'Anyone who has loved or lost can tap into this film'

Benedict Cumberbatch dug deep for his role as a grieving father in the adaptation of Max Porter's bestseller. The pair speak to Ellie Harrison about masculinity and raising sons

- Ellie Harrison

For his new film The Thing with Feathers, Benedict Cumberbatch found a useful - if painful - shortcut to get him into the mindset of a bereaved man. In the adaptation of Max Porter's luminous 2015 novel, Cumberbatch plays a father of two boys who is undone by grief after the sudden death of his wife. For one of the scenes, the child actors recorded a voiceover, where the boys open up about how much they miss their mother. Cumberbatch would listen to it when he needed to. “I used that as a device to put me into their pain, their perspective, their sense of loss,” he says. “And those innocent little voices talking about how their dad changed a lot after their mum died —” he exhales sharply — “Immediate access to emotion there.”

That the actor has three sons of his own only compounded his sensitivity. “They say that the minute you have children, you become far more available emotionally, and everything’s a lot closer,” he says, touching the skin on his arm. “But, I mean, I’m nearly 50, so I’ve lived a bit. I’ve experienced grief. And anyone who’s loved or lost can tap into this film.”

At 114 pages, Porter’s original book is as light as, well, a feather. But within those pages is an experimental, poetic and emotionally bulky tale. A man and his sons are stumbling through their suffering when, all of a sudden, a talking crow crashes into their lives, uninvited, to serve as their “antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter”. Porter, whose father died when he was just six years old, mined his own experience of losing a parent for the book. It is sometimes unbearably sad: “The whole place was heavy mourning, every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, welly, covered in a film of grief.” And often sad and funny at once: “People, on their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying ‘OH NO YOU DON’T COCK-CHEEK’. She was not busy dying... she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.”