Benedict Cumberbatch touched down at the Variety Studio presented by Audible at Sundance ahead of the world premiere of his new drama film, “The Thing With the Feathers.” Written and directed by Dylan Southern from the book “Grief Is the Thing with Feathers” by Max Porter, the movie casts Cumberbatch as a grieving father struggling to raise his two sons after the sudden loss of his wife.
During the interview with Variety’s Brent Lang, the “Doctor Strange” actor said the father he plays is perhaps the closest he’s come to seeing his real self on screen. He explained: “We’re really fucking weird creatures, us actors. We want to be in extreme situations sometimes to tell a real story. And it does tell something universal. This character is as near to me as any others I’ve played, to be honest. The middle class, the father, being in northwest London. It all felt very real and I had immediate access to it.”
Southern said he was attracted to adapting the book because it “did things with literary fiction that you can’t necessarily do in films. All of the things that were daunting to me ended up being the positives in the adaptation process. I looked at how the book was so poetic in its language and told from three different perspectives, one of which was potentially imaginary…My biggest ambition was to make a film that matched the tone and scope of Max’s book. It deals with this monolithic thing that happens to everyone, this serious subject of grief. But it does it in a way that’s so idiosyncratic and unsentimental and moving.”
Cumberbatch spoke to Variety for a Sundance cover story before the festival started and said he was attracted to “The Thing With the Feathers” because “it shines a light on male grief.”
“I haven’t seen many things that do that,” he added. “You have a man facing up to his limitations as he deals with the pressure of work, life, raising kids, all while his sense of self is just brutalized by grief. There were a great many challenges there. And I love a challenge.”