160 Quotes by Benedict Cumberbatch

I'm a high-functioning sociopath, do your research.

Looking for happiness is a sure way to sadness, I think. You have to take each moment as it comes.

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.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun. (Meaning)

You come into this world as you leave it, on your own. It's made me want to live a life slightly less ordinary.

I keep myself amused and others confused

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If you have an over-preoccupation with perception and trying to please people's expectations, then you can go mad.

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.

I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book.

People always want to knock you when you're up.

Mystique is rare now, isn't it? There aren't that many enigmas in this modern world.

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.

My first agent dissuaded me from calling myself 'Cumberbatch.' I had six months of not very productive time with her, so I changed agents. The new one said, 'Why aren't you using your family name? It's a real attention-grabber.' I worried, 'How much is it going to cost to put my name in lights?' But then I decided that's not my problem.

Our daily lives are so mundane, we get taken over by what is immediately in front of us and we don't see beyond that.

One of the best things about being an actor is that it's a meritocracy.

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Being in front of an audience makes me feel alive. Being with friends makes me feel alive. I’ve done some crazy stuff in my time and yet I can feel infinitely alive curled up on a sofa reading a book. So, what makes me feel alive? I guess it’s realizing I am part of the world around me.

Any irrational fears?no, i'm quite a rationalist. i'm not superstitious, i think life is too full of natural wonders and logical complexities to worry about illogical things.

If you can't fail, you can never get better.

Because reading is one of the joys of life, and once you begin, you can't stop, and you've got so many stories to look forward to.

That's something I have to work on: to separate what really matters, to conserve energy by not worrying about what other people think.

We have a lot more unlikely heroes now. It’s not just the guy with guns—it’s the guy with brains.

I'm sort of focused on my long-term goal of carving out a career that's for life, rather than being a flash in the pan.

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.

The number of people my age, younger now, a whole generation younger, who are fiercely bright, over-educated, under-employed and who are politicised and purposeless really upsets me. It's soul-destroying.

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.

Mum did a lot of commercial theatre and farces in the 1980s and '90s to make sure the school bills were paid.

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.

One of the fears of having too much work is not having time to observe. And once you get recognised, there is nowhere for you to look any more. You can't sit on a night bus and watch it all happen.

There are things that are a given, that you've already established, and obviously, visually, certain iconic things that can't be completely removed, like a certain hat or a certain coat in my case.

We all want to escape our circumstances, don't we? Especially if you are an actor.

Not that i had a big arse but even that was toned.

Sometimes being away, on location, I feel like I'm away for much of my own life. I want to be better at staying connected.

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.

Live a life less ordinary.

You have to sometimes just run with the problem rather than trying to solve it with hi-tech wizardry and lots of planning.

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.

Fame is a weird one. You need to distance yourself from it. People see a value in you that you don't see yourself.

Enjoy the journey of life and not just the endgame.

All the backstories are there but not talked about.

The first time we did cavalry charge I was so breathless with excitement I nearly fell off the horse. I actually saw stars in front of my eyes and thought I was going to faint. The second time I had a bit more control but was still giddy with excitement. And the third time I was an emotional wreck. I had to really try hard not to cry.

My mum and dad had worked incredibly hard to afford me an education.

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.

Every job is incredibly different, and I love it because you're picking up skill sets and experiences. It's the university of life.

It's always important to have the blessing.

There's no shame in stealing - any actor who says he doesn't is lying. You steal from everything.

There was a moment of extraordinary humbleness and humility and pride, as well, with my father when he turned to me - and I think it was after I played Salieri in "Amadeus" at university. And he said, You're better than I ever was or ever could be, you should do this for profession. You'd have a good time.

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.

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.

Upper class to me means you are either born into wealth or you're Royalty.

If I'd had fame early on, I'd have been able to abuse it in the way that a young man should.

I've been reading the books. It's the origination, it's the primary source. You should always go back to the books.

The awful lesson of history is that we too often ignore people, just because they're foreigners or different from us.

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've said for quite a long time I'd like him to have a different haircut. I quite like my hair being short. You know, we've been away two years, let's f*** around with his outfit, let's f*** around with his haircut, let's do something different.

Conan Doyle is amazing in the way he has Watson describe Sherlock’s posture, mood swings, his hand gestures, and so forth in the novels.

It's great for the people who supported me early on to see the success I'm enjoying.

I've been quite a late developer on the clothes front, but I've suddenly realised it is one of life's joys.

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.

If I'm playing someone who's smart, suddenly every character I've played is smart. If I'm playing a bad guy, every character is a bad guy. I suppose it's that thing where people want to see a through-line to understand you. I mean, you know, I have played pretty ordinary people too.

I'm interested in art for all. I don't want it to be only the sons and daughters of Tory MPs who get to see my plays.

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.

Honestly, it's very satisfying, and I'm very, very happy about how successful the last few years have been... It's great for the people who supported me early on to see the success I'm enjoying now.

There's so much in the 21st century that is stymied by bureaucracy and mediocrity and committee.

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.

When you see a good horseman, you're unable to tell where the instruction is coming from. It's like telepathy.

It still makes me giggle that I'm paid to act.

Talking about class terrifies me. There is no way of winning.

I tell my wife all my secrets.

My dad read The Hobbit to me originally when I was young. So, it was the first imaginary landscape I ever had in my head from the written word. It gave me a passion for reading, thanks to my dad's performance of the book.

The world of 'Sherlock Holmes' and the world that we live in now is big enough to take more than one interpretation.

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'm not an overnight success. I've been doing it for 12 years. It's been lovely and varied so far.

Actor is an odd profession, and sometimes people get jealous, but I haven't really experienced any of that. Everyone's been really happy for me, which is really, really great.

I never really got obsessed about one thing for long. I was a bit of a butterfly and a magpie.

Even though Doctor Strange is an established character, when you're doing an origin story there's a lot of room for manoeuvre.

I'm a Prince of Wales Trust ambassador, so I'm all about giving youth an education, a voice and a chance to not take the wrong road.

For brain surgeons it's particularly difficult to deal with failure. It was fascinating to learn about that whole world.

There are moments when, like all of us, you get a bit self-conscious and you'd rather not be living any of your day in public. Those are the awkward times, but you've got to have fun with it.

The more charming person is the person who admits the other person is more charming.

Anyone who works in the NHS has superpowers. It's a miracle, it is magic.

The armoury of having any academic education does not necessarily set you up for being a good or better actor.

Sherlock being the most prevalent, and they've been really good fun.

Maybe it's because I was an only child, but I've always wanted kids.

I'd love to do a noir. I think Steve McQueen is so cool. But a classic film is a classic film, and perhaps the fantasy of being those characters should be left alone. You're treading on very thin ice.

There's still nearly the same amount of slavery, if not more, in the world today, as there was at the height of the slave trade.

We should have a conversation when we hang up.

We look at science as the ultimate answer for everything yet we are really messy organisms and when the two collide in the upper echelons of medicine you think science will prevail but it's not always that way.

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.

My massive motivation in life is to make parents proud. But even that has to stop at a point.

You let things run in order to have some sanity and be able to do your work and not feel pre-judged.

Maybe it's just getting older, but I don't want to miss things.

There are very specific demands, though, in television, and you notice the budget constrictions. It's the time constraint and a purse constraint more than anything else that you notice. But the ambition of the writing and, hopefully, the delivery of it gets better and better because we want to outdo ourselves to keep ahead of a very expectant and hungry public.

What makes a good animated movie is being able to balance adult and knowing in-jokes and also just out and out funny things that make all people laugh. The idea that it's actually something that will appeal to a family, that's the trick.

I have pitfalls. I have emotional responses to things that are really not about me. They're about other people.

It does get strange when you realize people will hang around for hours to get a glimpse of you doing scenes outside.

Someone will always hate what I say. There’s always going to be somebody spitting blood about my wooden-faced, toffee-named, crappy acting.

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.

You'd have to be pretty hard-nosed not to feel some sympathy for the guy [Doctor Strange].

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.

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.

If you can't jump on board when the ride's going past that's it, it usually goes by, so the hugest compliment they paid me was to come back to me. It motivated me to try to fulfill their faith.

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.

There's a heroic amount of effort that goes into making him [Doctor Strange] a superhero by the end of the film.

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.

I'm quite surprised by how many people grew up with this character [Doctor Strange ].

What's not to look forward to? It's like all the actors in all of the films. It's difficult to get Martin Freeman and I in a room together. Imagine what it's like to get myself, Chris Hemsworth, Robert Downey Jr., Elizabeth Olsen... these extraordinary actors who all have careers outside the Marvel Universe.

Doctor Strange is an origin story so there's a certain room for me improving as well as the character improving.

It will be obvious to anyone who sees it that he [Doctor Strange] earns that cloak. You think he's doing all right and then you realise that there's one massive lesson to learn.

Kevin Feige said to me: "I don't think we've ever put an actor through quite as much as this, physically and mentally." I'll wear that as a badge of honour. It was endless.

Being someone who is of our sensual reality, Stephen Strange has a lifestyle, he has a sexuality, he's materialistic.

Those are more universal things than some of the characters I play, who are slightly sociopathic. I keep reminding people I can do ordinary.

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.

The biggest lesson Stephen Strange learns in this film is it's not all about him.

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.

It's very easy to be cynical about any kind of interference in things that are beyond our skill set.

It's the same thing, I think, whether it's breathing or meditation or yoga. And running is a great way of doing it.

An inflated sense of self-importance? Absolutely, but I think it comes from Doctor Strange need to control things and that's what happens to all surgeons, I think. There's a huge degree of uncertainty and bafflement.

My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a 'desert rats' tank operator in the Second World War.

New York City is crazy and beautiful and really close to my heart, and I've always had dear friends here - family, actually, I would say.

When are you ever settled enough to have kids?

As an actor, you are aware of how a role can seep into your real life.

The training gave me the building blocks to get through it. A production of that scale, in a theater that big, you are going to struggle to keep your voice at first-run perfectness. All that work I did - the pull-ups and pushups - helped keep my body fit. Hamlet, the show, is a cardiovascular workout of about three hours, never mind the mental, soul-crushing element of it.

Landing the role of Stephen Hawking was the most positively surprising thing that has happened to me.

When I was young I became kind of a party animal. I had a massive crash. My health suffered. I was just overdoing it. That person could not be further from the one who emerged from that earlier experience. I regressed massively.

I still find to give an interview to be difficult, as any person who deals with the press will tell you. That's why it's nice, with this one, to talk to a friend. But sometimes with a coffee and a friendly smile, I suddenly start talking without thinking about how it's going to be read.

It is a wonderful thing to get married young and become a father.

You can perfect genius because genius is not perfection. On his level and his practice and his methodology, it's almost inhuman. So, that's been a fantastic arc to play, and boy does it go somewhere in this series.

Even though my parents experiences were different from mine. I wasn't a child actor brat; I didn't travel with them in the circuit. But I got a look into their world, so I did know what I was getting into, to an extent. And they are a constant source of grounding.

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.

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.

This is an odd profession, and sometimes people get jealous, but I haven't really experienced any of that. Everyone's been really happy for me, which is really, really great.

There's a huge amount of footage of Julian [ Assange] online, but he's usually in presentation or defending mode, talking about his cause, or the revelations which Wikileaks have brought about. There's none of Assange relaxing or in private mode. There's none of the personality I tried to give him behind closed doors [in The Fifth Estate ].

Even in cerebral roles that are seemingly intelligent and nothing else, I think it's so important to wrap your characterization in a physical form as well.

I've turned up to costume parties in the wrong costume. I've made social faux pas a plenty. I've put one foot in front of the other and fallen over.

I really discovered [Dr.Strange] through hearing about this film and first meeting Scott [Derrickson] and getting into it and just opening up and saying, "Okay, this is, like all comics, very much of its era," and my first question was, 'How do you make this film? Why do you make this film now?' and the answers were so enticing that I was like, "I'm in."

I think the characters are supposed to be an open book, blank canvas.

I feel that TV and film feed off each other well. It's more in the perception of the viewer than it is of the actor.

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!

I don't call myself an expert because I've played experts. I know a little bit about very little. But it's very hard to not be drawn into saying something, especially if it has to do with the work.

To get a horse to hit a mark without a rider, to get it to stand up, to get it to rear, to get it to pick up a bucket and bring it over is amazing. It's hard work and very rewarding but can be dangerous.

I did a lot of acting at school and university, then I went to drama school. It was quite a normal route.

Look at you lot, you're all so vacant, is it nice not being me it must be so relaxing.

I have actual acting scars.

There's a huge raft of roles that actors in our culture perform, and you can see any one of about three Hamlets in a year. It's not something to be completely daunted by.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

I'm not loyal to one genre. I want to mix it up.

If people ask, 'Are you Sherlock Holmes?', it's horribly naff, but I say, 'I'm not, I just look a bit like him' - which is how I feel. There are bad attributes of his that I really don't share!

Having your adolescence at an all-male boarding school is just crap.

I had the privilege of being able to choose, or at least have the opportunity to work at, being anything but an actor.

A woman who knows that she doesn't have to get all decked out to look good is sexy. A woman who can make you feel smart with her conversation skills is also sexy. I believe the sense of humor is important.

I think it's fair to say that, yeah, I'm playing Doctor Strange, I get there.

Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.

Animations are really powerful - it's not just entertainment, it's a very cunning way to get good ideas across.