Starring as another alienated genius, this one with superpowers, the actor reveals his own attraction to the edge. When Benedict Cumberbatch was 19 years old, he got good and lost in the Himalayas. No longer a schoolboy, not yet the internationally known star of Sherlock and one of the world’s most unlikely sex symbols, he had taken a gap year before university to get a glimpse of life beyond A-level exams and Sunday chapel. In a hillside town near Darjeeling, he taught English to Tibetan monks, giving himself a crash course in improvisation as he conjured up instructional games. On […]

Benedict Cumberbatch is concerned that the world might be growing tired of him. Though the actor, who shot to fame as the titular character on the BBC series Sherlock, has long had a rabid and vocal fanbase, he is rapidly emerging as a leading man. His star turn in last year’s The Fifth Estate badly stumbled, but he more than compensated with wildly different roles in August: Osage County and 12 Years a Slave. And now he’s tipped for his first Oscar nomination, playing World War II codebreaker Alan Turing in the just-released drama The Imitation Game. Cumberbatch, making a […]