Benedict Cumberbatch and Kodi Smit-McPhee Open Up about Straight Actors Playing Gay Roles

Jane Campion's upcoming Netflix western "The Power of the Dog" received terrific reviews at the Venice Film Festival this week, with Oscar talk for star Benedict Cumberbach, who plays a macho cowboy in 1925 Montana with a strange attraction to a younger man who comes to live on the family's ranch.

"Cumberbatch wrangles an earth-shattering performance, perhaps his best ever, with an excessive bravado that seems to consume Phil from within," writes The Wrap. Central to his character is an unexpressed desire that comes to a head when his brother George (Jesse Plemons) marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst) with a teenage son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Phil humiliates the boy, but his resentment of the sensitive, nerdish boy appears to come from a long hidden place within Phil.

"The intolerable fire of his repressed truth comes out as resentment," continues The Wrap. "It's only in the comforting memory of Bronco Henry, a mentor who taught him the ropes of roping and who likely passed along the ability to hide in plain sight. No flashbacks are necessary, as these would break the spell of what we don't see but can nonetheless read between the lines."

While the sexuality of both Phil and Peter isn't clearly defined, Cumberbatch and his co-star, Smit-McPhee, discussed straight actors playing gay roles while at the Telluride Film Festival to IndieWire.

Previously Cumberbatch played LGBTQ icon Alan Turing in "The Imitation Game," for which he was nominated for an Oscar in 2015.

"I feel very sensitive about representation, diversity, and inclusion," Cumberbatch said. "One of the appeals of the job was the idea that in this world, with this specific character, there was a lot that was private, hidden from view."

"To describe Phil as a poster boy for toxic masculinity would fail to capture the essence of a man whose testosterone has grown thick enough to clog the blood in his veins," IndieWire writes in its review. "This is a guy who makes John Wayne look like Paul Lynde, or would at least desperately want to if he were born 30 years later and didn't think that television made you soft."

Cumberbatch also questioned the divide between an actor's public persona and personal behavior. "I also feel slightly like, is this a thing where our dance card has to be public? Do we have to explain all our private moments in our sexual history? I don't think so."

The final line, though, came with director Jane Campion's decision to hire him and Smit-McPhee.

"Jane chose us as actors to play those roles," he said. "That's her question to answer."

Smit-McPhee's character, IndieWire describes, is "a lanky, flamboyant young man whose physicality is itself a blatant challenge to the repressive heteronormative standards of the era."

"I would say that there's a lot in Peter that I relate to," said the 25-year-old actor, who made his debut in 2009 in the critically-acclaimed "The Road." "Sure, I'm a straight man, but I'm extremely in touch with my feminine side. I was raised by my mother and my sister. Of course, my dad has a huge masculine influence on my life but he could never really take me away from the feminine side that I just intrinsically have in myself. It was just a matter of bringing it out... and letting it be in the world. It was a really experimental but beautiful thing to do."

Smit-McPhee credits his director for pushing him in unexpected ways. "One thing that really stood out with Jane is that she challenged me to get out of my comfort zone," he said. "At first I was like, 'I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know if I can find anything more than what I've done for all these years.' But when I just surrendered to it and accepted it and had fun with it, Jane helped me bring more to Peter than I could bring myself."

To allow the actors to bond, Campion arranged a two-week boot camp for them which included character-developing exercises. "Of course we chatted with each other, but there was also some little secret sauce in there somewhere, the stuff you leave to the moment," Cumberbatch said. "I think when it's non-verbal and intensely subtextual, when there are so many planes of intention and thoughts going on, you obviously want to take the audience in. You want them to believe what they're seeing, but you also want to leave something to discover."

Netflix releases "The Power of the Dog" in theaters on November 17, 2021, before it streams beginning December 1.