Benedict Cumberbatch's Dad looking shocked while sitting at his desk and Crow looming behind him in The Thing with Feathers
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Liam Crowley
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Grant Hermanns
Published 15 minutes ago
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Benedict Cumberbatch is a father grieving over the death of his wife in The Thing with Feathers, and the movie takes a unique path to doing so. Adapted from Max Porter's similarly titled 2015 novella, Cumberbatch leads the film as Dad, a cartoonist whose idyllic life with a wife and two children falls apart when the former dies suddenly. As he fails to process his grief properly, Dad and the sons are visited by the large, anthropomorphic Crow that leads to some wild psychological events.
Written and directed by Dylan Southern in his fictional directorial debut, The Thing with Feathers made its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it left critics split down the middle. In the months since, when it went on to screen at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival and released in the UK and Ireland on November 21, the movie has continued to divide critics, currently holding a 52% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, who largely praise Cumberbatch's performance.
In honor of the movie's release, ScreenRant's Liam Crowley interviewed Benedict Cumberbatch to discuss The Thing with Feathers. When asked about his first exposure to the novel, Cumberbatch recalled the 10-and-a-half-year journey from when he first read Porter's novella to seeing the Cillian Murphy-starring stage adaptation by Edna Walsh, to which he then turned his focus to other things.
From there, Cumberbatch recalls receiving Southern's "very, very special" script adapting The Thing with Feathers, praising the writer/director for having "pulled off a magic trick" in his approach to the novella given "it's a pretty unfilmable book." As the star explained, the approach to Porter's source material became "expanded," leading to him being "intrigued to meet" Southern, which saw "a friendship bloom" and, subsequently, "trust and a great working relationship."
When asked about how The Thing with Feathers might've approached certain scenes compared to the "extraordinary" novel, Cumberbatch acknowledged that while he "wouldn't say [they could do it] better" on the screen, there were elements that "were made flesh in a more literal way" than the novella, particularly that of Eric Lampaert and David Thewlis' Crow:
He's a manifestation of grief, this sort of humanoid, monstrous animal that we know as the corvid bird. And despite how specific it is to Dad's work, in both the book and in our version, he's someone who's working around these Ted Hughes poems called The Crow, and they're very visceral, nasty, gnarly, beautiful, honest, very heartfelt poems. So it came out of trauma. He tries to absorb himself into his work, and, of course, his work comes out and punches him in the face and goes, "You want grief? I'll be your grief."
Benedict Cumberbatch as Dad screaming in The Thing with Feathers
While Crow may become "real for [Dad] and for the children," Cumberbatch explains that there is still a path in for viewers to "see [their] own story" as they read the novella or watch the film, particularly "our universal experiences as human beings of what grief is." The two-time Oscar nominee went on to recall some of the "most amazing conversations" he's had with viewers after the film, many of whom are "those who have been widowed or lost a parent or a brother or a sibling or a loved one."
As he shared, the consensus among these viewers is "how relatable this extraordinary metaphor" in the movie is, in which "grief is violent and unwelcome and comforting and oddly familiar." Cumberbatch even likened the movie's experience to being "Mary Poppins and [Fight Club's] Tyler Durden in one film," feeling that his film lives up to Porter's novella.
The one thing Cumberbatch admits to being a "difficulty" in adapting The Thing with Feathers from the page to the screen is that "there's a lot [in the novella] that is non-linear," even recalling the unique experience of seeing the stage adaptation, in which two adult characters are "suddenly talking about what it was like to be those boys":
You think, "Hang on a minute, is this whole thing framed from the two grownup boys' recollection of their dad and the madness of that year?" It's a phenomenal piece of writing, but out of it comes all these iterations to play. There's another play, there's a mime play apparently in a puppet piece being done, and so it goes on.
Cumberbatch continued by expressing that "great art can hold" a different medium from its source inspiration while still maintaining its thematic structure. He also celebrated Porter for being "an incredibly generous collaborator," recalling being "terrified by him coming on set" as the star strove to "make sure that he was all right" since it was largely pulled from the author's life:
It's his story of losing his father when he and his brother were very young, and this is what came out of that. And to be responsible for bringing an extraordinary, much-loved book to life is one thing. To have the author there whose experience is utterly personal to his work, and him be that generous. I just fell head over heels in love with the guy, and he's become a dear, dear friend. He's an immense human being.
The Crow Sometimes Required Cumberbatch To Put On A Mime Show In The Thing With Feathers
ScreenRant: You've played a father twice on the big screen this year, in The Roses as Theo and now in The Thing with Feathers as Dad. You're very different fathers in both of those projects, but could you compare and contrast the parental styles of the characters?
Benedict Cumberbatch: They're tasked with different things, aren't they? I think they've become single parents in different ways, but they have a singular focus on their children. Theo, when the mother's career takes off, becomes the stay-at-home dad. In Feathers, Dad is bereft and suffers a very violent, very sudden loss of his wife and has to raise two young boys in a motherless home. They're very different human beings, and I think there's that thing that happens — especially at my age, in my career, with the amount of work I've done — where people go, "Oh, you're playing lots of dads. Oh, you're playing a chef." Of course, I'm at that age, and I've done a lot, so I'm going to repeat myself in some way, shape, or form. But you can't think of two more different milieus or feelings to a film than Roses and Feathers.
ScreenRant: I'm very curious about your creative process on set when it came to working with David Thewlis as Crow, because he's just a voice that you hear. Is his voice playing on a speaker? Was he on set? How were you developing that dynamic back and forth?
Benedict Cumberbatch: He wasn't even cast. He was the idea, but it was Eric Lampaert who was in the costume on stilts doing a David Thewlis impersonation because we all thought he'd be great. So, it was very odd. There wasn't any interaction, and that meant that sometimes I had to do scenes as a dumb show because I wanted David to be able to fill that void. We'd do the dialogue, and then we'd figure out the movement and the dance of the characters in my vocal response, which had to be recorded. And then Eric would say his lines quietly, in a very monotone way, but he'd be animating it — in terms of how he physically moved his body and the analog costume he had. It was all on screen, and we wanted that to feel claustrophobic up close. Even if you see it's a little bit tatty at times, that's the crow you get if you are a house full of kids, and you're an artist who scratches away with a pen and paper and ink in the style of wonderful Lucy Sullivan's illustrations. It was a far cry from knowing what David would do with it. I'm a huge fan of his. We'd worked together before in The Fifth Estate, which is a joyous memory, and we were just hoping that he'd like it enough to give us his immense talent. Because the presence of Crow is always going to be figured out in the edit: how much we see, how much we don't see, how much is heavily featured in midshot or in shadow or off as a voice. And David's voice is so powerful and so extraordinary that it really does elevate the material.
Be sure to dive into some of our other Thing with Feathers-related coverage with:
- Cumberbatch on how his Thing with Feathers journey differed from Netflix's Eric
- Our interview with Cumberbatch and Southern at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival
- Our interview with Southern for Thing with Feathers' Berlin International Film Festival 2025 premiere
- Cumberbatch teasing his creative involvement on Doctor Strange 3
10/10
6/10
The Thing with Feathers
10 stars 9 stars 8 stars 7 stars 6 stars 5 stars 4 stars 3 stars 2 stars 1 star Like Follow Followed Drama Release Date January 25, 2025 Director Dylan Southern Writers Dylan SouthernCast
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Benedict Cumberbatch
Dad
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David Thewlis
Crow
The Thing with Feathers, directed by Dylan Southern, follows a father and his two young sons as they navigate the emotional landscape of grief and healing after the sudden death of their wife and mother.
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