Benedict Cumberbatch on his harrowing gunpoint kidnap ordeal

Ben Arnold

Benedict Cumberbatch has recalled the details of the terrifying gunpoint kidnap he underwent while filming a TV series in South Africa.

The ‘Sherlock’ star was stopped on the road in 2004 in KwaZulu-Natal with Theo Landey and Denise Black, his co-stars on the BBC mini-series ‘To The Ends Of The Earth’, following a scuba diving trip.

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After pulling over on a highway with a flat tyre – a highway that is notorious for car-jackings – they were then accosted by six armed men, tied up with their own shoe laces, and robbed of their credit cards and mobile phones.

The robbers then shoved them back into the car, Cumberbatch in the boot, and drove them away, at which point the actor was ‘kicking and screaming blue bloody murder’.

After stopping under a bridge and forcing the three to their knees, execution style, Cumberbatch said he pleaded for his life, before realising after several minutes of silence that their assailants had fled the scene.

“I was definitely more impatient to live a life less ordinary,” he 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. But we were on our way back from the first weekend of a scuba-diving training course, so it wasn’t as if I was insular before that.

After untying themselves, they met some local women who lent them a mobile phone to call for help.

“I think it just made me run at it a bit more recklessly,” he added.

Image credits: WIre Image/Conde Nast


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