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The shot never came. The power of persuasion that serves him so well as an actor worked on his kidnappers, who released them. They found their way to freedom, unscathed but shaken. He worried he might just "shrivel up into a shell and not want to be part of the world." Instead he woke up the next morning, had a beer and a cigarette, and says he thought, "I want to be part of this. I want to go out and swim and run through the sand dunes and into that landscape. It was a small event in a big country." Later he went to Mozambique and finished a scuba course. "My first underwater dive, I saw a sperm whale and its calf, 10 meters away from me. The pilot of the boat said, 'You lucky f — -er, I've been doing this for 10 years and I've never seen one so close. And on your first dive? F — - you!' And I just laughed and thought, You know, I did go through a bit to get here!"
He's learned how to keep things hidden. "With Star Trek, with Sherlock, God knows there are other projects as well ... I can't at all talk about them," he says. "It's ridiculous. I kind of feel like I'm carrying around all these secrets." For a man under the bright glare of celebrity, Cumberbatch keeps much of his private life in the dark. "Every time I'm seen at a bar with a girl, I get photographed," he says with a sigh. "Anyone who has a computer knows my entire dating history. I get it. Paparazzi is an inescapable, immovable obstacle."
He's become the object of the kind of DIY paparazzi of Internet fans as well: dozens of Tumblrs are devoted to his life, with awkwardly punny names like Cumberbum and A Cumberbatch of Cookies. When he repeats how his success is "an embarrassment of riches," he puts equal emphasis on both sides of the phrase.
Cumberbatch says he admires the way August: Osage County producer George Clooney has managed celebrity: "He's a wonderful man to be around. He just wears his fame and who he is as a public persona, and it doesn't seem to cost him, you know?"
August was filmed in rural Oklahoma, where Cumberbatch assumed he'd go unnoticed. Even there, though, the master sleuth's reputation preceded him. "I thought, Oh, I won't get recognized here," he says, laughing. "But the first café I walked into, the waitresses were like" — and here he approximates a gum-chewing Midwestern accent with affection — "'Oh my God! Aren't you on television? Don't you play Sherlock Holmes?' It's amazing the spread of that thing, it's incredible."
He had better luck going incognito in New Orleans, where he filmed 12 Years a Slave. "All that darkness, just outside the city border, [the remains of] steamboats and slave markets, and just extraordinary shops and extraordinary stories — everyone has a passion, and it's all kind of on display. I have the radio station WWOZ on my phone."
Beyond jazz, he is a fan of soundtracky postrockers Sigur Rós and just saw Nile Rodgers' Chic in London. "To have that many people in a disco mood, everyone dancing and smiling without shame in your moves, is the best kind of high," he says.
You get the sense that as articulate as Cumberbatch is, that kind of abandon is a rarity. He likens a successful performance not to a moment of losing himself, the flow that his fellow Buddhists often talk about, but in more athletic terms, as if it takes a bit of physical exertion to get there. "It's rather like a sportsman," he says, "where you hit a sweet spot and think, Oh, that felt good. You don't necessarily know why it is. It's pretty fleeting, and I guess that's how it should be, because the minute you try to hold on to it, it's too precious, and you start to try to reinvigorate the ghost of what you've done rather than keep evolving it."
Few actors are evolving faster, or more intelligently, than Cumberbatch. So far he has resisted a rom-com cash-in or action-hero self-mythologizing, though he's scheduled to play the great hero of inaction, Hamlet, on the London stage next spring. His next big film project is 2014's The Imitation Game, in which he portrays the groundbreaking father of computer science, Alan Turing, who was chemically castrated in 1952 for being gay and whose work, like that of the modern Sherlock and Assange, takes place at the intersection of communication, technology and humanity.
Cumberbatch's zeal for unraveling these knotty sorts of men is unmistakable. "Coming back to Julian for a second," he says, "he's a man who, excuse his message of transparency, wants to keep as much of himself together as possible." The same could be said for the man who plays him, but the resemblance ends there. "As far as typecasting," Cumberbatch says, "I think I'm clear of that."