Benedict Cumberbatch Breaks Down Grief & Growth In The Thing With Feathers

I want to start with a fun one. You've played a father twice on the big screen this year, maybe more if I'm mistaken, but two times that I recall in The Roses as Theo and this film, The Thing With Feathers, just as dad. And you're very different fathers in both of those projects. Could you kind of compare and contrast the parental styles of dad and Theo? I mean, oh, they're tasked with different things, aren't they? I think they become single parents in different ways, but similar, I suppose. They have a singular focus on their children when the mother's career takes off. So he's the stay-at-home dad. And obviously in Crow and Crow in The Thing With Feathers, dad is, you know, is bereft and suffers a very violent loss, very sudden loss of his wife and has to raise two young boys in a motherless home. So, yeah, I guess that's a sort of not particularly tasteful comparison. They're very different human beings. And I think there's that thing that happens, especially, well, my age, my stage of my career, the amount I've done that people go, oh, you're playing lots of dad, oh, you're playing a ----, oh, you're playing, well, of course I am, I'm that age. And also I've done a lot, so I'm going to repeat myself in some way, shape or form, but you couldn't think of two more different milieus or feelings to a film than Roses and Feathers. Yeah, very different genres, of course. The one sense of commonality they both have is, I guess they both kind of have motherless homes in different circumstances. I said, yes, a little bit. Roses obviously being, you know, because she's off away on work. Anyways, The Thing With Feathers, this is a concept, a novella from Max Porter that's been around for quite some time. And it also was adapted to the stage, I believe in 2019 with Cillian Murphy in the starring role. What was your first exposure to The Thing With Feathers? The book about 10 and a half years ago, then Cillian's amazing stage adaptation done by Enda Walsh. And then nothing for 10 years. And then Dylan gave me this script, sent it through my agents and all of us just were like, well, this is very, very special. He's pulled off a magic trick here because it's a pretty unfilmable book and it expanded far more of the novel as a cinema can do than the stage. And I was intrigued to meet him. And then the friendship bloomed and out of that trust and a great, great working relationship. I'm glad you brought up the aspect of things that are unfilmable based on the page because that's the luxury of getting to adapt things to live action is, there are things that work on the page that don't work on screen and then vice versa. So I was wondering if you could highlight some of those elements that you felt worked better on the screen with The Thing With Feathers. I wouldn't say better because the novel is, it's extraordinary and you can't, yeah, it's, I would say there were things that were made flesh in a more literal way, despite how idiosyncratic Crow is, for example, the crow in the room. He's a manifestation, it's a manifestation of grief this sort of humanoid monstrous inauguration of the animal that we know as the Corvid bird. And despite how specific it is to dad's work and in both the book and in our version, he's someone who's working around these Ted Hughes poems called The Crow and they're very visceral, nasty, gnarly, beautiful, honest, very heartfelt poems that came out of trauma. So, you know, he tried to absorb himself into his work and of course his work comes out and punches him in the face and goes, you want grief, I'll be your grief. And it becomes real for him and for the children. And it's yet within that, it's so iterative, this work, that it is kind of where we all go in as a viewer or a reader in the case of the book and see our own story, our own universal experience as human beings of what grief is. Most amazing conversations I've had with people after this often with those who've been widowed or lost a parent or a brother or a sibling or a loved one and just talk about how relatable this extraordinary metaphor is. Because grief is violent and unwelcome and comforting and oddly familiar. It's both Mary Poppins and Tyler Durden in one film and it kind of, it lives up to that in our version of it and as it does in the book. I think the difficulty with the book is that there's a lot that's non-linear. You get to a stage as well where you look at the back, with kind of glance of these two men suddenly talking about what it was like to be those boys and you think, hang on a minute, is this whole thing framed from the two grown up boys' recollection of their dad and the madness of that year? It's a phenomenal piece of writing but out of it comes all these iterations. The play, there's another play, there's a mime play apparently and a puppet piece being done and you know, and so it goes on. Yeah, better is definitely not the right word but different interpretations and you know, you get different. A great art I think can hold that, it really can. Max is an incredibly generous collaborator. I was terrified about coming on set and you know, in the end it was about trying to make sure that he was all right on his train home weeping to Bath because this is from his life, this is from his drama. It's his story of losing his father when he and his brother were very young and this is what came out of that and you know, to be responsible for bringing an extraordinary, much loved book to life is one thing. To have the author there whose experience is utterly personal to his work and him be that generous, I mean, I just felt however he was in love with the guy and he's become a dear, dear friend. He's an immense human being. Very much so. You're no stranger to big responsibility. Three years ago when you got your star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Kevin Feige referred to you as the anchor of the MCU and it was a pretty big phrase to use for you in that grand universe. We haven't seen you as Doctor Strange since then so I wanted to ask, I know you can't talk anything specific but are you still that anchor of the MCU? Has your plans at all changed? You'll have to ask Kevin. Okay, well, he's a hard man to lock down. I do wanna ask one more Doctor Strange question because it's all the rage right now so I hope you don't mind me prying a little bit. You can pry, I mean, it won't end in much revelation I'm afraid but yeah, go on. I will say that word is that you wanna get a little bit more hands on when Doctor Strange 3 comes around. You're no stranger to producing in your career but you haven't produced on a Doctor Strange film so far but the name I keep seeing circulated around which brings me a lot of excitement is maybe Sam Mendes for Doctor Strange 3. I love 1917, it's one of my favorite films ever and the brief moment we have of you two working together on screen, I would love to see a full length feature film. So whatever you can speak to about maybe getting more hands on creatively with Doctor Strange 3, I'd love to hear. Honestly, it's just not worth the backlash, trouble and the boring nature of any answer following me around forever. I love the amount of collaborative input I'm allowed to have in that universe but collaboration is collaboration. You're working with the most amazing people and the most extraordinary original IP. So yeah, bring it on. I just, I love being part of a creative process. So yeah, where I can contribute, I do and it's exciting to see where he's gonna go next. Okay, well, first off, I appreciate the transparency. I know you Marvel actors out there, you can't say much at all. So I appreciate you just being very transparent with me. I'll wrap with this though. I'm very curious about your creative process on set when it came to working with David Thewlis as Crow because it's a voice that you hear. So, you know, I'm not on set. I don't know how you guys are doing it. Is his voice playing on a speaker? Was he on set? How are you developing that dynamic? He wasn't cast, he was the idea but it was Eric Lampert who was in the costume on stilts doing a David Thewlis impersonation because we all thought he'd be great. And so it was very odd. There wasn't an interaction. And that meant that sometimes I had to do scenes as a dumb show because I wanted David to be able to fill that void. So we do the dialogue and then we'd figure out the movement and the dance of the characters and my vocal response which had to be recorded. And then Eric would sort of say his lines quite quietly on a very monotone way, but be animating it. So it was kind of back to front, you know, and animation, none of this was animated by the way. I mean, animated as in how he physically moved his body and the analog costume he had. It was all on screen and we wanted that feel. We wanted to be claustrophobic up close to it. So even if you see it's a little bit kind of tatty at times crow, that's the crow you get if you're in a house full of kids and you're an artist who scratches away with a pen and paper and ink in the style of wonderful Lucy Sullivan's illustrations. And my point is, yeah, it was a far cry from knowing what David would do with it. And I'm a huge fan of his and we'd worked together before on Fifth Estate which is a joyous memory. And, you know, we were just hoping that he'd see the film and like it enough to give his immense talent to that voice. Because the presence of crow is always gonna be figured out in the edit. How much we see, how much we don't see, how much is heavily featured in mid-shot or in shadow or off as a voice. And David's voice is so powerful and so extraordinary that it really, really does elevate the material. Well, very well spoken, Benedict. 10 minutes with you is very generous. I wanna just let you know that I recognize that that is a very much a privilege on my end. So I appreciate your generous time today and congrats on another phenomenal picture. Thanks very much for you. Do your worst. No.