Intense and unabashedly provocative, Friday’s “The Thing with Feathers,” a very theatrical English drama, demands that Benedict Cumberbatch aim for the stars to play a recent grieving widower. The title refers to black crows. There’s the life-size bird that menacingly smashes into a rain-soaked window and a 6-foot version that appears indoors to taunt this graphic artist as he works. For Cumberbatch, 49, “Thing” was a deep dive into nearly unhinged sorrow. His widower simply can’t cope with his two young sons or his grief. It was, he said in a Zoom interview, scary and irresistible. “Scary is attractive in our profession. Because if you’ve been as lucky as I have been” he has 2 Emmys, 2 Oscar nominations, a BAFTA and an Olivier Award “to find something challenging is interesting. The idea of it being difficult is enticing because that makes you a little scared. Like, ‘Can you do it?’ And I like that.” As for this devastated, miserable, freaked out, walking nervous breakdown of a man? “We never really learn his name, but I figured out you’re not supposed to. You’re not supposed to know the boys’ names. Or anyone’s name the wife’s name or the crow’s name. It’s an iterative story. “You’re supposed to see yourself in it, however idiosyncratic these character quirks.” Is the crow a manifestation of grief? “Maybe it’s about seeing yourself in the universal aspects of what grief is in the story,” he said. “As an actor you come into it wanting to know the biography, especially of the absent other the wife, the mother, the love of the friend who is the cause of this grief, who is the absence.” As for this grief-stricken man with no name, “It’s like you don’t know him well enough. You don’t know what he’s lost. What his emotional engagement with the story is. “How does grief evolve over that year? What takes place between the dynamics between these men without their matriarch? That for me is what I’m most proud of, in a way. “The fact that front and center this pedestals male grief and how we respond to it. Grief and emotional existences are very genderized in our culture and we’re trying to break through that. “It would greatly benefit a lot of things going on in the world if men could be allowed to feel as deeply and as painfully and be as unwell or lost or hopeless or vulnerable as these immense life moments should make us. As human beings. As any other gender. “Yeah,” he concluded. “I feel drawn to these stories for many, many reasons the challenges, the shapes of them.”.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2025/11/25/benedict-cumberbatch-struggles-to-cope-in-the-thing-with-feathers/
Benedict Cumberbatch struggles to cope in ‘The Thing With Feathers’
