Benedict Cumberbatch had the politest response to Sam Elliott’s ‘Power of the Dog’ dig

Benedict Cumberbatch is reacting in a really British method to American actor Sam Elliott calling his film “The Energy of the Canine” “that piece of s—.” With out naming names, one of the best actor Oscar nominee referred to as Elliott’s response “very odd.”

“Somebody … actually took offense [at] the West being portrayed on this method,” Cumberbatch stated in a BAFTA Movie Classes interview that streamed Saturday. (His remarks start across the 44-minute mark.)

He famous that he was reluctant to remark intimately as a result of he hadn’t but heard the episode of the “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast and stated he didn’t wish to “stir over the ashes” of the story. He proceeded to remark anyway.

Elliott, who stars within the Paramount+ streaming sequence “1883″ and has sealed his place within the canon of the western style over the course of his 77 years, took large concern final week with a blurb from a “Energy of the Canine” evaluation that — in his phrases — described the movie as an “evisceration of the American fable.”

“They’re all working round in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions to homosexuality all through the f— film,” Elliott stated of the story set in Twenties Montana. Later he added, “It’s like … the place’s the western? The place’s the western on this western?”

Cumberbatch took concern with Elliott’s “denial that anyone might have something aside from a heteronormative existence due to what they do for a residing or the place they’re born.”

He additionally criticized what he noticed as “a large intolerance inside the world at massive in direction of homosexuality nonetheless, in direction of an acceptance of the ‘different,’ of any sort of distinction, and no extra so than on this prism of conformity within the sense of what’s anticipated in a person within the kind of western-archetype mildew of masculinity.”

However the English actor did all of it in a nonconfrontational method, absent any outrage. He described the storytelling in “The Energy of the Canine,” which leads the pack of Oscar contenders with 12 nominations, as a glance underneath the hood of poisonous masculinity.

“I believe there’s no hurt in taking a look at a personality to try to get to the foundation causes of that,” he stated. “I imply, this can be a very particular case of repression, but additionally attributable to an intolerance, a societal intolerance for that true id that Phil is, that Phil has, that he can’t totally be.”

As for the deconstruction of Phil, the character he performed within the movie, within the context of the American West? Nicely, Cumberbatch stated, “It’s not a historical past lesson.”