Late last year, British actor Benedict Cumberbatch joined a rather short list of male celebrities to be described as “real-life heroes” after stepping in to stop moped thieves from taking on another helpless victim.
The problem is, his intervention was minimal, because that’s all it took to scare off the 4 “kids” trying to rob off a poor Deliveroo guy. So forget everything else you’ve read about the incident, because he doesn’t consider himself a superhero.
Cumberbatch was on The Ellen Show the other, for a taping on this week’s episode, and DeGeneres got him to open up about the incident. Initial reports said that he and his wife were riding an Uber when they noticed a biker was being robbed by a gang, and he swooped in and, with help from the Uber driver, beat the crap out of the bad guys and saved the poor victim.
It wasn’t exactly like that, Benedict admits with some embarrassment.
“I saw a Deliveroo guy on a bicycle getting surrounded by some guys on a very cold November night and I just stopped the Uber that we were in and got out and tried to calm the kids down,” he tells Ellen. “And I tried to calm [the biker] down, it looked like he was about to fight for his life.”
Cumberbatch admits the situation had dangerous potential and that he didn’t think about “knives or acid or any of the other things that can be part of that situation,” but he stops short from saying out loud he “rescued” the bloke. He simply got in the way and prevented the 4 kids from robbing him blind.
As for whether the Uber driver got out and fought the bad guys by his side, as he claimed he did at the time, that didn’t happen either. They didn’t get the assailants off the bloodied victim together, as the Uber driver told the British tabs: the driver stayed inside the car and was “supportive” by keeping the engine running, Cumberbatch says, with a smile.
Cumberbatch was on The Ellen Show the other, for a taping on this week’s episode, and DeGeneres got him to open up about the incident. Initial reports said that he and his wife were riding an Uber when they noticed a biker was being robbed by a gang, and he swooped in and, with help from the Uber driver, beat the crap out of the bad guys and saved the poor victim.
It wasn’t exactly like that, Benedict admits with some embarrassment.
“I saw a Deliveroo guy on a bicycle getting surrounded by some guys on a very cold November night and I just stopped the Uber that we were in and got out and tried to calm the kids down,” he tells Ellen. “And I tried to calm [the biker] down, it looked like he was about to fight for his life.”
Cumberbatch admits the situation had dangerous potential and that he didn’t think about “knives or acid or any of the other things that can be part of that situation,” but he stops short from saying out loud he “rescued” the bloke. He simply got in the way and prevented the 4 kids from robbing him blind.
As for whether the Uber driver got out and fought the bad guys by his side, as he claimed he did at the time, that didn’t happen either. They didn’t get the assailants off the bloodied victim together, as the Uber driver told the British tabs: the driver stayed inside the car and was “supportive” by keeping the engine running, Cumberbatch says, with a smile.