Benedict Cumberbatch Recalls How His Actor Parents Pushed Him Forward Benedict Cumberbatch Recalls How His Actor Parents Pushed Him Forward

It seems Benedict Cumberbatch was always destined for the spotlight. Being raised by two actors (Timothy Carlton and Wanda Ventham), Cumberbatch was all too familiar with the hectic, and often unreliable, life behind the curtain, but that didn’t deter him from pursuing his passion.

“I grew up with it,” the actor revealed to Claire Foy during a 2018 conversation on Variety’s “Actors on Actors.” “Mum and dad are both actors, a bit of ‘born inside the trunk.’ I’d been on tour with them, I’d snuck around backstage, I’d be in on sets, I had that sort of understanding of what it was they did for a living very early on.”

Looking back at some of the most memorable “Actors on Actors” pairings over the years, Cumberbatch opened up about how he found a love for acting early in his life. “Dad was working nonstop partly to pay for an education to basically pull me into line with the idea that it was madness to be peripatetic, not being able to plan your family holidays, not knowing where your next income is going to come from,” he said. “All the uncertainty which was on display in their lives, our lives. And yet they managed to squirrel away enough for a ludicrously expensive education, that was purely to make me see sense and become a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, something of use to society.”

However, there’s one particular moment from his past that makes this award-winning actor well up with emotion. When he was just a university student, his father came to see him play Salieri in “Amadeus.” After the curtain call, Carlton passed on this praise to his son, saying, “You’re better at this than I ever was or ever will be. I can’t wait to watch you and support you in what I think is going to be a fantastic career.”

Watch the upcoming season of Variety’s “Actors on Actors,” presented by Amazon Studios, starting on Jan. 24.