As Sherlock Homes, Benedict Cumberbatch is a wizard at deduction. But when it comes to chatting up girls, TV’s super sleuth admits that he hasn’t a clue. “I’ve always found it difficult chatting girls up,” he tells me when we meet in a West Hollywood office. “I’m not confident in social situations just going up to someone and saying ‘hi’ or just cold calling in a bar but now it’s even more difficult because they don’t know the real me—-they just know me as a fictional person I play or they know me from interviews.”
Nowadays with the quirky Sherlock entering its third season and 35-year-old bachelor Benedict making a name for himself in movies such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and War Horse, there are plenty of girls who love his distinctively unusual looks and want to know him better.
“It’s interesting and it’s something I’m processing,” he says. “It’s new to me and I’m sure I’ll get used to it and find a way of dealing with it but at the moment it’s quite odd.”
Unattached after splitting with girlfriend Anna Jones following a ten year relationship with Olivia Poulet, he is amused at the attention his looks are attracting, particularly in America, where he has been filming Star Trek 2.
“Do I like being thought of as attractive?” he muses. “I don’t know anyone on earth who doesn’t but I do find it quite funny. I mean, I look in a mirror and I see all the faults I’ve lived with for 35 years and yet people go kind of nuts for certain things about me. It’s not me being humble—I just think it’s very weird and odd.”