Benedict Cumberbatch presented The Thing with Feathers, Dylan Southern's adaptation of Max Porter's novel of grief and a visiting crow, at its London Film Festival screening.
Benedict Cumberbatch, the star of Sherlock, presented Dylan Southern’s The Thing with Feathers at BFI Southbank on the South Bank on Saturday 11 October 2025. The director and his two young co-stars joined him.
Cumberbatch was born in Hammersmith in 1976, the son of two actors. He read drama at the University of Manchester and trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
His Frankenstein at the National Theatre won him the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor, and he played Hamlet at the Barbican in 2015. The Imitation Game and The Power of the Dog each brought an Academy Award nomination.
The film adapts Max Porter’s 2015 novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. A father raising two boys after the sudden death of his wife is visited by Crow, a presence that taunts and steadies him in turn. It is Southern’s first fiction feature, produced with Cumberbatch’s company SunnyMarch.
Richard and Henry Boxall play the boys, and David Thewlis voices Crow. The film screened in the 69th BFI London Film Festival after opening at Sundance in January. Vue Lumière released it in British cinemas on 21 November.