Let's look at what he actually did say.
Interviewed for Radio Times by Decca Aitkenhead, he talked about sudden real post-Sherlock fame, touched on his personal life and lucidly compared the similarities and differences between that role and the one he brings to our screens soon this Friday, that of Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy Parade's End, by all early accounts winningly adapted by Tom Stoppard. Both well-spoken, tall, English and Edwardian – in soul anyway, even though Cumberbatch's Sherlock has been so vibrantly updated – and variously tortured gentlemanly souls. But Christopher is taciturn and there is, as Cumberbatch put it, "none of that hyper-articulate mental vomiting. I think people might think, 'Why would he want to do that, because it's nothing like Sherlock?' But that's exactly why."
Then, in some final throwaway comments, he touched upon, or was invited to touch upon, "posh-bashing", and said that sometimes, mainly as a consequence of having been to Harrow, he has been "castigated as a moaning, rich, public-school bastard, complaining about only getting posh roles". Aitkenhead goes on to say: "As he's one of the most gifted, intelligent and likable actors this country has produced, I'm not surprised he can't even be bothered to engage the attack. 'It's just so predictable,' he sighs wearily. 'So domestic and so dumb.' I just hope he's not serious when he adds, 'It makes me think I want to go to America.'"
And there you have it. A half-hearted sigh about being castigated for complaining about only getting posh roles, and what sounds like an end-of-interview joke. Radio Times – perhaps surprisingly for a publication normally viewed as reliable, comprehensive but a bit… Auntie – has, for the past year or two, been knocking out many interviews that have produced the lead item in the next day's papers. They are not averse to taking the slightest of controversies from a celeb's mouth and, while never presumably being actionably inaccurate, still flamming it up to the high heavens. So you can be sure that, had Cumberbatch indulged in any serious kind of rant about class, or seriously "threatened" to go to America, it would have been worked into the intro, if not the headline. And from this, our nation of point-missers erupted into an orgy of castigating him for moaning about only getting posh roles. Which he hadn't.
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