The Thing With Feathers star Benedict Cumberbatch spoke with ComingSoon about his new drama movie. Cumberbatch discussed the film‘s depiction of grief, how it pairs with his television show Eric, and more. It is out in theaters on November 28.
“Left to raise two young sons after the unexpected death of his wife, Dad’s life begins to unravel. Grief is messy and chaotic enough as it is, but when it takes the form of an unhinged and unwanted house guest – Crow – taunting him from the shadows, things start to spiral out of control…but maybe that’s exactly what Dad needs,” says the official synopsis.
Tyler Treese: I really enjoyed The Thing With Feathers. I thought it was so interesting to pair with Eric, the TV show you did last year, because both have these fathers that go through just an incredible amount of turmoil and even see manifestations of the voices inside their heads. What draws you to these characters and these very tortured performances? I would think after doing one, you would want a break, but you jumped right back into very similar territory.
Benedict Cumberbatch: Yeah. I mean, these things, they kind of manifested very close to one another, and there was discussion about the parodies, but I felt they were nuanced and culturally different enough just by the locale and what they had to say. This one really is about a journey of grief over a year. The other one’s more about losing a son, and the schizophrenic split of this very unwell man coming undone, and it’s only real to him. Whereas in this version, the crow is real to the boys as well. It’s that shared family — what’s the word — transformative or illustrative being that becomes Crow. It’s the same for both of them. They’re very challenging roles, obviously. To get back to your question, they have a great deal of breadth and risk, and there’s a lot of meat on the bone with these characters.
Especially with this film, because I find it rare that films don’t just view grief as something to overcome. This is really about accepting it and living with it.
Cumberbatch: Precisely.
What was most interesting to you about expressing that in your performance?
Cumberbatch: Well, that there is hope when you realize that. So, I mean, thank you for understanding that in your reading of the film, because it’s very important to me that this isn’t… Look, people deal with this in all different ways. It’s a universal experience of the human condition, grieving, and you can’t love without losing at some point, whether it’s a personal relationship or whatever it might be that’s dear to you. That goes, and in it, you find yourself. You never lose the thing that causes it. It travels with you, but it becomes manageable. It becomes part of you, part of the agreement of life, and I think that’s a very beautiful part of this film. It’s really manifest in the family unit, and how, at the beginning, he’s tried to control it. He’s trying to separate himself and his grief from his children.
The hope for me that comes out of it is the love that they are, that the children, especially, are able to show their dad when he’s vulnerable to his emotions. They see him for what he is a man who’s really struggling, who they love, and when they fan together in that moment in the woods, for me, that’s when the Emily Dickinson poem [comes in], which the book is a misquote of, purposely, Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Emily Dickens’ poem is “Hope is the Thing with Feathers.” So, yeah, it’s a brilliant sort of tied in with the metaphor. Brilliant, brilliant title for this piece by Max Porter.
There’s a pretty wild scene early on where a giant crow man’s just beating the hell out of you. You’ve done wild works before, and Marvel can get strange, but how do you approach something like that, which is very goofy when viewed stand-alone, but it’s very impactful in the film?
Benedict Cumberbatch: It is, it is. I mean, it was like a day at the office, in terms of I’ve been there before — Marvel land. Look, I think this is a film that dares to switch tones. It dares to blend genres and film influences from horror to creature workshop, Jim Henson-type puppeteering, and then also hopefully domestic-nuanced verite, in terms of observing the psychological strains of a man becoming undone with grief, and to play with all of those takes.
There are two things for me that it has parity with. One is grief itself because it’s constantly shifting and changing its form. It doesn’t work itself out in a sort of linear way either. It can reverse back to the potency of the first feeling or can just flatline. It’s a many-flavored emotion to have to go through. I think the film plays with that idea as the book does. Yet there is a journey in it. There is a progression, but it’s really about the boys and dad coming to a place of understanding and acceptance. But yeah, I mean, there were a lot of weird days at the office on this one, even by someone who’s been in the Marvel Cinematic Universe standards.
Thanks to Benedict Cumberbatch for taking the time to talk about The Thing With Feathers.
