Benedict Cumberbatch relishes challenging 'alpha male machismo'

Benedict Cumberbatch relished rejecting an “alpha male machismo” in 'The Thing With Feathers'.

The 48-year-old actor plays a dad struggling to cope with his wife’s death in the new drama movie – which is an adaptation of the novel, 'Grief Is the Thing with Feathers', by Max Porter – and Benedict relished the challenge of shooting the film.

Speaking at a press conference in Berlin, Benedict reflected: “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.

“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.”

Benedict loves that his on-screen character adopts an unusual approach to dealing with heartbreak and tragedy.

The Hollywood star explained: “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.

“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.”

Benedict found that one particular scene in the movie “really struck a chord” with him.

The acclaimed actor also admitted to being surprised by his own emotional reaction to the scene.

He shared: “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.”

Meanwhile, Dylan Southern – the film’s director – acknowledged that adapting 'Grief Is the Thing with Feathers' into a movie wasn’t an obvious move.

The filmmaker said: “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.

“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.”