Playing Rugby and cricket insulated him from taunts. But in his final years he dropped sports to focus on acting and painting; his classmates, he says, “presumed that because I was into art I was definitely gay.” After his mind-opening pilgrimage east, he returned to study drama at the University of Manchester and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He worked at a steady clip, playing Stephen Hawking in a TV biopic and earning an Olivier nomination as Tesman in a West End production of Hedda Gabler. But he envisioned something bigger than his parents’ journeyman careers: “I wanted to do things that they didn’t get the chance to.”

Now that Sherlock has made that possible, he may not be long for the role. Having filmed Season Four, which premieres in January, he does not expect to return to the character “for the immediate future.” Sherlockmade him a meme; The Imitation Game made him an A-lister; Doctor Strangemay yet make him a mega-star.

WALKING THE LINE

Cumberbatch, beneath elevated subway tracks in Long Island City; opposite, the actor rolls up his sleeve. Photograph by Jason Bell. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

Role with It

Because he resembles a sun-deprived habitué of the London Library, you wouldn’t peg Cumberbatch as a daredevil, but he has always gravitated toward the edge: motorbiking, skydiving. “He’s definitely a bit of an adrenaline junkie,” says his best friend, Adam Ackland, whom he met while working on the 2008 BBC drama The Last Enemy. (Their production company, SunnyMarch, is developing several Cumberbatch vehicles, including an adaptation of the 1939 suspense novel Rogue Male.) Acting, for Cumberbatch, is another form of thrill-seeking, a way to scale Himalayan summits of the psyche. Hamlet was a kind of Everest, one he seems to have conquered. As the Telegraph critic wrote, “Cumberbatch admirers can take heart, his female devotees are entitled to swoon: in this trial of his acting strength, he emerges, unquestionably, victorious.”

To understand his taste for the extreme, you have to go back to 2004, to a near-death experience even more harrowing than his misadventure in the Himalayas. He was in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, filming the BBC mini-series To the Ends of the Earth, and went scuba-diving in Sodwana Bay with two of his co-stars, Theo Landey and Denise Black. As they were returning at night, along a stretch of highway notorious for carjackings, they pulled over with a flat tire. Six armed men jumped them and took their cell phones and credit cards, then forced them back into the car at gunpoint and drove. At one point, Cumberbatch was stuffed in the trunk. “Ben kicked and screamed blue-bloody murder,” Landey recalls.

The robbers stopped under a bridge, where the actors were tied up with their own shoelaces, crouching execution-style. Convinced these were his last moments, Cumberbatch pleaded for his life. After several minutes of silence, he realized the men had left. The actors managed to untie themselves and wandered along the highway until they stumbled across some local women who lent them their phones to call for help.

Rather than retreating into himself, as some might after a trauma, Cumberbatch says the ordeal only intensified his lust for adventure. “I was definitely more impatient to live a life less ordinary,” he says. “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. I think it just made me run at it a bit more recklessly.”

The past two years have tempered, or perhaps transmuted, his need for adrenaline. When I ask where he wants to find his next thrill, he says, “It’s a sappy answer, but the truth is I want to seek some thrills at home.” He met Hunter almost two decades ago, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, but it took them years to get together. After a courtship that they miraculously managed to keep out of the tabloids, they married Valentine’s Day 2015 on the Isle of Wight. Hunter was pregnant with Kit, who was born that June, two weeks before Cumberbatch began rehearsals for Hamlet. He has since given up motorbiking, to say nothing of jumping out of airplanes.