Benedict Cumberbatch and the Monsters Among Us

The actor is earning some of the best reviews of his career for his turn as a vicious bully in “The Power of the Dog.” Here’s what it took to become that seething cowboy.

At the beginning of the shoot for “The Power of the Dog,” the ominous new psychodrama from Jane Campion, the director brought the actors and crew together on a remote and magnificent site on New Zealand’s South Island, which was standing in for the story’s Montana setting. After a Maori blessing, Campion began to introduce everyone. “This is Phil Burbank,” she said as Benedict Cumberbatch stepped forward. “Benedict is really nice and you’ll meet him at the end of the shoot.”

Phil, the clever, bullying, angry character played by Cumberbatch, is the elder of two brothers who run a thriving cattle ranch, and he isn’t nice at all. He dominates and insults his quiet, mild-mannered sibling, George (Jesse Plemons), and his perpetually simmering hostility finds a soft target when George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a local widow with an effete teenage son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Phil is an alpha-male cowboy, dark and dirty (literally). But slowly we begin to understand that Phil, who studied Greek and Latin at Yale, is also playing a role.

“In her dry way, with that introduction, Jane gave me permission to be Phil,” Cumberbatch said in a video interview from his home in England. With rather more exuberant hair than Phil and minus the character’s fearsome stare, he was relaxed and articulate as he discussed the role. “He behaves abhorrently, but there is a deep well of pain there, this life not lived, an arrested development that informs the way he behaves. If we don’t understand the monsters in our world, what motivates this behavior, if we can’t look at someone beyond being a baddie or a goody, then we’re in trouble.”