I think now with fundamentalists, people who treat belief with a total lack of humor or empathy for any other viewpoint than their own – they, to me, are the enemy. And those people are born out of desperate extremes.
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!
Do awards change careers? Well, I haven’t heard of many stories where that’s the case. It’s a fun excuse to meet colleagues and celebrate people who’ve done well that year in certain people’s eyes, and it’s nothing more than that.
I remember very clearly someone saying, ‘Don’t shake hands with the cactus,’ and I thought, ‘Well, why not? What could possibly go wrong?’ Shaking hands is a friendly gesture.
There’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.
I try to work hard. I’m really proud of what I get to do as a living. I still pinch myself. But I also know it’s a craft, and I can get better at it and learn every time I do it. So I try to work hard no matter what the task is.
[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.
I haven’t done period dramas back-to-back, or really anything back-to-back. You get asked to do what you’re most recently famed for, so I’m careful of not repeating myself.
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.
![Benedict Cumberbatch Quote - I’ve never been front and centre as an iconic American character [like in Doctor Strange]. Day to day, you know you’re painting on a very big canvas.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/ive-never-been-front-and-centre-as-an-iconic-ameri.jpg)
![Benedict Cumberbatch Quote - [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.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/on-bbcs-sherlock-its-a-rare-challenge-both-for-the.jpg)
