’s 21,’ you know? It’s crazy. It’s gone so fast. So there’s a huge shift in priorities, and it makes you value what you do with your life in a very different way.”
Cumberbatch previously told the story about the kidnapping crisis in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2013.
“I was scared, really scared,” he recalled of being tossed to the ground outside after being driven around by the kidnappers. “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.”
The Marvel star said he appreciated life more after the armed men didn’t kill him and his friends.
“It really, really enriches your values in life,” he shared. “It’s incredibly important.”
