He’s played Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Strange, and even voiced The Grinch but acting opposite a seven-foot (2.1m) crow may be one of the strangest roles Benedict Cumberbatch has taken on.
Speaking about his new film, The Thing With Feathers, he admits it’s “a very odd job, there’s no getting away from it”.
If the vision of Cumberbatch wrestling with a giant bird sounds like the sort of amusingly surreal movie you fancy taking a look at next week, it’s important to understand that this is no comedy.
While the film, based on Max Porter’s eclectic novella Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, the film is at times disturbingly funny, but mostly it is an incredibly emotional take on the heartbreaking way we all process grief.
Cumberbatch plays a man whose wife has died suddenly, leaving him with their two young boys. The story itself is split into three parts – dad, boys and crow.
Crow – voiced by David Thewlis – is a figment of dad’s imagination, a sort of “unhinged Freudian therapist” for him, according to Porter.
Cumberbatch, a father of three, said this certainly wasn’t a role he wanted to think about when he returned to his own family each night.
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“I didn’t take it home, I didn’t talk about it…You have to work fast when you’re a father of three with a busy home life, you know, it’s very immediate the need they have of you, so you don’t go in and talk about your day crying your eyes out on a sofa with a crow punching you in the face.”
Since Porter’s award-winning work was first published in 2015 it has built a cult following.
Using text, dialogue and poetry to explore grief from various characters’ perspectives, the author says the subject matter is universal.
“Most of us are deeply eccentric in one way or another, like my father-in-law, apparently a very rational, blokey bloke, who’s like ‘when my mum died, a wren landed on the window and I knew it was my mum’.
“Grief puts us into these states where we are more attuned to the natural world and particularly more attuned to symbols and signs. So, imagining a crow moving in with the family actually makes a lot of sense to people, whereas, weirdly, five steps to getting better or get well soon or a hallmark card or whatever doesn’t make much sense to the people when you’re in that storm of pain.”
While the film sees Cumberbatch portray a firestorm of emotions, he says he feels it’s important to tackle weighty issues on screen.
“It is a universal experience, in one way or another you’re ‘gonna lose someone that you love during your life.”
The film, he says, explores grief through a male prism.
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“At a time when there’s a lot of very troubling influences on men without female presence in their lives, this thing of scapegoating and seeing the other as a threat, all of that comes into play within the allowance of grief to be a messy, scary, intimidating, chaotic, unruly and out of control place to exist as a man.
“This is a film that just leans into the idea that it’s alright to have feelings, you bury them or hide them at your peril.”
The Thing With Feathers is out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 21 November.
