TV Sherlock star deduces a great future

Amid the hullabaloo of the red carpet at this year's British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards (Baftas) held on February 16, one little gem from 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen almost slipped by unnoticed. "Benedict Cumberbatch - he auditioned," he told one interviewer. "I don't know Sherlock, I'd never seen it. And through his audition, he shined." It was a remarkable admission: firstly that Cumberbatch had to audition and, secondly, that fellow Brit McQueen was only dimly aware of who this actor was.

After all, the Cumberbatch curriculum vitae now includes collaborations with Danny Boyle, Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams and Peter Jackson. Last year alone he played the villainous Khan in Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness, a digital dragon in Jackson's Tolkien adaptation, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate - and Time magazine put Cumberbatch on the cover of its international edition. As his Star Trek co-star Alice Eve puts it: "He's having a moment."

Two other 2013 films in which he had eye-catching roles, McQueen's epic 12 Years a Slave and the all-star familial drama August: Osage County, are finally opening in Hong Kong this week. The first is a red-hot favourite for the Oscars, having collected a Golden Globe and Bafta for best picture. Based on the true account of Solomon Northup, a free man ripped from his family and sent to the plantations of Virginia in 1841, the 37-year-old Cumberbatch puts it both simply and elegantly: "It's extraordinary, this story."

There may be a website devoted to matching pictures of otters with shots of the actor (yes, really) but there's something magnetic about being in his presence. Just ask his devoted female fans (the so-called "Cumberbitches"), although he's in denial about this sex-symbol status. "I don't think people turn on to see me, looking the way I look."

Certainly, he slips neatly enough into the ensemble for 12 Years a Slave, which also features Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Northup. He plays William Ford, "a very paternal slaveowner", who becomes Northup's first master. While he's a kindly soul, Cumberbatch makes no excuses for a man who bankrolls his ailing business with human trafficking. "It's still a terrible thing he's doing. When the chips are down, he sells these people because they are a commodity to him at the end of the day; they can get him out of his debt, and make him solvent."

It recently emerged, in a horrific twist of fate, that Cumberbatch's own Bristol-born ancestors founded their family fortunes on a sugar plantation in Barbados and owned slaves - revelations that came to light via a newly appointed city commissioner in New York, Stacey Cumberbatch. Not that the actor has ever tried to hide his family's dark secret. In the past, he claimed playing abolitionist prime minister William Pitt the Younger in the 2006 film Amazing Grace was a "sort of apology" for such events.

With brutal realism, McQueen's drama doesn't flinch in its depiction of the slave trade. "There was a massive black market," the actor says. "Their value increased beyond the actual value of the land they were cultivating, and the produce they made. So they were traded for thousands of dollars, and were farmed themselves and brought together for their fertility. Families were kept together to try to breed children, [who could then] be nurtured into slavery, in adolescence and adult life."