Depending on your point of view, Benedict Cumberbatch has almost died on five separate occasions. The first (hypothermia) occurred when he was a baby. The second (bomb explosion), when he was a student. The third (dehydration and starvation), when he was on his gap year. The fourth saw him taken hostage, tied up, bundled into the boot of a car, driven to an unknown location, forced to the ground on his knees and the cold muzzle of a gun trained on the back of his head.

He never heard the shot of a bullet, but then, of course, he never would have.

By that point, he was an actor. But none of the above is fiction.

And yet, when people think of Benedict Cumberbatch, it's likely the only near-death experience that comes to mind is the fifth one, the one that didn't actually happen - at least, not to Cumberbatch.

It's the one at the end of the second series of Sherlock, where the 37-year-old, who will be seen in no less than three Hollywood films in the next two months, leapt from the top of St Bartholomew's hospital, trademark

Belstaff greatcoat flapping in the wind, and seemingly plummeted to his death - only, of course, to be seen to have cheated it.

Talk to most people - his friends, his co-stars, his directors, your next-door neighbour - and they will tell you that it was the

Sherlock role that changed his life, that transformed him from a respected character actor into a household name and, from there, an international star. Which is undeniably true.

But talk to Cumberbatch himself and he will also tell you there is a deeper reason for it all - for the career that, despite mainstream success coming in his thirties, has not for one moment seen a lull, a break or slowdown of any kind; a kind of non-stop career sprint that has included 14 theatre productions, 17 TV roles, 30 films and, really, he's just getting started.

The three films he's in this winter - as a kindly slave-owner in the red-hot Oscar favourite 12 Years A Slave; as fearsome dragon Smaug in tent-pole blockbuster The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug; as an unemployed screw-up opposite Meryl Streep in August: Osage County - come after a summer in which he outshone the Enterprise crew as super-villain Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, and gave an uncanny performance as Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate. Then there's the new series of Sherlock starting next month, the biopic of code-breaker Alan Turing (The Imitation Game), which he's currently filming, Hamlet on stage and, after that, the lingering hope of the rebooted JJ Abrams-directed Star Wars ("There's a possibility, of course there is - JJ knows how much I'd love to be part of it").

As his good friend Matthew Goode, a co-star in The Imitation Game, says: "I remember him coming to our house after he'd just finished something at the National Theatre and yet another film, and my wife said, 'How are you Ben?' And he said, 'Yeah, um, I'm all right, I mean, I'm unemployed at the moment...' He'd been unemployed for two days!"

After recalling the third time he almost died, Cumberbatch will say to me: "These seismic events give you perspective on mortality, on the sacredness of it... to realise not to sweat the small stuff.

And just to enjoy the ride of being alive."

After recalling the fourth time, he will put it more plainly: "The afterburn, the follow-on stuff from that experience, is impatience. And I think that might still be ongoing. About me trying to cram a lot into my life."

To put it another way: Benedict Cumberbatch might be one of the few people whose post-traumatic stress has made him a superstar.

The truth - as always with life, as often with Cumberbatch - is a bit more complicated.

His first memory is of staring at the sky. His parents - both actors - lived in a top-floor flat in Kensington, London ("bought in the Seventies for something like three grand"), and when Benedict would cry, they would carry his pram up to the roof and point him skywards. Then, he would become still. He would smile.

And often, he would sleep. He remembers, still, the wonder he felt at this: "A vision of sky."

His first word was helicopter. "They were the biggest things in the sky."

It was around this time that he first cheated death. His half-sister, Tracy, from his mother's first marriage, was babysitting him in the middle of winter. She put a crying Benedict on the roof to calm him for a moment or two. "Then," says Cumberbatch, laughing, "she forgot about me! I mean, it was funny. She was in the kitchen with her friends and she suddenly saw the snow falling through the window..."

When she ran upstairs, she found Benedict serene - teeth chattering, but still smiling, still in awe. He had to be thawed out on a radiator before his parents returned home ("I had turned blue").

Still, he remembers his childhood as idyllic. Even when, at eight, he was packed off to boarding school. "I was an only child, but I was very gregarious. I thrived; an amazing five years. But yes, eight seems a bit of a wrench. I don't know if I could do it with a kid of eight."

He started acting early. At the school nativity, he remembers, he played Joseph - and shoved Mary off the stage because she had forgotten her lines. "It was very unchivalrous."

Confidence was never a problem. Nor was a belief in his ability.

By the time he went to Harrow he was cast in most of the lead roles - including, as it was an all-boys school, Rosalind in As You Like It - and from there didn't much doubt acting was for him. "I think, going into it, I always had self-belief in my talent.

You have to."

It was at the end of his time at Harrow that Cumberbatch had a run-in with mortality for the second time. He was at home, studying for his A levels in his bedroom, when all of a sudden the whole flat shook from a huge explosion. The windows shattered, a dust cloud enveloped him, his ears rang. "I just thought, 'F***!' I ran through the flat. My mum and dad were saying, 'Are you all right?

Are you all right?' I said no - I couldn't hear out of one ear."

It was the 1994 attack on the Israeli Embassy, a car packed with 30lb of explosives. Cumberbatch remembers a deafening silence, then a sound - schrrlllllll, schrrlllllll. It was the sound of glass falling to earth.

When he went to Manchester University to study drama, he had a blast - girls, drinking, clubbing. Pills? "I was a student in Manchester," he says with a laugh, by way of an answer. "But, uh, I'll take the Fifth." Yet he soon overdid it: "I got very ill in my first year. I got glandular fever. I had to calm down a bit. It was my body going, 'What the f***?'"

After he graduated, he decided to take a gap year, teaching English in Tibet. And that's when he had his third near-death experience. He got lost while hiking with friends. Armed only with a biscuit and a piece of cheese between four of them, he remembers walking across outcrops lined with ice and down semi-frozen rivers, "nearly breaking our necks", poking yak droppings in the hope they were warm - "to see how far we could be from some kind of civilisation".

He remembers, finally, breaking through the tree line, falling on his knees near the home of a Sherpa shepherd and "making the universal hand-to-mouth gesture of food". He remembers getting a meal of spinach and meat, and the dysentery he got straight after eating it. He remembers it as the best meal he's ever had.

But it was the fourth of his near-misses when he really thought he was going to die.

© BBC

Interviewing Benedict Cumberbatch is a bit like being a matador, but one trying to influence the direction of a train.

We meet in a pub at the end of Cumberbatch's road in Hampstead, north London, just below the Heath, where he owns the top two floors of a Victorian house. He is wearing dark-blue jeans, white T-shirt, purple pea coat and a smart grey flat cap, which, when removed, reveals a short back and sides propping up a neat quiffed wave of hair, breaking left to right.

It's not that he's rude, you understand - he's unfailingly polite, funny, generous with his time and wonderful company. It's simply that, when he begins a sentence, you're locked in for the paragraph, and if you try to interject, often he'll just keep talking while you talk.

As Goode, who has known Cumberbatch for more than a decade, will tell me a few days before the interview, "He gives his time and his thoughts, but he likes to follow a point through to the end. But I love that. And it probably stands his acting in good stead - he's able to get from point A to point B and finish it with extreme clarity."

It is also, I think, down to a feeling he has of being misrepresented by the press, and it's only by giving the exact line, his exact position, without distraction, that he can hope not to be misquoted.

Partly, perhaps, this stems from the confected "row" that erupted in the tabloids last August when he told the Radio Times that he felt "castigated" for his privileged background. "All the posh-baiting that goes on," he said. "It's just so predictable, so domestic, so dumb." Cue more castigation.

For the record, Cumberbatch has this to say about his social standing: "I'm an upper middle-class kid. I know that's counted as posh, but then I know people who I would call posh, and I don't talk like them."

And, no, he's not leaving for the United States any time soon.

This was not the only run-in Cumberbatch has had with the press.

In fact, his cuttings file is littered with occasionally tetchy exchanges with interviewers. Even a recent cover story in The Hollywood Reporter - which proclaimed him the key player of "The New A-List" - was awkward, beginning with the sentence: "I am 45 minutes into an interview with Benedict Cumberbatch, and frankly, it's not going well."

A recent interview with the Guardian to promote The Fifth Estate, meanwhile, ended with Cumberbatch feeling he'd been quoted out of context concerning Chelsea (nee Bradley)

Manning's incarceration, and saw him ask for a clarification to be posted online (it was), and the relevant transcript published (ditto). "It was very irresponsible of them to do that," he says. "It's like, what are you going to gain from my opinions? Oh, I see, you're going to turn it into a piece that makes me sound like a big schoolboy who thinks that people who break the rules should be punished."

It's also probably no coincidence that this, too, circled back to a veiled dig at his social class.

We speak, on and off, about his true thoughts on politics, whistleblowers and terrorism in greater detail than could be included even in a profile of this length, but suffice to say his position is, like most people's, not black and white: he understands the reality of whistleblowers, and why the relevant governments seek to punish them. But at heart he's a liberal, and wouldn't want Manning punished. He's not a security- expert, but understands the complex balancing act between civil liberties and protecting the population. I tell him it's an utterly reasonable, balanced position to take, and one I share. "And yet, the minute you do that, you're accused of sitting on the fence," he says.

While filming the third series of Sherlock, meanwhile, Cumberbatch held up a piece of paper to the paparazzi hovering nearby that read: "Go photograph Egypt and show the world something important". Then, later, a four-page treatise he'd written about civil liberties regarding the Guardian and the government's attempt to muffle the paper. Yet it was the

Guardian once again - this time via Marina Hyde - that stuck the boot in, referencing his class with a piece headlined, "Benedict Cumberbatch's vital mission to educate the hoi polloi". "I was really shocked with what was going on," he says, "so I just thought, if this culture is so fixated on me, I may as well use it to ask questions. I wasn't trying to trash popular culture.

I don't belittle the appetites of people who just want to see shots of Sherlock."

He sighs. "I guess that's my nearest flirtation with social media, and if I get misinterpreted in print, or if the perception of me is edited in print, then this is clear: I'm holding up the words."

As for the article: "The Guardian really does have its cake and eat it. Their offices are being raided for these hard disks, and I find it extraordinary they [ran] that [piece] as well."

Benedict Cumberbatch worries a lot. I suggest, in fact, he might worry too much. "I know. And I am getting better at that. I remember something happening during the filming of Sherlock and someone said,

'You've got a thin skin.' And it was like, 'I've done it again.

I've f***ing done it again.' I mean, I do [have a thin skin] when something is said at my expense. But I'm learning. Regret is too big a word, but I'm learning."

And yet there is a clear and wonderful flip side to all this concern of his, which is unbelievable enthusiasm. As much as he seemingly worries about everything, he's excited and thrilled about everything else.

He's excited about the coffee we order (the barman gets a lengthy grilling on what exactly is a flat white); by how this magazine works; by wild swimming in Hampstead Heath; by the burgers we order; even, as we leave the pub - him to stroll home, me to unlock my single-speed racer - by my bike (he recognises the make of frame, the bike nerd in me is impressed).

Seeing all these enthusiasms - and these are just the minor, slightly unexpected ones - I can't help but think two things.

First, the follow-through of rampant enthusiasm is often naivety, and I understand why his Sherlock co-star Martin Freeman says he's easy to "screw over" ("He's sweet and generous in an almost childlike way. I could take advantage of him playing cards"), or how Simon Pegg convinced Cumberbatch while they were filming Star Trek Into Darkness in a nuclear facility that he needed to wear a special face cream to protect him from radiation; he obliged, and even became convinced it was why he kept screwing up his lines ("Guys, I'm sorry," he said. "I've got a real headache. I think the ions were getting to me").

But mostly, I feel, compared with Cumberbatch, like someone going through existence with the contrast dial turned down. To him, it seems, everything is neon bright. The barbs may sting more sharply, but his sun must shine that much brighter.

It's not hard to imagine how this sensitivity - both bad and good - feeds into his acting. He feels more, notices more, hears more. It's in his nature - he's a human tuning fork. When he was a child, he says, he used to carry around a Dictaphone wherever he went, recording anything he found of interest, trying out voices, practising sounds. It didn't last too long, but only because he became the Dictaphone. For every person he quotes during the three hours we spend together, he can't help but drop into a pitch-perfect impersonation of them, body, voice and all. It's uncanny, not least because this cast list includes Madonna ("She said, 'You're the one with the strange name.' I said, 'Yes, I am - Madonna'"), Meryl Streep ("She just said, 'Well, I

love what you do'") and Ted Danson ("It was a pre-Oscar party and he just screamed across a crowded room, 'Oh my God! F***!

It's Sherlock! You're Sherlock! Oh God!'"). It occasionally feels like I'm getting the best one-man show in the world.

On the Graham Norton show he did Chewbacca from Star Wars. Harrison Ford, sitting next to him, almost jumped out of his seat. "He's got a remarkable ear," says Steven Moffat, the co-creator of Sherlock. "He can pick up people seriously fast. He could do me. He could do you. When he got into trouble a short while ago for saying he was pigeon-holed as posh - he can do it all, that's all he meant. And yet he gets pigeon-holed for parts because he is, let's be honest, the son of Timothy Carlton - a posh boy."

When Cumberbatch was featured recently on the cover of

Time ("An unbelievable honour"), the cover line read: "Playing Genius". It's a cliché - playing slightly odd yet often brilliant men - that has stuck with him over the years, ever since his stunning breakout role in his twenties as Stephen Hawking in a TV biopic. And it's one that's only been solidified by playing the likes of Vincent van Gogh (another TV biopic), Assange, Sherlock, Khan and his forthcoming role as Turing. This, despite roles as varied as a hostage negotiator in Four Lions, a major in Spielberg's War Horse, a rapist in Atonement and a gay spook in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. "Look, I know that everything I do now will have flavours of

Sherlock. Everyone wants those dark, complicated antiheroes, and of course I play them. But I also play Charles in August: Osage County, Ford in 12 Years A Slave and Alexander in Stuart: A Life Backwards - he's a pretty open book; smart man though he is, the complexity is all about Stuart [a homeless man played by Tom Hardy]. Alexander's an everyman; he's not super-sleuthing or cracking code or breaking algorithms. I mix it up."

The truth, I think, that you can see in all Cumberbatch's best roles is not really that he plays genius or even intelligence exactly (one of the most slippery of thespian tasks; trying to "act" intelligence is a bit like trying to feign coolness - it doesn't work if you force it). The thing that binds them, from Frankenstein on stage and Alexander in Stuart: A Life Backwards to Sherlock, is something more fundamental: a sense of wonder.

The day I meet Cumberbatch, it is the Monday after opening weekend in the US of The Fifth Estate, and the film has tanked. On an estimated budget of $30m (£19m), it took just $1.7m (£1.1m) from 1,769 cinemas across the country, making it the worst opening weekend for any major film released in 2013. "Well, I always thought that Disney and Dreamworks were odd bedfellows for such a specialist topic, really. The parallel is

The Social Network, but everyone uses Facebook; not everyone is au fait with WikiLeaks," says Cumberbatch, adding, "This was never going to be a popcorn multiplex film."

Box-office gross - now he's in the market to play the leads - is seemingly one more thing he has to fret about. That morning,

Variety ran a piece titled, "Does 'Fifth Estate' Bombing Hurt Benedict Cumberbatch As A Leading Man?" "Water off a duck's back," he says. "I'm just thankful that it has positioned me as someone who is capable of doing that kind of a role. And whether the film has a big box office or not, the response to how I have performed [as Assange] has done me huge favours. You know, it's the first lead role I've had and it's caused this much attention."

Has it harmed his Oscar chances though? "I think so. But then I never really held out for that." He never really held out for TV superstardom either, but that doesn't mean he didn't get it. Despite it airing in the summer, despite it being brought forward on the schedule, despite minimal PR, the first episode of Sherlock, in July 2010, got nine million viewers. Cumberbatch wasn't an overnight star - he was one at the end of 90 minutes.

It was the perfect fit - the pinnacle of the tormented, brilliant loners he'd made a specialism of; a role that would play on, as co-creator Mark Gatiss puts it, the fact that "in a certain light, his face is quite alien. And then in another, he's iconically handsome."

Details of the third series are tightly under wraps, but Cumberbatch will tell me this much: there will be a reunion, an explanation (of how he cheated death), a marriage, a speech and a new villain "who is the opposite of the otherworldly Moriarty, who is painfully real and possible - that's what's chilling". There will be another cliffhanger ending ("that makes you go, 'What the f***?'"), fewer lengthy deduction monologues ("Maybe people won't miss them; although saying that, episode two is almost one entire monologue"), and a new haircut. Well, actually... "I've said for quite a long time I'd like him to have a different haircut. I quite like my hair being short. You know, we've been away two years, let's f*** around with his outfit, let's f*** around with his haircut, let's do something different."

Was he allowed to? "Not really, no."

And yet, as hard as it is to imagine now - with the fan army of "Cumberbitches" that are name-checked in every Cumberbatch profile, and duly get a mention here - the BBC almost didn't go for him, because they said he wasn't attractive enough. "We kept saying to the BBC, we're going to give you a sexy Sherlock Holmes," says Moffat. "And I remember the BBC saying,

'Hmm, really? We don't think he is.' And now, he's the sexiest man in the world."

It begs the question: do his army of devoted female followers want to sleep with Sherlock, or with Cumberbatch? "I suppose as Rita Hayworth used to say," says Gatiss, "'The trouble is, they go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me.'"

Matthew Goode has a different take when I suggest it must be hard for Cumberbatch to -distinguish when it comes to women. "Ha ha, you know, this is a man we're talking about! Look, he's not that old, but he's coming to the end of his thirties, so he's looking [for a long-term partner]. But if he has to have a few conquests to get the right one, I'm sure that won't bother him either. I'm sure the cream of the crop will be coming towards him.

He's going to enjoy himself."

As for Cumberbatch himself, he'll simply say this: "It is harder

[meeting women], because people think they know more about you than they actually do. And you can't control that. You can't control perceptions of you."

No matter how much, it seems, he tries.

This is what Cumberbatch can remember from the time he nearly died in South Africa, while filming mini-series To The Ends Of The Earth in 2004.

He is with co-stars Denise Black and Theo Landey. They are making their way back from an idyllic weekend of scuba-diving in the KwaZulu-Natal district, north of Durban. It is night-time. They are driving on a highway near the Mozambique border. Cumberbatch has lit a spliff, and is listening to Radiohead on the stereo - "How To Disappear Completely" - and contemplating how blissfully happy he is. Their right tyre blows, forcing them to pull over.

Trucks shudder past. As they begin

to remove the wheel and replace it with a spare, six armed men emerge from the bush. Cumberbatch and his friends are frisked, asked for money, drugs and weapons. Their hands are bound with their own shoelaces and they are driven away. Off-road, is all he knows.

Cumberbatch is bundled against the windscreen, sitting on Black's lap on the front passenger seat, awkwardly folded, his back and head hitting the glass as they go over bumps. He remembers a surreal moment when his bum hits the car stereo, turning it on, and Thom Yorke is suddenly soundtracking his ordeal: "I'm not here," he sings. "This isn't happening..." He is in some discomfort, so they stop, and decide instead to put him in the boot.

He remembers a trickle of blood on his head. He remembers suffering bad cramps, and thinking he is going to pass out. He remembers thinking, if they aren't going to kill him, he might be taken hostage. He takes some small solace from this. He imagines where they would store him. Would it be like TV - some kind of

Silent Witness-style lock-up under the arches? But there are no arches. They are being driven into the wilderness.

Suddenly, they stop. He remembers being taken out of the boot and being forced to crouch in the execution position. He remembers the duvet that was placed over his head, to silence the shot. He remembers thinking: "No matter how loved you are in this life, you will die alone."

He remembers trying to reason with them, saying that killing him would not be a good idea, that they don't want a dead Englishman on their hands. After an indeterminate amount of time, which may only have been minutes, but which spread out like hours, he realises the kidnappers have gone.

They run towards the only lights they can see and, after about ten minutes of so, running in a daze, they come across women operating a cart outside a car park. He remembers the black hands that untie him. The pure gratitude he feels. And he remembers the women crying for what has been done by their countrymen. They cry the same sentence again and again. For shame, they cry. For shame. For shame...

He remembers, then, that he too started to cry. And he remembers he couldn't stop.

Some of this harrowing encounter, in varying parts and in varying detail, he has recounted before. What he has not spoken about are the after-effects. He woke up the next morning, he says, and went to the balcony of the house they were staying in, which looked out to the sea. "And I felt the heat on my face, and I looked across and thought, 'I want to swim in that sea. I want to walk across that dune, I want to be with those people I can see playing. Every atom of me wants to be part of it. Because I'm alive.'"

He saw a counsellor, who said, "Maybe write this out, speak to people about it, and do some exercise - be part of your landscape."

True to Cumberbatch's hyper-aware nature, he had already done all three - he had written four pages detailing the experience while waiting on the road side for the police, gone skydiving in the days following, returned to work and spoken to everyone about it. "I'd already done the check list," he says. "It was just intuitive."

After his parents flew over the following week, he even revisited the site. "They said, 'Are you sure you want to?' I said yes. You can't imagine all the small details that came back to me.

Right down to the insects."

The only trauma he identified occurred a few weeks later, while resuming To The Ends Of The Earth's filming. They were shooting under the deck of a boat on a covered section of dock.

Cumberbatch came up for air and a smoke, only to see they had started to close the main shutter entrance. "I saw the daylight being blocked out and I said, 'Look, can you stop that?' It kept closing, and I was like, 'Please, keep it open!'"

He panicked, and ran outside. "I smashed my fist three or four times against the brick wall." He has tears in his eyes now as he recalls it. It had reminded him of the car boot. "It was the anger of being reminded of the fear, and where I'd gone in my imagination. And I remember thinking: 'Don't let that be the legacy of this.'"

We keep in contact after the interview. He calls me to chat the next day, saying how he'd since spoken to Denise Black from South Africa, and how much he missed her. I watch him on TV, giving a remarkable live performance in Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead for the National Theatre's 50th birthday celebrations. We text briefly. I wonder how much of who he is - his incredible sensitivity to the world, the thing that seems to fuel everything - is simply his nature, and how much he's been shaped by his remarkable experiences. He texts me a long explanation about how those experiences have shaped him, before saying, "I'm starting to sound like a self-help book of zingy one-liners packed full of fortune-cookie wisdom!"

But then, just when I wonder if there is an answer, if anything so simple could describe something so complex, he texts me a line that may not seem profound, or especially ornate, or like a life lesson of any kind, but, to me, feels so true it is almost neon-bright.

It's one line. It simply says: "You have to experience this stuff yourself."

Originally published in the January 2013 edition of British GQ.