Benedict Cumberbatch Recalls Harrowing Experience of Being Abducted and Held Captive in South Africa

“It gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one,” said the ‘Thing with Feathers’ actor of the experience

By Jen Juneau is a News and Movies Staff Writer at PEOPLE. She started at the brand in 2016 and has more than 15 years’ professional writing experience.

Published on January 22, 2025 03:50PM EST

Benedict Cumberbatch is recounting a harrowing experience he had 20 years ago while working overseas.

Speaking with Variety ahead of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of his movie The Thing with Feathers, the 48-year-old actor spoke about how he was once abducted and held for hours in South Africa, while in the country filming the BBC miniseries To the Ends of the Earth in 2004.

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

According to Variety, Cumberbatch and his friends went diving and had a tire blowout while driving back. While stranded, they were abducted by six men, who robbed the group and forced them to drive them around for hours, then left them tied up outside before fleeing.

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The Doctor Strange actor said the “near-death’ experience “turbo-fueled” his desire to engage in hobbies some might deem high risk, like skydiving.

“It made me go, ‘Oh, right, yeah, I could die at any moment,’ ” he told Variety. “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. Now that’s changed, and that sobers you,” continued the actor, who is now married and shares three sons with his wife of nearly 10 years, Sophie Hunter.

“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,” Cumberbatch added.

The actor’s new movie 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 malign 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 sons are Kit, 9, Hal, 7, and Finn, 6 — also told Variety of fatherhood in his 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 of Finn. “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.”

“It does weigh on me,” Cumberbatch added of time passing. “When you become a parent, your thoughts turn more towards mortality.”