Benedict Cumberbatch's terrifying home intrusion at the hands of knife-wielding chef: new details emerge
New details have emerged from a terrifying home intrusion Benedict Cumberbatch and his family faced at the hands of an angry, knife-wielding former chef.
The actor and his wife, Sophie Hunter, plus their three kids, were in their $4.3 million home in London when Jack Bissell, a 35-year-old former at the five-star Beaumont Hotel in Mayfair, forcibly entered through the home's front garden iron gate, making threats while holding a fish knife.
The home intrusion occurred earlier this month, though details have only now emerged after the Daily Mail challenged blanket reporting restrictions earlier this week.
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"I know you've moved here, I hope it burns down," the outlet reports that a court heard during a hearing on May 10.
The court further learned that the former chef ripped out one of the garden plants and threw it against the wall, and screamed more abuse through the intercom, which he later used his knife to rip out from the wall.
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Though he fled the scene, he was subsequently arrested after police found his DNA on the intercom.
During the Wood Green Crown court hearing earlier this month, he admitted to criminal damage, was fined £250 ($310), and was given a three-year restraining order banning him from approaching the Marvel star's family and the area in north London where they reside.
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Bissell, who worked at the Beaumont both through 2017 to 2018 and 2019 to 2020, has had a brush with authorities in the past. In 2015 he was photographed shirtless while getting arrested during a central London protest against military intervention in Syria, and the Daily Mail reports he has a previous conviction for theft, three warnings for offenses against property, a public order offense as well as a drug offense.
Cumberbatch and his wife bought the five-bedroom home in question in 2015, the year they tied the knot at the 12th-century Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Mottistone on the Isle of Wight. They have three sons together, Christopher Carlton, seven, Hal Auden, six, and Finn, three.
The two got engaged in 2014, after starting to date the year prior, though they had been friends for nearly 17 years before turning their relationship into a romantic one. She is an English theater director, having made her directorial debut in 2007 co-directing the experimental play The Terrific Electric, and she has also been involved in movies such as Vanity Fair (2004), Friends and Crocodiles (2005), Burlesque Fairytales (2009), and Macbeth (2010).
This isn't Cumberbatch's first instance facing traumatic incidents, as in 2005, while in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, he and two friends were abducted by a group of locals after bursting a tire, and were held at gunpoint. They were subsequently driven into unsettled territory, though they were then set free without explanation. Years after the fact, he said of the incident: "It taught me that you come into this world as you leave it, on your own. It's made me want to live a life slightly less ordinary."
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