The Sherlock star was forced into the back of a car on a dirt road.

The English actor opened up about his ordeal in a recent interview with Variety, describing to the magazine the terrifying moment he and two friends were kidnapped by armed thugs after their car broke down on a remote road in South Africa.

The 48-year-old Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy star was filming the BBC mini-series To the Ends of the Earth when he and Emmerdale actress Denise Black were approached by a group of men and forced into the back of a vehicle.

Cumberbatch, who was in his late 20s at the time, described how the kidnappers drove them around for hours and stole some of their posessions.

He said the incident fundamentally changed him and "gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one". 

He added that he still deals with trauma from the event, over twenty years on.

"It made me impatient to live a life less ordinary, and I’m still dealing with that impatience," he said. 

At the time, the actor's career was just beginning. He had only appeared in a handful of TV shows before landing the lead role of Edmund Talbot in the BBC's adaptation of William Golding's novel.

The incident also turned him into something of an adrenaline junky with a passion for extreme sports and daredevil activities like skydiving.

"It made me go, ‘Oh, right, yeah, I could die at any moment'," he said. "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."

"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.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in 2013, Cumberbatch went into more detail about the harrowing incident, admitting that he genuinely feared for his life.

The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art graduate described how the six armed men emerged from the darkness and told him and his co-stars to look at the floor and put their hands above their heads.

"They started frisking us and said: ‘Where’s your money? Where’s your drugs?’ — we had smoked a bit of weed — ‘Where are your weapons?’ And at that point, this adrenaline of fight or flight just exploded in my body. I was like, ‘Oh f—, we’re f—ed!'

"I was scared, really scared," he continued. "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."

Eventually, without explanation, the assailants let their prey go, slinking off into the night, after which Cumberbatch says he rediscovered the sheer wonder of being alive.

"It really, really enriches your values in life, he told THR. "It’s incredibly important."