Benedict Cumberbatch Quotes

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.

I drag a lot of stuff round with me that I don’t need.

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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

Live a life less ordinary.

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

Pull the hair on my head the wrong way, and I would be on my knees begging for mercy. I have very sensitive follicles.

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

I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London.

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

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.’

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

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

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

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.

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.

I was brought up in a world of privilege.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I am a PR disaster because I talk too much.

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’ve realised now that the reality of children is you have to be in the right place with the right person.

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

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.

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

I have an appetite for the normal in my life, as well as the abnormal.

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

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’ll always do ‘Sherlock’ – it’s something I’m not going to give up on.

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

I love doing impersonations of people.

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.

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

‘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.

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

I want to be able to play trailer-bound fatties in a Judd Apatow comedy.

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.

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

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.

Lines are very difficult to learn.

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

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.

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

‘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.

I’ve been broody since I was 12, but I can’t just get anyone pregnant. It has got to be the right person.

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.

I think with any characterization there’s a point where you empathize, no matter how much of a deviance his or her actions may be from your understanding of humanity.

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.

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

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

I had a real yearning to make use of the opportunities I had at school. When I heard about the gap year of teaching English at a Tibetan monastery, I knew I had to do something about it really quickly, otherwise it was going to get allocated.

Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.

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