There’s no shame in stealing – any actor who says he doesn’t is lying. You steal from everything.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHThere’s no shame in stealing – any actor who says he doesn’t is lying. You steal from everything.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHWriting in French is one of my ambitions. I’d like to be able to dream one day in French. Italian and French are the two languages that I’d like to know.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHI think the characters are supposed to be an open book, blank canvas.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHIt will be obvious to anyone who sees it that he [Doctor Strange] earns that cloak. You think he’s doing all right and then you realise that there’s one massive lesson to learn.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHAny privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHIt’s one of the things that attracted me to the role [Doctor Strange] is the fact that it’s a really widely origin story, I mean this is part of it, but of course there’s the whole chapter before where he’s the neurosurgeon who has the accident. It’s fantastic.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHI tend to have a cup of tea, try to stop worrying about what I did wrong, cool down and will the audience back in as soon as possible.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHIf you can’t jump on board when the ride’s going past that’s it, it usually goes by, so the hugest compliment they paid me was to come back to me. It motivated me to try to fulfill their faith.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHAn inflated sense of self-importance? Absolutely, but I think it comes from Doctor Strange need to control things and that’s what happens to all surgeons, I think. There’s a huge degree of uncertainty and bafflement.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHNot that i had a big arse but even that was toned.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHWhen you freefall for 7,000 feet it doesn’t feel like you’re falling: it feels like you’re floating, a bit like scuba diving.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHScott Derrickson breathes humour into a character with a very strong identity in the ’60s and ’70s, that psychedelia era of Eastern mysticism meeting the West.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHWhen I was young I became kind of a party animal. I had a massive crash. My health suffered. I was just overdoing it. That person could not be further from the one who emerged from that earlier experience. I regressed massively.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHLanding the role of Stephen Hawking was the most positively surprising thing that has happened to me.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHThere’s another weight of us being in the public eye, which is this presumption that, because your work and your promotion work is very public, your private life should be, too.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHI am shortsighted. I need glasses for watching movies or concerts. It’s not a hipster affectation; I do have poor eyesight. This is how ridiculous my life is: I’ve had the test for contact lenses, but I haven’t found a half-day where I can go to the optician.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH