I’ve realised now that the reality of children is you have to be in the right place with the right person. – Benedict Cumberbatch
My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a ‘desert rats’ tank operator in the Second World War. – Benedict Cumberbatch
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
I realised quite early on that, although I wasn’t trying to make a career speciality of it, I was playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals. – Benedict Cumberbatch
‘Benedict’ means ‘blessed.’ My parents liked the sound of the name and felt slightly blessed because they’d been trying for a child for a very long time. – Benedict Cumberbatch
‘Sherlock’ fans are, by and large, an intelligent breed, so they’ve gone through my back catalogue and got what I’ve done, why and how I’ve done it. There is some obsessive behaviour, but I worry for them rather than me. – Benedict Cumberbatch
People’s hands fascinate me. It’s tempting to look at a businessman’s left hand and see if there’s an indentation from a missing wedding ring. Or maybe there’s a tan line and the skin is pressed down where’s he’s worked a ring off his finger. – Benedict Cumberbatch
I’m not confident in social situations; just going up to someone in a bar and saying ‘Hi’ is going to be even more difficult because they won’t know the real me. They will just know me as a fictional person I play on the screen. – Benedict Cumberbatch
We’re living through a time where we are fighting wars fostered by politics, admittedly not on the same scale as the First World War, but with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families. – Benedict Cumberbatch
‘Frankenstein’ was all about the idea that, through electricity and the destruction of night, man creating light and darkness, we took on god-like powers and then abused them like gods, and we are only men. That’s a story about man making a man in his own image. The inversion of natural order. – Benedict Cumberbatch
I’ve been quite a late developer on the clothes front, but I’ve suddenly realised it is one of life’s joys. – Benedict Cumberbatch
I never was obsessive about anything I watched when I was a kid, except maybe ‘The A-Team’ and ‘Airwolf’… And I loved ‘Knight Rider’ and then later ‘Baywatch.’ – Benedict Cumberbatch
Landing the role of Stephen Hawking was the most positively surprising thing that has happened to me. – Benedict Cumberbatch
Metaphorically speaking, it’s easy to bump into one another on the journey from A to B and not even notice. People should take time to notice, enjoy and help each other. – Benedict Cumberbatch
My first, big, silly role at school was as Arthur Crocker-Harris in Rattigan’s ‘The Browning Version,’ where my job was to make school-masters’ wives weep with recognition. – Benedict Cumberbatch
Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it. – Benedict Cumberbatch
The world of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and the world that we live in now is big enough to take more than one interpretation. – Benedict Cumberbatch
It’d be really nice to wake up looking like, I don’t know, Jake Gyllenhaal and think, ‘Let’s try this on for a day and see how it feels.’ – Benedict Cumberbatch
I was thrilled with how the first series of ‘Sherlock’ was received. It was such great fun to film, which makes it so rewarding when something you enjoy is so well received. – Benedict Cumberbatch
Fame is a weird one. You need to distance yourself from it. People see a value in you that you don’t see yourself. – Benedict Cumberbatch