[on BBC’s Sherlock] It’s a rare challenge, both for the audience and an actor, to take part in something with this level of intelligence and wit. You have to really enjoy it. It’s a form of mental and physical gymnastics.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHI think I’ve had very knee-jerk emotional reactions to things, and sometimes I’ve said things without thinking. Being overly emotional clouded my judgment.
More Benedict Cumberbatch Quotes
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I always seem to be cast as slightly wan, ethereal, troubled intellectuals or physically ambivalent bad lovers. But I’m here to tell you I’m quite the opposite in real life. In fact I’m a f**king fantastic lover.
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I want to do it all. I want to climb mountains, go through jungles, fight wars in space, get the girl, shoot the bad-guy full of lead, have all the zippy one liners, bulge muscles out of a singlet, drip sweat and blood on screen, all of that.
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Talking about class terrifies me. There is no way of winning.
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I got live tweeted once by someone who was opposite my home in some rented accommodation. He was actually describing on twitter what I was doing. ‘I took a shirt off, I went to the window, I put a shirt back on… ‘ And I’ve got blinds in my flat!
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I’m a high-functioning sociopath, do your research.
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Even the cerebral characters I play seem to have physical quirks. They’re all “physically inhabited,” for lack off a better expression. For instance, Sherlock Holmes has very particular physical gestures which are drawn out in such detail.
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Enjoy the journey of life and not just the endgame. I’m also a great believer in treating others as you would like to be treated.
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Even though Doctor Strange is an established character, when you’re doing an origin story there’s a lot of room for manoeuvre.
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I’m always playing characters with intellects profoundly superior to mine. That’s great fun, even though it’s as much a fantasy for me as for the people watching me.
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There’s no shame in stealing – any actor who says he doesn’t is lying. You steal from everything.
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Sherlock [Holmes] is on the side of the angels, but don’t think he’s one of them. He uses similar means, but it seems to be for a better purpose, one would hope.
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Marvel always make it fresh so you can give it your personal twist.
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It’s very easy to be cynical about any kind of interference in things that are beyond our skill set.
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Mystique is rare now, isn’t it? There aren’t that many enigmas in this modern world.
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It does get strange when you realize people will hang around for hours to get a glimpse of you doing scenes outside.
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It’s difficult because nothing’s preordained by plan and you can’t control it. That’s one of those joys and thrills and nerve-racking realities of being an actor. A lot has to do with luck, no matter what your talent or contribution can be.
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When you start getting jobs, and see your mates from drama school, you don’t really want to talk about it, because you have this innate sense of guilt that it’s not fair that others aren’t doing exactly what you’re doing. I do have that.
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I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London.
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The awful lesson of history is that we too often ignore people, just because they’re foreigners or different from us.
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Landing the role of Stephen Hawking was the most positively surprising thing that has happened to me.
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[Scott Derrickson] is terrific, really sharp on the details, and he’s not afraid to go to dark places.
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I 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.
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It’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.
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I thought, well, why am I giving up on my primary dream to work doubly hard, to do something as an alternative to what it really still want to?
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There are other people who don’t mind shouting from the pulpit and being judged for it, and they do a hell of a lot of good – real, on-the-ground, life-changing good. So I think it can sometimes be a balancing act.
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You have to sometimes just run with the problem rather than trying to solve it with hi-tech wizardry and lots of planning.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH