It is the evening before the London premiere of the keenly anticipated film The Thing With Feathers. Max Porter, author of the novella on which it is based, and Benedict Cumberbatch, its star, are, rather unexpectedly, chatting about Dwayne Johnson – aka the Rock – in The Smashing Machine, Benny Safdie’s bruising biopic of the MMA pioneer Mark Kerr.
Johnson “was saying at the junket that it’s the first time he didn’t think about box office”, Porter says. “A lot of people called bullshit. But, actually, I don’t ever think about the box office.
“I think about collaboration. Think about the relationship you have with the person you’re sitting with in a room, saying, ‘Here’s a way of doing this character on screen.’ Deal with that. Then I meet Benedict and talk to him about the relationship he’s going to have with his character.”
“Hang on,” Cumberbatch says. “Let’s go back to the Rock for a minute, because I don’t think it’s complete bullsh*t. He’s so locked into an extraordinarily successful business relationship with the entertainment industry.
RM Block
“And this is the first time he’s saying, ‘Actually, for me, this is about the challenge of doing something I’m frightened of. I’m not smiling at the press and doing my routine, I’m doing character work.’”
Cumberbatch, an actor of looming presence, has shared bodies with a sorcerer in Doctor Strange, breathed fire into The Hobbit’s dragon Smaug and squared up to Andrew Scott’s Moriarty in Sherlock. But none of these experiences prepared him for scenes playing opposite a man-sized crow in The Thing With Feathers.
His unnerving scene partner in the film adaptation of Porter’s book Grief Is the Thing With Feathers – a project Cumberbatch also executive produced – was the product of animatronics, the physical performance of the actor Eric Lampaert, the voice of David Thewlis, and much dark plumage.
Lampaert, inside the bird suit, was brilliant, Cumberbatch says. “From a performative point of view, his performance was extraordinary in itself, but it was an amalgamation of five different people’s artistry.”
It was also every bit as terrifying as one could imagine from a 2.5m-tall man-bird.
“I arrived on set,” Cumberbatch says. “I’d been told about the kind of model he was going to be – an artist called Nicola Hicks had made this incredible maquette – but nothing quite prepared me.
“It was like some kind of Napoleonic surgery happening on the deck of a ship. There were bits of bird arriving on trees. Eight people building Eric into Crow, which took about an hour every time.”
What emerged was “uncannily bigger than human, smaller than giant, covered in his body language and behaviours – and so human. And almost laughably man-in-a-suit. It was comic in another register watching him bump into bits of furniture.”
For Cumberbatch, the creature’s presence was both inspiring and oppressive. “At times it was also too much,” he says. “You never want a ping-pong ball and green screen, but sometimes it has to be part of my imagination. I actually needed it to be less present than it was. It was like acting with someone shining a torch in your face.”
Grief Is the Thing With Feathers began as a literary experiment. Porter, then a young bookseller and editor, wrote it as a hybrid of prose, poetry, folktale and meditation on loss inspired by Ted Hughes’s Crow and titled after Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope” Is the Thing With Feathers.
The book tells of an unnamed father and two sons who are reeling from a mother’s death. They are visited by Crow, a trickster, therapist and outsize babysitter, who declares, “I won’t leave until you don’t need me any more.”
The unconventional text found a champion at Faber & Faber, which published it in 2015 to ecstatic acclaim. Its originality and emotional impact found an immediate audience. Ten years later, the book has been translated into 36 languages.
“You’d drive yourself mad, wouldn’t you, predicting things,” Porter says. “In fact, one of the lessons of this book and many others – just think about Anna Burns’s Milkman – is that publishing continually seems to think it knows the rules, insists on the rules, lives by the rules, and yet those rules are repeatedly, tirelessly broken.
“The imitative strategies of publishing seem to be proven wrong every time. When I speak to my mentees I say, ‘You have to split your mind in half: be utterly naive, follow your convictions, write in a flow state, write only what you can write; and let the other half of you keep a rigorous eye on what’s going on.’
“Because you’re not going to have a hit with a book about a kid who goes to wizard school. Somebody has done that.”
Cumberbatch, who has deftly navigated a path between juggernaut Hollywood franchises – Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Hobbit and Star Trek – and such auteur-driven indie work as The Imitation Game, The Power of the Dog and The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, nods in agreement.
“It’s the same algorithm in film-making as well,” the actor says. “‘Well, we have a combination of Mary Poppins meets Jaws meets Schindler’s List. And we’ll have a wonderful messy hit.’ It’s an algorithm based on ‘We know that works.’
“But the minute you fall into that trap, the culture deadens. People sleepwalk into the cinema and leave saying, ‘Yeah, it was all right.’ But it doesn’t enliven you. It doesn’t provoke new thought or evolution of the form.”
The children were children. They’re untrained actors. There’s nothing performative about what they gave us. It was like capturing lightning in a jar. All the more authentic, punchy and powerful for it
— Benedict Cumberbatch
Cumberbatch has long been a fan of Porter’s book. “I loved it,” he says. “I read it shortly after Max had done a reading with my sister-in-law, Megan Hunter, whose book The End We Start From is also something we produced” (as a 2023 film).
Grief Is the Thing With Feathers found a bold new life on stage through Enda Walsh’s adaptation, Porter’s regular collaborator Cillian Murphy giving a virtuoso performance as both the bereaved father and Crow. First staged in Galway in 2018, the play was nominated for five Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards before transferring to London and New York.
“Of course I went to see the play,” Cumberbatch says. “I am a huge fan of Cillian Murphy and anything he does with Enda Walsh after their three collaborations.
“One of the chief things that made me go, ‘Right, that’s the work I want to be doing,’ was watching Cillian Murphy being beaten up – or pretend to be beaten up – to the Ramones’ Be My Baby in Disco Pigs. Cillian and Eileen Walsh – another incredible performer – just blew my mind. And, f**k me, Cillian’s manifestation of Crow on stage was a great thing.”
For a book that was supposedly unpublishable, and later deemed unfilmable, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers has a knack for bucking the odds. Enter Dylan Southern, one of the directors of the well-regarded music documentaries Meet Me in the Bathroom and Shut Up and Play the Hits.
Southern’s adaptation marshals the original’s formal experiments into three distinct chapters, told from the points of view of the father, his two orphaned boys and Crow. Swerving between horror, drama and dark comedy, the film plays like a home-invasion movie, with Thewlis’s Crow assuming the role of an unwelcome house guest with a menacing line in patter: “Good morning, English widower! Sleep well, did we?”
Southern’s film opens with Cumberbatch’s widowed father – called just Dad in the script – who is left to raise his young sons after the sudden death of his wife, overwhelmed by his grief and struggling with such basic tasks as making breakfast and washing the dishes.
His fraught emotional state summons the corvid creature that simultaneously represents his grief, guilt and increasingly fractured psychological state.
Crow inserts himself in the shadows of the family home, taunting Dad and forcing an emotional reckoning. Ultimately, the visitor helps to reshape the broken family in the wake of death.
There is a fascinating intersection between Dad’s pretence at normality and a working actor who, like Cumberbatch, has to alternate between Hamlet or Frankenstein’s creature and home life with three children. The son of the veteran actors Timothy Carlton and Wanda Ventham, he has been married to the director Sophie Hunter since 2015.
“The work allows you to get everything out and leave it on the dance floor,” he says. “It’s a gift. People ask, ‘How do you shift between imagined reality and your own lived experience?’ It’s very easy. When it’s that intense it’s about putting something on and then taking it off. Getting in a car, leaving it behind. Getting back in the car the next morning, putting it back on.
“It’s a ritual. There was an amazing make-up artist I worked with, Wakana Yoshihara, who created this sort of spa-like calm for me to meditate and listen to music in, to focus through massive grief. Everyone on set was extraordinarily helpful.”
The two boys in the film are played by the first-time actors and real-life brothers Richard and Henry Boxall. They required even more careful management than the furniture-bumping Crow.
“The children were children,” Cumberbatch says. “They’re untrained actors. There’s nothing performative about what they gave us. It was like capturing lightning in a jar. All the more authentic, punchy and powerful for it.
“But at the time of making it, the cost was time, patience, being in several different forms and wearing different hats. There was the producer side going, ‘Are they okay? What do they need?’ We had the safeguarding aspects of their hour.”
Cumberbatch admits to a conflict.
“And there was the acting side. I’m opposite two colleagues who have experience here. But then there’s the parent inside of me going, ‘F**king hell. Film sets are a horrible place for children to be, especially six-year-old boys who just want to run around and fart and play and kick each other.’”
He smiles. “There was a lot going on.”
The idea of Crow has long since outgrown the book. Porter tells a story about Crow’s migration. “One of the most beautiful responses I ever got was from a grief counsellor for children who had been working with two young children who lost their parents,” he says.
“She didn’t read them the book; she just introduced them to the idea of Crow and read some passages. And she said it was the first time she reached them. Off they went into the woods, running up and down the trees, screaming, ‘I’m a crow! I’m a crow!’
“We don’t have much in our culture that ritualises death, that allows us to talk about it. The Irish do it better than we do, if you think about John McGahern and those descriptions of the communal attention to ritual.”
Cumberbatch nods approval in his thoughtful way.
“Middle England has a very locked, tight, get-the-f**k-on-with-it kind of language,” he says. “It’s a hard place to exist emotionally. This film, if anything, gives permission to grieve. Permission to go there. It’s all right. It’s part of life. The more we accept that, the better.”
The Thing With Feathers opens in cinemas on Friday, November 21st
