[Image: Wiki Commons]
Sherlock and Doctor Strange actor Benedict Cumberbatch revealed that being abducted by six men while filming in South Africa more than 20 years ago still haunts him.
The 48-year-old actor said the terrifying incident happened while he was filming a TV show in South Africa and has changed the way he lives his life.
“It made me go, ‘Oh, right, yeah, I could die at any moment,’” the actor said in an interview with Variety magazine.
Cumberbatch was here filming a miniseries for the BBC in 2004 called To the Ends of the Earth. Between recordings, he went on a driving excursion with some friends.
Things were going smoothly until their car got a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere. Criminals then ambushed them and forced the group to sit as if waiting to be executed. The men then fled with the stolen vehicle.
While no physical harm befell the actor, he’s still dealing with the psychological wounds more than 20 years later.
Opening up about the ordeal in the interview, the dad of three, who was in his late 20s at the time, said the incident fundamentally changed him and “gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one”.
“When you become a parent, your thoughts turn more towards mortality,” he said.
He said it also made him a lot more “impatient to live a life less ordinary”, which he says he is still trying to deal with now. What’s more, the incident turned him into something of an adrenaline junky with a passion for extreme sports and daredevil activities like skydiving.
“I was throwing myself out of planes, taking all sorts of risks. But apart from my parents, I didn’t have any real dependents at that point.”
Cumberbatch has told the story about his near-death experience in Africa many times over the years, but the fact that his three kids, nine-year-old Christopher, seven-year-old Hal, and six-year-old Finn, are rapidly growing gave the harrowing anecdote renewed relevance.
Being a husband and father, he said, has had a ‘sobering’ effect on his adrenaline-junkie ways.
“I’ve looked over the edge. It’s made me comfortable with what lies beneath it. And I’ve accepted that that’s the end of all our stories,,” he shared.
“I will be in my 60s when he’s 21,’ you know? It’s crazy. It’s gone so fast. So there’s a huge shift in priorities, and it makes you value what you do with your life in a very different way,” he said.
When he opened up about the incident to The Hollywood Reporter back in 2013, the London bloke said his three friends were like “sitting ducks” after their car tyre blew, and he genuinely feared for his life as they were frisked for money, drugs and weapons.
“I was scared, really scared. I said: ‘What are you going to do with us? Are you going to kill us?’ I was really worried that I was going to get raped or molested or just tortured or toyed with in some way, some act of control and savagery.”
Cumberbatch’s testimony coincides with a common side-effect of PTSD in men: increased risk-taking and impulsivity, BoredPanda notes.
According to Maggie Talbot, a professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado, men who experience trauma are much more likely to engage in life-threatening activities when compared to women suffering from the same psychological disorder.
“Gender differences in post-traumatic stress disorder prevalence are well documented,” she explained.
Neurologist Carolina Contreras explained what exactly makes these activities so attractive for patients.
“The literature suggests that risky behaviors may have an emotion regulating function,” Contreras explained. “[They] serve both as an escape for the person dealing with traumatic memories, as well as a tool.”
For the neurologist, one of the most important objectives when treating trauma-exposed patients is teaching them skills to help them manage their emotions without engaging in harmful behaviors.
It seems having kids and loving his family was one way for Cumberbatch to cope and manage these destructive feelings.
[Source: Mirror]
