Benedict Cumberbatch is pointing out how social media is affecting children as well as the “male inability to manage emotion.”
Cumberbatch spoke about these topics while talking about his new film The Thing With Feathers, which is based on Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter.
The story follows a dad-of-two who loses his wife and is unable to express his grief, so sometimes he yells at his kids, and other times he’s bottling up his emotions.
“I think it’s really important to have the conversation around the male inability to manage emotion,” the Sherlock star said in an interview with The Independent, adding, “and how easily co-opted it is into pretty awful causes, whether it be incel culture, riot culture, or blame culture – where your problem is not your problem, it’s that person’s over there. I think it’s so important to realise, ‘No, it’s OK, you can take responsibility, you can also be a mess, you can also be vulnerable to human emotions, and you can feel stuff at a very profound level.’ This is all there in this film. And it’s also about the mess that men make of their lives without women.”
In the film, his 10-year-old sons depict kindness and good nature. The actor noted that children are naturally empathetic.
“Media is co-opting children so early,” said Cumberbatch. “And it is because of the devices we have in our hands. We have to control the access that they provide to all of us. We can’t just go, ‘Well, let’s give a smartphone to our kids and see what happens.’ Look what’s happened to an entire generation.”
“Children have an extraordinary ability to be empaths without any lived experience or promptings. They just go to you and give you love, unasked for, and it’s regenerated, without any input or feedback from you, necessarily, to bolster that,” he shared.
The Thing with Feathers was released on November 21.
