“It was all-consuming”: the movie that took over Benedict Cumberbatch
After a career defined by period roles playing British luminaries of the fictional and not-so-fictional variety – Sherlock Holmes, Alan Turing, William Pitt the Younger, Stephen Hawking, Charles Darwin, Louis Wain – it appears there was always a part of English actor Benedict Cumberbatch that wanted to play the cowboy. He got his wish in 2020 with his Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’-nominated performance as the closeted cowpoke Phil Burbank in Jane Campion’s Power of the Dog.
It’s a curious film, as much a modern psychodrama as it is interested in the masculine trappings of the traditionalist western movie – even with New Zealand playing the part of the Montana badlands. It echoes another film that took the Academy Awards by storm with an update on the western set in the empty quarter of the northern Rocky Mountains. Dances with Wolves had a more successful night at the Oscars and was ultimately credited with bringing the western back into the light and giving Kevin Costner a directorial career – one that appears to have come full circle with this year’s release of the two-parter Horizon: An American Saga.
It’s also the film that captured a young Benedict Cumberbatch’s imagination when he saw it as a teenager. In the run-up to that year’s Academy Awards, Cumberbatch told A Frame films like Dances with Wolves gave him a thirst to play a gunslinger. “I was young when I saw that, and I was enraptured by every single second of those three hours,” he said. “It was all-consuming, as great work is. As I became an actor, it became a genre that I definitely wanted to experience.”
Power of the Dog was lauded for its use of New Zealand’s Southern Alps as the stunning backdrop for the story of the Burbank brothers and Phil’s struggle to reach the standard he sets for himself as a traditional man. And it’s the landscapes that Cumberbatch wanted to put on his own chaps and spurs, at least for the duration of a film shoot. He said he wanted to be in a western “because of the connection to nature, because of how characters are placed in landscapes, and how much I love that—selfishly, as a human being—wanting to work in an environment outside of four walls.”
Based on the 1967 novel of the same name by Thomas Savage, Power of the Dog found critical success after its release on Netflix, but ultimately disappointed at the Oscars, losing 11 of the categories it had been nominated in.
Nevertheless, Cumberbatch spoke positively of his experience filming the movie, going so far as to learn all of the cowboy skills his character would need: rope-weaving, horse-riding, and banjo-playing.
He later told Deadline it was one of the toughest roles he had ever played, although he seemed less than keen to start comparing past jobs. “I had to further my standards for this,” he said. “I had to reach into something I haven’t played with before. But I don’t know. I always feel a bit on spot with this kind of question because I can’t immediately review all of my work. And they’re not always comparable. I mean, carrying a Marvel film is pretty hefty stuff, an utterly different set of muscles. And the same could said of anything on stage. So, comparing them is also pointless.”
