fangirl extraordinaire.

God Damn. I just realised…

Martin when Benedict is mentioned and he has nothing to drink x:

Is Benedict Cumberbatch too big to fail?

BY STUART MCGURK

When I meet Benedict Cumberbatch, he raises his arms in front of himself, a good few feet out, giving the unmistakable sign that what we are about to do is hug.

“Stuart!”

This is both worrying, as I hug like a panicked passenger executing a talk-down landing of a plane, and welcome. At least I have time to prepare.

We pat solidly on backs, ask how the other is, and generally inspect each other for damage. The hug isn’t overly familiar, exactly: we’ve met before, but no more than that, yet he greets me like a long-lost friend, which is perhaps one of the politest things you can do to someone who isn’t.

Specifically, we met for the other time Cumberbatch featured on the cover of this magazine, a little more than three years ago, back when he was single, when he was about to appear in a third season of Sherlock (he’s now about to appear in a fourth), and had spent the year dividing his time between scene-stealing bit-parts in big films (the villain Khan in Star Trek: Into Darkness; the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug) and lead roles in smaller ones (Julian Assange inThe Fifth Estate; Alan Turing in The Imitation Game).

We’ve bumped into each other since, off and on - at a charity auction; at the 2014GQ Men Of The Year awards, an event where he took to the stage less than sober (“I’m here with motor-drivers… motor-drivers? What century am I from? Someone auditioning for Downton Abbeyor some such shit… Not that Downton Abbey is shit!”); and, finally, at the afterparty, where I found him quizzing a sommelier in the way one might question a recently landed alien who could, say, smell headaches. Not just intense interest in the details, but a sort of semi-baffled glee that such a thing could exist in the first place. I think he was asking about a Shiraz.