“Are you going to kill us?”: when Benedict Cumberbatch was kidnapped at gunpoint
The life of an actor, or at least the life of a successful one, is luxurious compared to the average mere mortal. They get paid well, they don’t have to grind themselves into dust for minimal remuneration, and they’ve got a whole team at their beck and call. Before Benedict Cumberbatch was that guy, though, he experienced a truly hair-raising moment on location.
It was the role of Sherlock Holmes that transformed him from a relative unknown into a household name, with the modernised retelling of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories booting down the doors for Cumberbatch to become an international star, one that now has two Academy Award nominations to their name and gets to wave their hands around a lot while pretending to be a superhero.
Long before he reached that point, Cumberbatch was dispatched to South Africa along with the rest of the cast and crew to shoot an adaptation of William Golding’s novel To the Ends of the Earth for the BBC. It was the biggest recurring episodic role he’d ever landed at the time, but it was an experience he’d remember vividly for entirely different reasons.
After spending a weekend diving, the actor and his co-stars Theo Landey and Denise Black were driving back to the show’s production hub in Durban, only for a blown tyre to stop them in their tracks. If that wasn’t bad enough, another vehicle soon pulled up next to them, from which six armed gunmen emerged.
“They were like: ‘Look down! Look down! Put your hands on your heads! Look at the floor!’ And they started frisking us and said, ‘Where’s your money? Where’s your drugs?’ – we had smoked a bit of weed – ‘Where are your weapons?’” he recalled to The Hollywood Reporter. “And at that point, this adrenaline of fight or flight just exploded in my body. I was like, ‘Oh fuck, we’re fucked!'”
Completely understandably, Cumberbatch questioned what the assailants had in store. “I was scared, really scared,” he admitted. “I said, ‘What are you going to do with us? Are you going to kill us?” The kidnappers took their phones, wallets, and credit cards, stuffed the future Oscar nominee into the boot of the car and drove off, leaving him completely oblivious to his fate.
Cumberbatch, Landey, and Black were then marched out of the vehicle, had their shoelaces tied together to prevent them from making a hasty escape, and were told to kneel down execution-style. After several minutes of silence, the trio got to breathe the biggest sigh of relief that’ll ever leave their lungs when they realised the kidnappers had disappeared from the scene with their belongings in tow.
They ended up walking along the side of the road until they encountered some locals, who let them borrow their phones to get in contact with the right people to let everyone know they were alright. It can’t have been an easy thing to recover from psychologically, and it’s definitely an incident Cumberbatch will never forget.
