Kermode & Mayo’s Take - Now & Ben: Benedict Cumberbatch on THE THING WITH FEATHERS

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Howdy Take listeners—it's about time for another Now & Ben, don’t you think? This time it’s Benedict Cumberbatch—who chats to our Ben about his new film ‘The Thing With Feathers’, alongside director Dylan Southern. Based on the bestselling Max Porter novel, the movie follows Cumberbatch’s character ‘Dad’ through his grief at the sudden death of his wife, and his efforts to raise their two sons alone. It’s a hefty subject matter and emotional performance—but as you’ll hear there were some pretty hilarious on-set antics too. When you’re working with two child actors and a guy in a giant crow costume, things are bound to be some laughs... Enjoy, and watch out for more of these bonus interview nuggets dropping into the Take feed every ‘Now & Ben’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Mooby, a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema. Mubi is the place to discover ambitious films by visionary filmmakers, all carefully handpicked. So you can explore the best of cinema streaming anytime, anywhere. Mark, what have Mooby got up their sleeves for us this October? Well, Simon, is a very exciting new release, The Mastermind, which is now in UK Cinemas. It's the new film from Kelly Reichard, the brilliant director of Meeks Cutoff, Night Moves, and First Cow for which we interviewed Toby Jones. The film went down a storm in Cannes earlier this year.

It stars Josh O'Connor, of course, another Kermudemeyer favorite, alongside Alana Haim, Gabi Hoffman, Hope Davis and Bill Camp. Visit mooby.com slash mastermind for showtimes and tickets. And to stream great films at home, you can try Mooby-free for 30 days at Mooby.com slash Kermud and Mayo. That's M-U-B-I-D-Moe for a whole month of great cinema for free. Hello and welcome to another episode of Now and Ben. We're our super sub-Ben-Belie-Smith collars the big stars we just couldn't miss while they're in town

and gets the lowdown on their latest projects. In today's episode, it's British, big and small-screen favourite Benedict Cumberbatch. Double Ben! That's right, he's talking about his new drama The Thing with Feathers, which is out this week. Plus, director Dylan Southern joins them too. They both chat to Ben about bringing this best-selling novel to the screen, the onset silliness behind a very serious performance, and acting alongside a giant crow.

Yes, enjoy. And keep an eye out for more episodes dropping into the take feed every now and Ben. Yeah, I'm all right. I'm all right. Dude, the performance is phenomenal. Thank you very, thank you very, very. That genuinely, I'm not just saying that.

Like, I was blown away. Thank you. And I suppose, you know what it is? You get, I'm me and you the same age. You get to a certain age and, like, everything upsets you and makes you cry. So I was like, oh God, you know, have these kids and the weight that your character's bearing. I just thought, I don't know how you did it, it's brilliant performance. Let's start Dylan, let's start with you.

Bark, was it, was it you reading the book? Was it something that was brought to your attention? Was it bent? I mean, this started 10 years ago for me. So I was gifted the book by my friend who actually worked at the publishers in 2015. I think it was the week the book came out. He gave it to me not thinking I would want to turn it into a film, just knowing my taste. and you know I think you really like this book and he was right I read it read it again

cried my eyes out at the exact same point both times I read it and just was just blown away by it just for such a thin volume it contains such depth and such truth about this thing that we don't often talk about and I'd experience bereavement as a teenager losing friends like two friends within the space of a year and hadn't really dealt with it I'd done the sort of typical thing of kind of pushing it down, you know, it's still there, but we won't talk about that. And I think Max's book, when I read it, just unlocked to that. It was so kind of compassionate, but also unsentimental and, you know, vulgar and funny in places and violence and all of these things that made me kind of understand some things

about myself better, and I had no idea how you would turn it into a film, but I still somehow managed to track down Max and have a coffee with him and persuade him to option the book to Right, and this is pre the Killian Murphy. Yeah, before any of that, yeah, yeah. It was put, I mean, and then, you know, everyone was after that option, but he got in there first. For the first couple of years, I was sort of on my own trying to make this film happen, and then gradually people came on board and it became more and more realistic.

What was the big moment where you're like, this is definitely going to happen? Was that Ben coming, getting involved as an exec, or was that way down the line? I mean, it was, I think in the film world today, you don't ever, know that anything's definitely going to happen but you know when i sent the script to benedict and he read it and liked it and that was the moment where i was like that wow this is really going to happen yeah i think when i met you ben um i'd been watching eric and this feels like almost like the the sort of deeper darker bigger brother of that scenario you know this that that artist you had in vincent and then and that manifestation the way he was dealing with loss this feels like it digs

even deeper into that relationship and similar in a way i mean yeah it's it's odd to have a moment of repetition quite so close uh otherwise inevitable in a career uh you know over a lifetime of being an actor but this is something that belongs to the children as well and the book's very much skewed to realizing halfway through or maybe two-thirds of the way through that it is an unreliable narrative perspective from the boys as older men looking back it's really subtly laid in that but it kind of actually it's very near the end isn't it when it's because it flits between boy, Crow, dad, and yeah, it's one of the later boy chapters where you realize, hang on there, they're writing the past tense, suddenly. It's like, but for Dylan and for me,

Crow's presence had to be real for all of us. I mean, we did talk about it because of Killing's extraordinary transformation in Under Walsh's adaptation where he became Crow, rather like Jonathan Price's fame to Hamlet for Richard Eyre, where he took on the voice of the ghost of his father, and it was like a possession. And it was an astonishing thing to watch. Too young to have seen Jonathan Price, but I did see the play and was blown away by it. But the minute I got the script, First of all, I felt there was so much more space for the sort of dynamism of the book to exist on screen than than there was in the play. The boys were obviously incredibly present, and Crow was this manifestation between all three, all three units. Yeah, it was an amazing, peculiar, odd thing.

You know, you're talking about how many people were involved in making that singular character from Hicks's sculptural marquette, manichet, manichet, I can never say it. Machet, maquette, just shorter, Macquette, to Creature Ink Workshop, creating the head and the animatronic and to Eric Lampart's embodiment of it. He was the operator and actor underneath it all on stilts as well, ball guy. Really heavy head. He was extraordinary to David Thule's voicing it. And I had to sort of see it as a complete thing. But in front of me, it was all of those things with a guy with a remote control.

Eric sweating away doing a David Thuris impression. Me getting kit in the face with a rubber claw. And I mean, so I'm happy to imagine it as real. I really wanted to ask about that. So what were you, were you hearing, you weren't hearing, David's performance. So Eric was in the lines. And he was voicing as David, but not as David eventually did it, because we hadn't

secured him by that point. But we all imagined it. I mean, anyway, the point is, there was a point where I think I know what David Theodore sounds like, we maybe just do without the voice and just do the actual, the whole sort of Feast of the Mau Mau, spiraling dance where he finally gets his kind of voodoo hooks into the character and starts to rip him open, the dad character that is, and the crow and him kind of mesh and become one rather than being adversarial. I just, we kind of did the motions and the dance and Eric was extraordinary and he brought it out of me as well and that

synergy was was was extraordinary and then the rest of it the kind of piecing together all these separate elements is one thing was just it's like acting in front of green screen or free screen you just you have to sort of fabricate a reality and know that it might not be as present it might just be a shadow in the final edit or a voice or silhouette or full-bodied thing and all its kind of... I mean, it was so important to me that crow was a real, tangible, touchable thing rather than a CGI confection. Just...

A tennis ball on a stick. Exactly, yeah. It was... Fullfield connection for the audience, let alone the performance, right? Yeah, in a way... It's strangely off-pouring to you as a performer. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say, yeah. It's stilts, you know, heavy is the head that wears the crow.

I think is the thing, but, like, it was a huge animatronic head that, you know, as soon as we had as many breaks for Eric as we did for the children. It was incredibly heavy. Audiences wouldn't know this, but as soon as I saw his name pop up in the opening credits, I was like, oh my God, perfection. Eric and I used to be a comedy duo in the early 2010s, yeah. We were called Dry Roasted. And he, you know, he was a French clown.

You know, he'd been to French clowning school. His physicality is remarkable. And obviously, shame we don't see his face because his face is remarkable as well, right? He has a really, really interesting. I have videos from early rehearsals where he's doing it with. the costume and he's still crow. It's like it's incredible. Almost like a praying mantis.

He's got incredible physicality. It's great to see. I wanted to ask you about... His script was a work of art as well. And he drew beautiful drawings and thank you cards. And he was a very gracious, generous presence. Everything we did, he'd have drawings, pictures, scribbles. It's just an amazing brain.

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So talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash Kerr Mode. That's BetterH-E-L-P dot com slash Kerr Mode. The other thing that blew me away was the two kids, the two boxaw boys, because I don't know, as a parent, whenever I'm around kids, I just feel this huge weight of responsibility. I don't want to scare them. I don't want to say anything untoward.

You don't want to do anything inappropriate around a kid. You're just thinking that innocence. I don't want to spoil it. But some of the stuff you have to do with them is, like, Like, it's horrifying. Like my worst fear with my own children is that they're going to, you know, develop some of my anxieties or my negativity or my bad habits. And he's actually told by psychologist to not hide his grief,

to not shy away from showing the chaos, the vulnerability, the emotion, the not coping because he thinks he has to try and cope, which of course means he erupts, he erupts in anger, he erupts in, he just sort of shuts off and disassociates and sinks back into something very nearing despair. at certain points his face changes as the kids say in their in their moment dad changed after mum died that's that's that's i found that really upsetting it's really upsetting how did you go about i guess this was maybe i guess it was probably on both of you but just making it comfortable safe

and explaining to them how horrific this thing is yeah yeah a lot of duty of care and like we worked with their mom and we worked with you know coaches and just to make sure that they understood that what was happening was pretend and, you know, and they were smart kids. But yeah, I think they brought a lot of levity to the set, you know, because there's two seven-year-old boys and they really did get what we were doing and Benedict was amazing, you know,

they'd never been on a set, they never acted, so this thing. They'd never acted? Never acted, no. Ah, okay. This thing was overwhelming to them, but they very quickly took it in their stride and I mean, they were hilarious.

I mean, I think we needed some aftercare some days from them because like, you know, if they didn't want to do a service, scene, I would have to find a new way to humiliate myself to persuade them. So there's one day they had to put on mum's makeup and they were just going, no. And I was like, well, you can do whatever you want to meet. They just wrote poo on my forehead and I had to direct for the... And they called you weak man.

They gave me on day one. My debut feature film, I have to command the respect of like a crew of 100 and those two boys just spotted it. They're like, oh, here's weak man. Weak man's here. And that was my nickname. You know, if it gets a shot, I'll take it. Yeah, I had to do similar things.

Although, yeah, Richard, it's very transactual with kids at times. And, you know, there's so many roles going on, just going to go back to the sife. There's exactly the same fear as you do. I'm a father, and it's my worst nightmare. A film set can be a very unchild-friendly place. With all the safeguarding and the hours and all that stuff, it's still like it's not somewhere you want to bring kids to,

especially when it's this sort of explosive drama of grief and turbulence and emotional chaos and yet you know it became a thing where I was both their friend their colleague I mean the more I talked to them just as another guy in front of the camera the more it was like oh I see we're all in this together I thought it's really important to be on a level with them and them to be on a level with me like we're doing this that's the crew we all work together but we're on this side of the camera and we're going to help each other out but also to be a dad and just have an overview as a producer thinking he's tired he's hungry he's not going to do it I'll have a chat with him later let me go and speak to them during

tutoring and see if I can sort of smooth the way or play our way into getting some something of the lightning in the jar moment that we needed and it was joy it made home life incredibly easy as well which is not often the case usually work is the holiday and home life is the proper work uh this is the other way around for a bit which is great um but also you know they teach you such humility and they really ruin any kind of self-importance there was a moment where i had to tell them that their mother had died and richard who's slightly older they're twins and he was born just minutes earlier, but he's got a profoundly old soul look about him. He contains kind of a great storm of volatility.

They're both wonderful children, but he's got this kind of gravity about him. And he walked towards me and just went, so I'm laughing in my face. I was like, oh, Jesus, I've got it. At the moment, I'm telling my children that their mother has passed away. And they're just back from school running in with their satchels on the ground, going, mom, mom. And I'm going, and he's literally laughing my face at every take. And another moment when I lost them in the woods and all.

all the resurgent fear of more loss on top of the compounding, you know, compounding the grief of losing my wife. I think I've lost my children and I shout at them and my rage as parents do when they think the children are under threat. I think they can lose them, you know, don't cross the street like that. You know, that kind of protective rage, that I'm misguided, but love really. It comes out at me and then I collapse in full realization of what it's really all about that I just, it's her, it's just her, I'm really miss her and I'm failing them as a dad.

I just collapse and this beautiful moment, the children are magically capable of giving un-asked for love and support to an adult. It's one of the most precious of many rare gifts they have. And as he came towards me, he was, I don't want to hug you. I don't want to hug you. I think we do need, I think this has to be a bit of a moment where there's kind of a huddle, you know. No. And then the take happened and he did it.

And he whispered it in my ear, but in full earshot to the sniggering crew who could hear it, like, you owe me big time. As I'm crying like an eye out. I mean, it was remarkable. And also just joyous days as well, joyous days of play and I adore them. I do them, very special point. It was never not going to be those two, as chaotic and wild as they were. I was terrified.

I was such a wimp. I was like, I'm literally in fear of my safety on set with these. And I also as a producer, I think we're not got to make the day. Dina was like, no, we have to go with them. They're the rawness, they're the realness. You did a big group casting with loads of kids and they would do their exercises individually. And I was looking on my phone this morning, I was looking at the video. And every time some new kids would get up and I was filming them, my camera would just

drift back to Henry and Richard watching and it was just, and anytime we could harness who they really were, so there's a scene where they have to, Crow tells them to build a model of their mothers. We put on some music before they were walked onto set and all of the stuff to the making stuff. And they came in and nobody spoke, we kept it silent and they just went in and started doing it.

And you know, art department, I think, had made some models and they were like, we wouldn't make that, you know, we want to make our version. It felt really real that moment. And that's just them being them. And there are other moments, like when they're playing on. the bed and Benedict can't get them to go to that's just them being like you know not listening

it's not just so how real is that we all know that moment he recognized it completely it was an incredibly effective movie i think it's a beautiful piece of work thank you yeah it's brilliant i really enjoyed talking with you guys thank you let me to see you again