The Mind-Bending Mr. Cumberbatch

The thinking woman’s crumpet Benedict Cumberbatch has a growing army of borderline-obsessive fans, whose hysteria will only be stoked further by the release of this month’s blockbuster-in-waiting, Doctor Strange, in which he plays yet another genius misfit. They aren’t the greatest danger he has faced in a daredevil life. But, as Cumberbatch tells MICHAEL SCHULMAN, he is now looking for a different kind of thrill.

- Michael Schulman

When Benedict Cumberbatch was 19 years old, he got good and lost in the Himalayas. No longer a schoolboy in tailcoat and boater, not yet the internationally known star of Sherlock and one of the world’s most unlikely sex symbols, he had taken a gap year before university to get a glimpse of life beyond A-level exams and Sunday chapel.

In a hillside town near Darjeeling, he taught English to Tibetan monks, giving himself a crash course in improvisation as he conjured up instructional games. On weekends off, he would seek adventure: white-water rafting down the Kali Gandaki River, traversing the desert province of Rajasthan. (It was monsoon season everywhere else.) But the mountains beckoned.

So he and three friends caught a bus from Kathmandu. Sherpas were expensive, and they were students traveling on the cheap, so they decided, extremely unwisely, to wing it. Altitude sickness derailed them one by one: their group of four became a group of three, then a group of two. By the third night, Cumberbatch recalls, “I started to have really weird, fucked-up dreams, and felt things were happening in my sleep. I wasn’t sure if I was conscious or awake.”

He and his friend reached a spiritual fork in the road, which happened to be a literal fork in the road: up or down? They chose up. And that’s when they got utterly, hopelessly, bewilderingly lost. They ran out of biscuits. They drank rainwater squeezed out of moss, because they’d read it was safer than river water. As night fell, with their flashlights losing power, they pressed on through the thicket, until they spotted a corrugated-steel roof in the distance: salvation?