Benedict Cumberbatch responds to “very odd” criticism of The Power Of The Dog
Without naming names, the Oscar-nominated actor calls out Sam Elliott's interview
Aux News Benedict Cumberbatch
During his BAFTA Film Session on Friday, The Power Of The Dog star Benedict Cumberbatch took a moment to comment on someone’s vitriolic response to the feature (of course, that someone being Yellowstone star Sam Elliott).
Elliott courted controversy last week when he called The Power Of The Dog a “piece of shit” with “all these allusions to homosexuality,” during an interview on Marc Maron’s “WTF” Podcast. The Sacramento native then went on to ask what Jane Campion (who is from New Zealand) could possibly know about the American West. He phrased his remarks in a way that only made him look like a roaring sexist.
“I’m trying very hard not to say anything about a very odd reaction that happened the other day on a radio podcast over here,” Cumberbatch said about Elliott’s interview.
Cumberbatch continued, “Without meaning to stir over the ashes of that […] someone really took offense to—I haven’t heard it so it’s unfair for me to comment in detail on it—to the West being portrayed in this way.”
In the session, Cumberbatch went on to explain how the story and his character Phil Burbank represent very real things in our lives. He also notes that people like Burbank did actually exist back during the time period in which the film and novel are set, and similar people continue to exist today.
“These people still exist in our world. Whether it’s on our doorstep or whether it’s down the road or whether it’s someone we meet in a bar or pub or on the sports field, there is aggression and anger and frustration and an inability to control or know who you are in that moment that causes damage to that person and, as we know, damage to those around them,” Cumberbatch said.
“There’s no harm in looking at a character to get to the root causes of that. This is a very specific case of repression, but also due to an intolerance for that true identity that Phil is that he can’t fully be,” Cumberbatch added. “The more we look under the hood of toxic masculinity and try to discover the root causes of it, the bigger chances we have of dealing with it when it arises with our children.”
Campion’s The Power Of The Dog is most Oscar-nominated feature of this year, with Cumberbatch himself competing in the Best Lead Actor category for his performance of Burbank.
96 Comments
Sometimes there’s a PR kerfuffle. Sometimes there’s a PR kerfuffle.
Shoot… lost my train of thought.
Quite possibly the kerfufflest in Los Angeles County, which would place it high in the running for kerfufflest world wide
Classy statement on Benedict Cumberbatch’s part. I wish all rebukes could be this eloquent.
Indeed.
It seems like he’s growing as a human being since all the Sherlock criticism and his dismissal of Sherlock/Watson— although this is a case of an actual, real person who was gay vs. a fictional character who was originally written in a time where even if he was gay, they would never have been able to explicitly say so.
I feel like people deserve to be at least a little angry at Sam Elliot, if only because he seems to be giving off that “gay people didn’t exist before 50 years ago” vibe, which again, is historically false.
I’m also willing to give him the benefit of the doubt since the Sherlock fandom was fucking CLINICALLY INSANE about that ship, and Moffat basically dropped it all on Freeman and Cumberbatch with the amount of queerbaiting written into the series. The only show to ever rival that hysteria was Supernatural.Sherlock sucks, by the way. It’s an awful show and I’m glad Cumberbatch is coming out of its shadow.
Moffat and Gatiss said from Day One that they weren’t going with Holmes/Watson in their adaptation and the fandom spent every minute after making up evidence that they were lying so that only the True Believers would be ready for the big reveal. The fandom baited itself. Because they were insane.
The fandom imagined it, but let’s not kid around that the show wasn’t fucking around with them with stuff like queer-coding Moriarty, the abundance of “mistaken for a couple” jokes or manipulative editing of season 4 trailers to imply Holmes is saying “I love you” to Watson. Idiots were setting themselves up for failure, but the people at the top were more than willing to lead them on to sell the show.Like, if you say something from day one and yet you still poke the bear that points to the contrary, you are queerbaiting. Especially in an era of TV where showrunners rewrite shows because someone on Reddit deduced a future plotline.
Even as a longtime Sherlock Holmes (in general) fan who has wanted at least one incarnation of those two characters to be canonically gay (or romantically involved in some other way, like in one of the continuities where they’re a heterosexual pair), I do admit the hardcore shippers were on another level with that one.
I agree with your first paragraph. Imagine being an actor, and having all these fans claiming you made acting choices that you didn’t make, and couldn’t be persuaded otherwise.As for the second paragraph, I mostly agree, though I liked the first season or so.
Not *was*. Still *is*. My wife just saw recent posts from tinfoil hat fuckers out there that cross that ship over into the actors’ real life. To-Day. She saw this today.
I still remember people hoping for the secret “final episode”, to the point they deluded themselves into thinking that a show premiering on BBC is actually a big misdirect.I’m still unsure who was crazier, Sherlock fans or Supernatural fans.
There’s so much overlap between those fandoms and their brand of crazy. There is (was?) apparently a Frankensteined Tumblr monster called SuperWhoLock (it also included Doctor Who). It was a hotbed of wild conspiracy theories.
You just put words in his mouth.
Which one?
Only the classiest things could come out of someone named Benedict Cumberbatch.
You know, people are allowed to have pissy, poorly-considered opinions on pop culture. It’s kind of part of fandom that people make fun of your stuff. If someone makes a joke about a dumb cowboy movie or Ted Lasso being for adult children or whatever, you can just laugh about it (or not!) and move on. You don’t have to make it a week-long twitter topic.
He wasn’t joking. He made homophobic comments.
I don’t disagree with the overall sentiment, but there’s a big difference between some rando on Twitter and a well-known actor on one of the most popular podcasts. [Ted Lasso is totally for Disney adults though.]
I think there’s a difference between making jokes about a movie and humorlessly disparaging the message a movie’s trying to make. The argument Elliott was trying to make was so weird, too. “What does this woman from New Zealand know about the Old West?” is rich coming from a guy who grew up in Oregon in the sixties. What does he know from the Old West that he didn’t learn from other people? Are other people not allowed to learn the same things he did secondhand?
“Yes, but only if they don’t gay it all up.”
Sam Elliott
Not what he said.
What I find weirdest is that he was griping about Cumberbatch wearing his chaps indoors, “nobody does that,” when Cumberbatch’s character wearing chaps indoors and refusing to wash up is a key character/plot element.
My cousin had a cattle ranch in Oregon. My brother got to go on a round up with him when he visited.
Oregon in the sixties was a racist hellhole if you weren’t white. My family had to live in Portland while my dad was training and we got lucky that a white neighbor lady liked us and told everyone to leave us alone. So he’s keeping true to his roots.
I was horrified and surprised/not surprised to learn that when Oregon was founded, it was explicitly whites-only. IIRC they also had open links between the Klan and the city council into the mid 1900’s.
Yep. It’s in the founding documents of the state. I didn’t knew any of this when I applied for college there. I did by the time I graduated from the University of Oregon, with a minor in history and an area of concentration in History of the American West. Half of my senior theses was on anti-Black discrimination in Portland during WWII. Fun times.
Remember: A joke isn’t a thing with a set up and punchline or humor or a one-liner or a pun or anything like that; it’s any thing you might want to criticize, because at some point “jokes can’t be criticized” became a thing that people pretend is in any way rational.
I will say that his opinion was more “New Zealand doesn’t look a fucking thing like Montana, and anyone who uses it as a stand-in clearly doesn’t know what they’re doing.”
What does a Black man in American in 2022 know about slavery in the 1650s?
What does he know from the Old West that he didn’t learn from other people?That was the part that made me almost roll my eyes out of my head. Like, the homophobia and sexism are right on the surface and plenty of other people are calling him out on it, but it’s like Elliott’s had that mustache so long he thinks he’s actually a grizzled old 19th century gold prospector or something.Has he ever voiced a similar sizzling hot take on, I don’t know, Sergio Leone? “What does this Italian guy know about the American West”? No?? Huh, I wonder why. (Kidding, we all know why.)
I learned in the eighties that we should respect people like Sam Elliott who survived the Oregon Trail.
And people get to respond when someone says something stupid and gross like this
By week 2 the discourse on these things has been exhausted and it’s just the same insufferable people making the same dunk over and over.
I don’t understand what your point is. People should only respond to stuff like this until you’ve deemed it insufferable?
I don’t understand what your point is. I think it’s pretty much that the responses/fighting amount to pretty much nothing, at the end of the day. Hence the “making the same dunk over and over.”
what has been added to the conversation that wasn’t present immediately when it was reported? Cumberbatch’s point was made by many people on twitter and various articles on the topic.
And yet, here you are.
“And people get to respond when someone says something stupid and gross like this”This, a million times over. Your right to free speech doesn’t give you a right to be immune from criticism.
99% of ‘cancel culture’ complaints boil down to “Whoa, I had no idea there were people in the world who don’t think like me!”
“You know, people are allowed to have pissy, poorly-considered opinions on pop culture.”So just the follow your argument, you’re saying this because opinions about pissy, poorly-considered opinions on pop culture isn’t allowed?I’m just trying to figure out what you possibly think you’re illuminating here.
I think the idea is that there doesn’t need to be so much hay generated over dumbass hott takes that amount to “old man yells at cloud.”But, meh. Ain’t like it’s going away.
Sure, and I don’t actually think many people were making much of it other than pointing to the history of spaghetti westerns. However, it DOES make more sense for Cumberbatch to say something here since he was, you know, directly involved in the project.
Oh, totally.
He should have worn his chaps to the interview and been like “what??”
And people are allowed to make fun of your opinions
Firstly, it was less of a joke and more a rant about how making it look like gay people existed in the Old West™️ is wrong. Secondly, just as much as people are allowed to have shitty takes about things, other people are allowed to come out and say “hey that take was shitty”. 85% of all sports discussions I see online are people like Stephen A. Smith or Nick Wright saying something incredibly stupid and then the rest of the internet dunking on them. How is this any different?
Hi, have you met the Internet?
you’re a fucking moron.
‘people are allowed to have pissy, poorly-considered opinions on pop culture.’
not on my watch buddy!
It’s also a part of fandom that bad takes are themselves subject to criticism and mockery. Sam Elliot doesn’t own cowboy movies just because that’s mostly what he’s known for.
This is just a weird take to me because if “people are allowed to have pissy, poorly-considered opinions on pop culture” why aren’t people “allowed to” turn it into a Twitter topic? I mean if we’re just going by what’s “allowed.” You say it doesn’t “have to” be made into a weeklong twitter topic but also people don’t “have to” share their pissy, poorly-considered opinions on pop culture, do they? If one’s allowed, they’re both allowed. If one doesn’t have to, neither one has to. You, for instance, are “allowed” to monitor how other people respond to stuff, but you don’t “have to”…
Once again, this is a nothingburger.
Definitely listen to the person who still regularly uses the term “nothingburger”
Definitely listen to anonymous strangers on the internet.
I for one am glad that word replaced ‘tempest in a teapot’
I have never heard this particular term in my life. If anyone can enlighten me on its etymology, please do. Save me the googling.
I don’t know but Donald Trump Jr liked to say it a lot
In which case, your criticism is clearly justified.
Why are you so insistent on minimizing homophobia
why are you so insistent that everyone must enjoy watching queer themed westerns made by women from New Zealand?
Sam Elliott said a whole lot of bad stuff in that interview…but the stuff about Campion was very specifically about the fact that the part of New Zealand where it was filmed looks exactly nothing like Montana, where the movie is set.
So what did he say that was sexist? Going back to look at the other article you linked but not quoted, his emphasis was that she was from New Zealand and how they don’t know much about the American West. Which is accurate to some extent. My friend from Australia doesn’t know about the American West outside of what he learned in movies and Red Dead Redemption 2. He thinks bears just roam everywhere in California – like on the streets in Sacramento. So, could he have said “what can this *person* from New Zealand know…”? Yes. Did he mean to sound sexist to AVClub? No.
Now what he said about the homosexual overtones in the movie, which Maron correctly chimed in that it was kinda what the movie was about, sounds dumb. But he liked Brokeback for its great story, but hated it as a western. Maybe he just doesn’t like sugar with his coffee?
Man, wait until Sam Elliott finds out that Phil Burbank, at least has he appears in Thomas Savage’s novel, is based on a real person.
This is a reply to an article on the same topic last week;
tiny epics 3/01/22 6:23pmAs someone who loved “Power of The Dog” and loves Sam Elliot.And listened to the WTF episode in full.
I have to say this an example of people editing what someone said in order to be out raged.To take and quote “what the fuck does this woman know?” which is only a fragment of a sentence, as a definitive statement is some piss poor journalism.Between the above quote Elliot explains, using many full sentences, as to why he doesn’t like the film before getting on to “the fact that Campion filmed the movie in New Zealand as a stand-in for Old West Montana” As I said I loved “Power of The Dog” so I don’t agree with Elliot’s dislike of the film but you should at least fully outline why he doesn’t like it.
Montana native chiming in here. I was actually surprised to learn that the movie wasn’t filmed in eastern Montana, the landscape looked so familiar to me. My father, who has lived there his entire life, said the same thing. New Zealand was an effective stand-in IMO, so even that aspect of Elliot’s criticism makes zero sense to me.
If Lord of the Rings taught me anything, it’s that NZ has a climate suitable for any filming needs.
It really does!
You forgot it being all homosexualed-up. What about that part?
Just about as gay and just about as repressed as you’d expect for a state with a largely conservative, largely rural population. I will say that Bandersnatch Crumblebutt’s character’s particular brand of bullying and toxic masculinity reminded me a lot of many of the men I grew up around. Not speculating on their sexual orientations, of course.
I’m beginning to think anyone writing articles about this interview didn’t listen to the interview. I counted 25 “fucks” out of Sam Elliot in the first 15 minutes of the interview. It’s clear from his inflection he wasn’t making a sexist remake. It’s clear from all the context that he didn’t think there was anything profound or new in the movie that hasn’t been played out in other films. Who cares.
That sounds way more like the take he had on Yellowstone versus what he had to say about Power of the Dog. He was pretty passionate in his disgust for the latter. And no, it wasn’t about the amount of times he said fuck. It’s the WTF podcast, It’s a show that begins with a barrage of the word. No one who knows the podcast cares how many times he said it.
Kinda weird to include that Sam Elliott is from Sacramento in this article.
The thing that baffles me (and which I’m too lazy to do the research on myself) is has Sam Elliot really never been in a western shot outside the US?
Oddly enough, no.
He did one in Alberta…which looks a lot more like Montana than NZ does.
He has, however, worn chaps in-doors in one of the ones he did, which is a complaint he has about The Power of the Dog.I recommend this Twitter thread by Western scholar and artist David Lambert: He discusses Elliott’s critiques and I think it’s a solid read even outside of that context, since he also dismantles a lot of preconceptions people have about that genre, both laypeople and supposed enthusiasts.
Thanks for the longform critique share. I’m trying to be generous to Elliott, and assume the article calling the film “an evisceration of the American Myth” kinda clouded his judgement a bit. It’s hard though, because he really put is foot where that ample mustache is.Does anyone know what that article was Elliott was talking about? Because if he just made that up then I take back any attempt at generocity.All that said, the David Lambert tweets introduced me to the story of James Young Deer. Looking forward to checking out that internet rabbit hole.
It’s the first line in Manohla Dargis’ NYT review:A great American story and a dazzling evisceration of one of the country’s foundational myths, Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” centers on Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), a swaggering man’s man. For decades, Phil has been raising cattle on his family’s Montana ranch, a parched expanse ringed by jagged mountains. As hard and isolate, open and defended as the land, Phil has been playing cowboy his entire adult life: He rarely bathes, picks a banjo and castrates bull calves using a blade he then holds in his teeth so he can finish the merciless procedure with his bare hands.Campion’s touch is more subtle in “The Power of the Dog” although her knife work is similarly swift, sure, inexorable and unforgiving.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/movies/the-power-of-the-dog-review.htmlSince Elliott mentions a full-page ad in the LA Times, I imagine it was a pull-quote.
Yeah, I do believe Elliott’s criticism is rooted in homophobia, or at the very least a homophobia rooted in masculine insecurity. Lambert himself points out that he’s giving him some generous benefit of the doubt and that reading his words as bigoted is totally valid.And yeah, the story of Young Deer and the way he had to utilize his varied racial background is fascinating, especially since it’s not clear how aware he was of his own origins.
that is a wonderful and thoughtful response thank you
I listened to the entire podcast. Sam Elliot made a point several times that he is a liberal and agrees with liberal politics and policies. When he started to discuss the movie he had a very knee jerk reaction. And while he did make the homosexual remark I got the impression that he was offended at what he perceived as an outsider taking a shot at his artform which is westerns. It was so poorly worded and incomplete, but that is my impression of what he was trying to say.
Do you think he asked Stephen Frears (who is from England) what he knew about the American West on the set of “The Hi-Lo Country?”
Sam Elliott does not abide.
He’s takin’ it easy for all us homophobes…
Sam Elliott has been playing the same character for so long he’s forgotten it’s all bullshit.
1883. He’s not in Yellowstone.Next time, with Same Elliott: “What does this woman know about talking about people from other Westerns talking about still other people in movies featuring the American West??”
He was responding while admitting to not having heard or read the comments, so this “article” is really a non-starter.
The movie was “meh” at best and not a western…Why anyone is making such a big deal out of it (academy awards?!?!) just shows where the entire industry has sunk. How’s that broadcast ratings dive going? I havent seen that much anticipation of death since kamikaze pilots prepared for Pearl Harbor!
H*ly sh* this site is garbage. There is not a single commentator here who has followed the links to see what Sam Elliot actually said. If you did, you would find it circled back to …. more AVClub articles. Do you understand how pathetic that is? You people are all such lightweights. And total fvkin embarrassments.
I assume I will stay in the greys. But… it is even worse than I thought, two of the links this ‘’article’’ links to ARE THE SAME ARTICLE from this website.What the fvk?
Great performances but the film was booooring.
I’d go a step farther and say the performances were bad, too. I don’t understand all the praise for this movie. It was a long slog for me to get through it, and afterward, I had words with the friend who recommended it.
why? because it didn’t have a horse chase scene?
1883 star Sam Elliott.
This film was a long walk for not a great pay off. If it were me I’d swap this out for the French Dispatch.