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Benedict Cumberbatch is getting candid about grief, toxic masculinity and advocating for those in need upon the premiere of his latest film, The Thing With Feathers.
The British star spoke from Berlin at the press conference of his latest film on Tuesday. Written and directed by Dylan Southern and adapted from the book Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter, the new film follows a father (Cumberbatch) and his two sons (Richard and Henry Boxall) who are struggling to cope with the sudden loss of their wife and mother.
“I think part of my job and where I lean into difficult characters, is to explore what is their humanity — if there is any left,” he began. “Everyone starts out pretty innocent in my book but I feel we, as a society, owe a responsibility to those who need our help most, and the ones that fall through the cracks, either as victims or as perpetrators of ill doing, are the ones we need to help the most, and don’t. We have a very easy time sidelining them or forgetting about them.”
“That’s been a driver of mine, since I was very young,” he added.
The Sherlock and Marvel actor also spoke about getting an opportunity to reject an “alpha male machismo” in the movie and work through a lens on male grief and the strength of being weak and vulnerable.
“Being open and able to learn from tragedy, rather than trying to pose it with more force and more force and more force, I think is obviously quite a prevalent and strong thing,” Cumberbatch said. “The uncertainty and emotional vulnerability is not at the top of the agenda of the alpha male machismo. … Or being pushed as the strong man image of what masculinity is or should be. So [I was] very happy to be part of storytelling that goes in the opposite direction of that.”
Cumberbatch, after lauding the performance of the two young Boxall brothers who starred alongside him, also opened up on his own relationship with grief and seemed emotional when discussing what parts of Southern’s directorial debut resonated with him.
“It’s only a small part of the montage in the film, but there was a moment of folding the clothes up for the final time, of taking the wife’s clothes and leaving an empty rack. … I’m 48, I’ve been through a bit. I’ve lived, I’ve experienced grief — I think most people have by my age. It just really struck a chord. It really, really struck a chord, and I wasn’t expecting it.”
On deciding to make his debut with Porter’s work — inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” — Southern told the room: “I think Max’s book opened up a lot of stuff for me. It gave me a language to some of the things that I felt or some of the ways that I behaved. It gave permission for some of those things as well.”
He continued: “It didn’t seem like an obvious thing to adapt into a film at first, because the book is so wildly formally inventive in its structure. It’s in three different perspectives. It’s in different tenses. It spans multiple years. But the more I dug into it, the more the shape of a film emerged. … And in making this film, I wanted people to go through this period in the family’s life and to feel the things that they feel. I think the book did such a wonderful job of that. For me, as a reader, the cinematic language for it very quickly became obvious to me.”
The Thing With Feathers will premiere on Tuesday night at the 75th Berlinale, which runs Feb. 13-23.
