Actor Benedict Cumberbatch appeared to fire back at actor Sam Elliott’s remarks on the Oscar-nominated film “Power of the Dog” on Tuesday.
Elliott called the film a “piece of shit” and criticized what he called several “allusions to homosexuality” in the movie during an appearance on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast.
“You want to talk about that piece of shit?” he began. “That’s what all these f*cking cowboys in that movie looked like. They’re all running around in chaps and no shirts, there’s all these allusions to homosexuality throughout the f*cking movie.”
Cumberbatch refuted Elliott’s claims by appearing to call his criticism both “very odd” and a symptom of “toxic masculinity,” though did not refer to the “1883” actor by name during an appearance with BAFTA Friday. The actor appeared to say Elliott seemed to take issue “that anybody could have any other than a heteronormative existence because of what they do for a living or where they’re born.” (RELATED: Irate Liberals Are Freaking Out Because Sam Elliott Doesn’t Like Their Gay Western)
Without naming names, Benedict Cumberbatch said ‘The Power of the Dog’ explores “what poisons the well in men, what creates toxic masculinity.” https://t.co/oI9bv48VUp
— Consequence (@consequence) March 8, 2022
“I think we are to teach our sons to be feminists, if we’re to teach equality, if we’re to understand what poisons the well in men, [and] creates toxic masculinity, we need to understand and look at the hood of characters like Phil Burbank to see what their struggle is and why that’s there in the first place because otherwise it will just keep repeating itself,” Cumberbatch continued.
“I think the more we look under the hood of toxic masculinity and try to discover the root causes of it, the bigger the chance we have of dealing with it when it arises with our children in playgrounds at school, with their friends, in the behavioral patterns we might see in innocent play and just understand how to police that,” he said.
Jane Campion, the film’s director, told The Guardian that homosexual theme were intentionally incorporated into the movie.
“It’s quite eroticized. That rope, man! That’s such an object,” Campion said. “You’re making a rope out of the hides of the beasts that you grow on the ranch. It’s sort of like a proof of masculinity because you use it to get animals into submission.”