Finding monster’s motivation
Cumberbatch focused not only on embodying physicality, but also understanding behavior of film’s complex bully
At the beginning of the shoot for “The Power of the Dog,” the ominous new psychodrama from Jane Campion, the director brought the actors and crew together on a remote site on New Zealand’s South Island, which was standing in for the story’s Montana setting. After a Maori blessing, Campion began to introduce everyone.
“This is Phil Burbank,” she said as Benedict Cumberbatch stepped forward. “Benedict is really nice, and you’ll meet him at the end of the shoot.”
Phil, the clever, bullying, angry character played by Cumberbatch, is the elder of two brothers who run a thriving cattle ranch, and he isn’t nice at all. He dominates and insults his quiet, mild-mannered sibling, George (Jesse Plemons), and his perpetually simmering hostility finds a soft target when George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a local widow with an effete teenage son, Peter (Kodi SmitMcPhee). Phil is an alpha-male cowboy, dark and dirty (literally). But slowly we begin to understand that Phil, who studied Greek and Latin at Yale, is also playing a role.
“In her dry way, with that introduction, Jane gave me permission to be Phil,” Cumberbatch said. “He behaves abhorrently, but there is a deep well of pain there, this life not lived, an arrested development that informs the way he behaves. If we don’t understand the monsters in our world, what motivates this behavior, if we can’t look at someone beyond being a baddie or a goody, then we’re in trouble.”
To play this complex, controlling monster, Cumberbatch focused on the role’s physicality as never before, learning to ride, working with animals, fully embodying Phil’s visceral dominance of his environment. A heady experience for Cumberbatch, it has already led to Oscar talk and some of the best reviews he has ever received.
“Cumberbatch is astounding in the role, as the actor knots his default sarcasm into a lasso of constricted menace,” David Ehrlich of IndieWire wrote. “The unforgettable performance that results — a definitive career-best — is at once both terrifying and terrified.”
Campion, the first woman to win the top prize at Cannes, for “The Piano” in 1993, adapted “The Power of the Dog” from a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. The movie, which will have a theatrical release Nov. 17 and stream on Netflix beginning Dec. 1, is her first in a dozen years and her first to feature a male protagonist.
Campion said that she had long admired Cumberbatch’s ability to “do something unexpected.” For Phil, you want “the guts and performance capacity to create someone who is worth hating and fearing. He is possibly one of the most interesting characters in American literature.”
The movie arrives just a few weeks after another Cumberbatch tour de force, “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain,” directed by Will Sharpe (now
on Amazon Prime). In that, he plays the emotionally fragile, socially awkward, brilliantly talented illustrator Louis Wain, who in the late 19th century became famous for his playful, anthropomorphic drawings of cats.
Louis is the polar opposite of Phil, a man unable to fulfill the traditionally masculine roles of provider and authority in an era that requires him to take care of his mother and five unmarried sisters. He falls unsuitably in love and marries Emily (Claire Foy), his young sisters’ governess; when she becomes ill, he draws cats to cheer her up.
“Over time, as Louis’ life takes a number of dramatic turns, his cat love deepens and his art changes, and so do both the movie and Cumberbatch’s layered performance, with its openness, tenderness and performative control,” Manohla Dargis wrote in a New York Times review.
Cumberbatch said he had adored everything about Louis Wain.
“I had a similar connection to him that I did to Alan Turing when I did ‘The Imitation Game’: they were both quiet characters in a very loud world,” he said, adding that he had been moved by Wain’s mental health issues, “how that loud, mechanicalized, industrialized era could snuff someone out who was a real hero to so many people across generations.”
Cumberbatch, who shot to fame around a decade ago as a grumpy, brilliant, emotionally disconnected Sherlock Holmes in the BBC series “Sherlock,” is no stranger to wildly idiosyncratic characters. He received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Turing; won a BAFTA award for the role of an abused, drug-addicted wealthy Englishman in the Showtime miniseries “Patrick Melrose”; has played Hamlet and Frankenstein onstage; and is Dr. Strange in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (He is in the forthcoming “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”)
“I fit a lot of very boring brackets in my personal description,” said Cumberbatch, 45, who is married with children. “I am drawn to the otherness of these people, to the difference from my lived experience. I want to understand it from the inside, not go, ‘Oh, I know what that feels like.’ ”
Cumberbatch spent months preparing before the New Zealand shoot, which began in January 2020, was halted by a lockdown halfway through and resumed three months later. He began with a look book that Campion had put together.
“It gave me a sense of the sensuality of the film, the erotic nature of certain aspects of the character, his masculinity tinged with the otherworldly look of a satyr,” he said.
Campion asked him what he needed. “I said, I need whittling lessons, I need riding lessons, I need banjo lessons, I need dude camp,” he recounted.
He spent several weeks on Montana ranches.
“An amazing way of life opened up for me,” he said. He added, “Pretty much everything I do in the film, I learned to do.” He cataloged it: “braiding rope, working with the cattle, castrating — braiding rope while smoking a cigarette, incredibly difficult!”
What is extraordinary about the story, Cumberbatch said,
“is that it still bears relevance. There are still angry, toxic masculine character traits writ large in world leaders of late, let alone other kinds of domestic abuse or abhorrent male behaviors.” It’s important, he added, that “we are getting to a place where women are being heard. But we should also be looking at men; why are men like this?”
The experience of working on “The Power of the Dog” was “intoxicating,” Cumberbatch added. “I can’t tell you how rare it is to sit in your own audience and go, ‘Gosh, that’s what I intended in a scene, in a performance, in an entire character arc.’ ”