Benedict Cumberbatch reveals how his new film hopes to change the ways we think about grief

Benedict Cumberbatch has revealed that he hopes his new film The Thing with Feathers will help to change the way audiences feel about grief.

The hard-hitting drama is based on Max Porter's award-winning 2015 novella Grief is the Thing with Feathers – which was previously adapted into a stage show starring Cillian Murphy – and follows a widowed father of two whose attempts to move on with his life are disrupted by repeated visits from a large crow.

Of course, while films exploring grief are hardly in short supply, there's sometimes a feeling that more glossy movies tend to sugarcoat the subject a little – sanitising it or making it more palatable for a wider audience. The aim of this film was to avoid that completely.

"That's not allowable in our film," Cumberbatch explained during an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com. "Because it's not a Hallmark movie and Crow is present – who's this reminder that grief is chaotic, unpredictable, and unwelcome. It just happens when it happens, and how it happens, in the way it happens."

Crow – who is voiced by David Thewlis – is presented in the film as a massive, nightmarish figure that towers over Cumberbatch's unnamed character and refuses to leave him alone, belittling him, sardonically mocking him and generally making his life a misery. In other words, he is the embodiment of the all-consuming, chaotic nature of grief.

"It's not something that is neatly divided into sort of stages as is often talked about," Cumberbatch continued. "And if it is stages, sure. But you'll go back to square one just when you think you're finished with square five. It's just all over the place."

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Given that all-consuming nature of the grief his character goes through, it can't have been a painless feat for Cumberbatch to access the intense levels of emotion needed to bring the character to life. But according to the star, with "material as rich as this" it was not difficult for him to embody the necessary dismay and devastation.

Furthermore, he was also able to draw on some of his own personal experiences in a way that he hopes might be helpful for audience members looking for something concrete to take away from the film.

"I've lived a life, and we all experience grief at some stage or another in our lives," he said. "It's one of the key reasons why I wanted to support this independent film by producing it as well as acting in it... because it's culturally still a little bit taboo.

"We're still a bit ashamed to sort of bring the tone down by talking about death or grief, and that's at our own cost. Every other major sort of culture, indigenous culture deals with it in a very full-frontal, honest way. And it's just an acceptance. And acceptance is such a gift in a short life. It really, really is, it's the biggest, biggest thing.

"I think if there's any takeaway from this film, it's that it's okay. It's all right to feel completely unearthed in the chaos and overwhelming, unpredictable, scary, and hard to quantify feelings of grief. And especially if you are a man and bringing up two children in a motherless environment. It's okay!"

Cumberbatch had long been a fan of Porter's novel, but before he'd seen Southern's script he'd been a little wary of any attempt to turn it into a film. However, upon reading the treatment he quickly recalled how "cinematic" his experience with the novel had felt and how well the script seemed to capture that feeling.

"[It's so] joyous in its invention," he said. "I mean, even though it's about a very dark and serious subject matter, just the kaleidoscope of invention and how he'd realised that and lifted it from the page of Max's brilliant novel. I was immediately hooked in by that."

For his part, when Southern had initially read the book – which he completed in just two sittings – he'd immediately decided it was "unfilmable".

"And then within two weeks was sitting opposite Max, trying to persuade him to option it to me," he said. " And I think he just liked that I came in and I said, ‘Look, I don't have all the answers. But I would want to make a film that retains the DNA of your book but is its own thing.

 “The great thing about this book is it's been proven to be iterative," he continued. "You know, there's been a play, there's gonna be a puppet show version of it in the works. It's been done in so many different forms. And even within our film, there's another version of it being created by the main character. So it's this story that's so universal but so specific, it seems to keep telling itself again and again – this film's just one occasion of that."

The Thing With Feathers is released in UK cinemas on Friday 21st November 2025.

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