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I think playing any iconic role when you’re stepping into big shoes, into the shadow of people who have come before you and you can’t process that.

Benedict Cumberbatch

Scott 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 CUMBERBATCH

Character Identity Strong
Anyone who works in the NHS has superpowers. It’s a miracle, it is magic.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Magic Miracle Nhs
Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Hard Privacy Thing
Laughing and crying are really similar – what happens to your body. It’s a very similar process in your diaphragm. Like a musician, you have to do your scales once in a while and warm up your voice.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Cry Laughing Musician
When 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 CUMBERBATCH

Fall Feet Floating
[ Stephen Strange] is less strange than other characters I’ve played. He’s lost the power to love, which doesn’t make him a nasty person. I just think he’s closed-off.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Character Nasty Thinking
Writing 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 CUMBERBATCH

Ambition Dream Writing
I like to think that we’re revolving on this planet and revolving through the galaxy. I love having context that’s so much bigger than I can fathom. It’s fantastic to realise how insignificant you are.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Bigger Fantastic Thinking
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.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Character Fun People
One of the best things about being an actor is that it’s a meritocracy.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Actors Best Meritocracy Things
Do I like being thought of as attractive? I don’t know anyone on Earth who doesn’t, but I do find it funny. I look in a mirror and I see all the faults I’ve lived with for 35 years and yet people go kind of nuts for certain things about me. It’s not me being humble. I just think it’s weird.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Humble Mirror Thinking
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.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Character Doctors Strange
Doctors and nurses do crazy hours and keep an ideal afloat through the love and care that they have for their craft and their patients and the institution of the NHS. We should be very proud of it.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Care Crazy Doctor Ideal
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.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Drama Jobs School
[Sherlock Holmes] has moved from being someone who was sociopathic, work-obsessed and slightly amoral, into being someone who has a certain degree of a private life, which is very, very private, with The Woman, or Irene Adler.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Certain Degrees Obsessed
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.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Better Get Hard Trying Work
I am a PR disaster because I talk too much.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Disaster Much
[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 CUMBERBATCH

Actor Challenges Gymnastics
I know he [Julian Assange] is a man of fierce determination, and now living under the strain of house arrest in the Ecuadorean embassy as a “political exile,” as he calls himself.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Determination House Men
I don’t want to miss things.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Allow Done Missing Want
I was brought up in a world of privilege.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Brought Privilege World
[Doctor Strange ] is slightly more specialised than Spider-Man or Superman or Batman, but he’s very loved by people who know him.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Doctors Men People
When you’re a kid, ‘Star Trek’ is a slower burn. It’s funny, it’s entertaining, but it also has a maturity about it – which is its universal appeal, I think.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Kids Maturity Stars
The world of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and the world that we live in now is big enough to take more than one interpretation.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Enough World
I can’t stop traffic on Fifth Avenue, not unless I walk in front of an oncoming cab.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Avenue Fifth Traffic Walks
It’s an interesting arc. You start with a character [Doctor Strange] who’s likeable and charming but very arrogant and distant. He’s funny but you can see there are massive holes in his life. It’s a very painful transition and all that he becomes is tested so quickly and violently.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Character Doctors Interesting
I 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.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Emotional Sometimes Thinking

I think playing any iconic role when you’re stepping into big shoes, into the shadow of people who have come before you and you can’t process that.

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I think playing any iconic role when you’re stepping into big shoes, into the shadow of people who have come before you and you can’t process that.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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