After working together on the new adaptation of Max Porter’s novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Benedict Cumberbatch, known for acclaimed turns in Sherlock, The Power of the Dog and the Doctor Strange films, sits down with the writer to talk about grief, fatherhood, the circus of publicity, Olivia Colman and a quickfire round of ‘would you rather’. What follows is an intimate, searching and at times funny exchange between friends and collaborators, probing how to live, feel and create in chaotic times
Benedict Cumberbatch: Oh, look. We got the same haircut and everything.
Max Porter: Yeah, I did that deliberately. Talk to me. How are you? How’s it going?
BC: Tube strikes in London are not much fun, and everything’s all right. It’s just that thing of transitioning back into a full schedule after a summer of ‘this life’s nice,’ and not getting my head into acting. I take full responsibility for it. But other than that, I’m good. Am I going to see you next week at Together for Palestine [a fundraising event for aid in Palestine?
MP: No, we’ve got a screening that night.
BC: Oh yes, [I’ll be at Together for Palestine] which is why I can’t come.
MP: Glad it’s happening, glad it’s big, glad you got all the names. Are you filming?
BC: No, I’m doing bits and pieces for and that’s kind of it work-wise. It’s just this and developing stuff, writing, going through the slate, getting stuff together with Sophie, and making sure the tennis racquets are in the right place, piano lessons are made on time, the bike’s serviced. It’s the endless domestic list, which leaves little bandwidth for work. How did the go in Toronto?
MP: I already had love for you, but now I have a great deal of sympathy, having seen how those things work – the drum kit, the red carpet. I don’t know how you do it.
BC: Everyone keeps saying that necessary. I don’t think it is. There’s another model out there no one’s bothering to deal with, because there are a lot of careers that benefit from this relationship between the press and hysteria around films. One thing it does is celebrate the collective, within the room, within the festival atmosphere. That community around what we do for a living is great. But half the people who want your signature aren’t going to watch your film. They’ll sell it for £300-£900. They’re not fans; they’re making money. I don’t begrudge them that, it’s a bleak world, but it exists alongside this endless need to answer the same questions.
We had a golden moment during COVID to rethink things. For about five minutes we did. Then we went back to the old normal. You have to get through it, treat it like fun and find something amusing about it. But then you shed so much afterwards. We’ve got a beautiful, neurotic whippet dog. When she goes on a walk, she starts out okay, then starts seeing dogs and everything becomes terrifying. When she comes back, she rubs her body to get rid of the adrenaline and the cortisol of the fight-or-flight reflex that kicked off. The best way is to immerse yourself in nature, or spend five minutes being at the mercy of a six-year-old. Or with the dog. But really, nature is what you need – and isolation.
MP: I want to sprinkle in quick-fire questions in and amongst the general chat. What’s your favourite tree?
BC: My favourite tree is the oak. The majesty and the prehistoric might of sequoias is humbling. Both trees, in our land and in lands abroad, for me, are sentinels in the way that whales are. They are slow-growing reminders of life being more important than a political cycle or the profit margin in a quarter. And they humble us. They give us life, both above and below the ground. Those two trees, in their longevity, I find are extraordinary totems of time and our insignificance, but also what we actually need to focus on in our lives, which is our brief moment here, in this incarnation, and leaving it in a better state than when we found it. Not much of that going on at the moment.
MP: Segueing to our film, The Thing with Features, one of the things that struck me when we met was that you don’t take the easy route. You don’t take this work lightly and your engagement with it is both professional and serious and, in this instance, and most instances for you, profoundly rigorous in terms of the craft. But this was also an intellectual and emotional engagement for you. You didn’t just get the script, you knew the book, and understood the toll it would probably take on you as a human being. But you also dive quite deeply into the questions of paternal care, literary influence, art, art-making as a parent, and the profound intersection of you as a dad, and you as an actor, playing dad with young actors on set. Can you talk about how you jumped in and whether you regret that now? Did it take its toll?
BC: I don’t think I was aware of the cost until I did it. I knew it’d be costly, but you don’t know until you’re doing it. That’s part of the joy – the perversity, even. It’s a gift – the unknown in our industry and in art in general. It’s about discovery, and that comes at an uncalculated cost.
The book is so cinematic, the psychological depth of it is naked and profound and alluring to an actor. You feel a lot when you’re reading it, not just because of the universal theme of grief, but this very specific lens. Some association too, not having been through that, but other forms of grief in my life. Also the milieu, the north London middle-class feel of it. It’s a world and a time, a retrospective unreliable narration from the kids’ point of view. Spoiler alert, but as that evolves it’s very specific. All of that resonated with me – our generation, the richness of the imagery, the imagination of it immediately flickered with the light of cinema.
MP: You know I have this obsession with juxtapositions. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is entirely that. It’s what the reader brings to the gap between things, the hinge of a metaphor. So I wanted to ask you, how was it to go from being spun by eight-foot-tall Crow in semi-screaming, semi-jayhawking, semi-wailing, semi-orgasming craziness to working with one of your close friends on a whip-smart comedy. How’s the juxtaposition of energy for you in that?
BC: That’s the Benedict buffet. You need it. I remember James McAvoy saying, ‘God, you’re having a lot of fun.’ I said, ‘Yeah. Try playing George Tesman for four months and watching your wife blow her brains out every night.’ I went big on the comedy for that.
MP: Is there a form of self-care in curating your career?
BC: Work should never be therapy, otherwise you leave your personal development in the hands of characters that are over once the film’s gone. That’s not a very safe place to be.
MP: Can I be nosy, was working together enriching for your friendship with Olivia?
BC: Massively so. It’s a working relationship too, so you get far more insight. You spend a lot of time with someone you’ve only seen fleetingly before. Half my life is family, then work, so friendships suffer unless you’re lucky to be friends with kids’ parents. My New Year’s resolutions are simple: simplicity and friendship.
Olivia is remarkable. It seems very easy for her. Not just because she grew up with Peep Show and comedy classics and knows that world, but she’s innately and supremely talented. She can do anything. It’s a very safe dancing partner, especially when it’s a friend. You risk more, it’s a bit faster and you can be very honest. She’s a great sounding board – never dismissive, properly on it.
MP: There is this sort of appetite that this world creates in emotionally intelligent people to latch on to. Like when we met, you could have just shook my hand and said, ‘That was nice, thank you very much, and see you next time.’ But you were curious about me, you asked me questions about my life. We got quite deep quite quickly.
BC: You’re not just part of an opening in my calendar. It’s a rarity to meet people that you feel very strong kinship with immediately. I over-romanticise our friendship, but it’s true. I look at some of my best friendships and how instantaneous they were. In a way, Adam ’s one of them. We did one job together, now we have a production company .
MP: Have I told you my story about my middle son when I got back from the West Bank? He’s 13, and he’s completely in charge of his own life. He’s someone that gets his own clothes out, makes his own breakfast. Develops his own tastes. It’s amazing; he’s running the show. But I can’t milk him for emotional content. Anyway, I was malfunctioning, heartbroken, traumatised by what I’d seen on a trip to Palestine – apartheid, machine guns.
BC: I can only imagine. It’s only now coming through in detail, away from social media, what’s been going on.
MP: One night I was robotically stirring risotto and I didn’t hear him come in. I had been crying a lot, but I wasn’t crying at that moment. My son wrapped his arms around me, held me for about three minutes, then left the room. It was exactly what Feathers is about. A non-verbal, instinctual benevolence. He recognised I needed it. My ability to grieve for that faraway child I’ve never met is connected to my ability to love this one. There is no empathy gap to be crossed. It’s all in me. It’s the pain that is thrust upon me. As he says in the book, ‘let no man cease to fix it.’ It is how I love. May we hurtle back into our family units, covered in the scars and thickets and bristles of the work, and let them see it. Let them soak it up. Let them know that we’re weird.
BC: It’s been amongst many fears of raising children, the fact we both have three boys. This is a story of male grief – what men feel or don’t allow themselves to feel, and the damage done. We are living through a culture of that. One of the most important things to teach boys is that it’s fine to feel. You are strong in vulnerability.
MP: We’re running out of time, so here’s a couple of quickfire questions. Favourite bird?
BC: White-tailed sea eagle.
MP: Wrong. Crow. Favourite spread?
BC: Honey.
MP: Nope, Marmite. Favourite car game?
BC: Yellow Car.
MP: I love Yellow Car. Our new game is making sentences out of number plates. It doesn’t work. Would you rather suffer the loneliness of being misunderstood or the unease of having caused offence?
BC: Fucking hell. Constantly ill at ease at causing offence. Both, really.
MP: Swimming or fishing?
BC: Swimming, definitely.
MP: Would you rather squeeze a pimple or pluck a hair?
BC: Squeeze a nipple?
MC: Pimple.
BC: Squeeze a spot. It’s painful isn’t it, but satisfying.
MP: This is a really disgusting story to remember but when you’re really tired in the car and everyone else is asleep and you’ve got three more hours to go, I pluck nose hairs to keep myself awake.
BC: Then I start sneezing and wake people up. Same with ear hairs. I’m getting rogue ones because I’m getting old.
MP: But you’ve got people to look after you.
BC: I get regularly plucked, I’m like a prepped chicken underneath this T-shirt.
MP: Listen, I love you, and I’m looking forward to seeing you.
BC: Are you coming to Zurich?
MP: What’s in Zurich? No, I’m not.
BC: All these film festivals…
MP: No, but I’m seeing you in London, and we’re doing a day of press together where we can do ‘shacket’ club again.
BC: Oh yeah, that’d be good. What shackets are you gonna turn up in this time?
MP: I have two looks at the moment. My T shirt game is entirely either ‘Free Palestine’ or I’ve got this incredible new T shirt that says, ‘Listen to Sade’. And I am therefore having abnormally rich conversations everywhere I go about why Sade is the best. People are sharing their favourite albums – security guards in Toronto were like, ‘My brother – come here. Which record?’
BC: Amazing. I mean, she’s great. All I’ve got in my head is when she sings, ‘This is no ordinary love…’
MP: Well, she’s a goddess. I have a theory that the world suffers in the gaps between Sade records, and then when there’s a new Sade record we have a moment of hope and optimism. I think Sade’s in the studio working away right now, so hopefully we will have a new era.
Cumberbatch wears Prada throughout. Watch Vanguart
Photography Matt Healy
Styling Reuben Esser
Grooming Wakana Yoshihara using Pelegrims, 111SKIN, Naturabisse, Ouai and Oxygenetix
Production The Production Factory
Photography assistants Cameron Jack and Leigh Skinner
Styling assistant Mayu Fukuda
This article is taken from Port issue 37. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here
