Benedict Cumberbatch has responded to the Sam Elliott shade. In a recent panel for the BAFTA Awards, for which Cumberbatch is nominated for Leading Actor, the star of Netflix’s acclaimed Western, The Power of the Dog, alluded to Elliott’s recent head-scratching and homophobic comments about the film.
“I’m trying very hard not to say anything about a very odd reaction that happened the other day on a radio podcast over here without meaning to stir up the ashes of that,” Cumberbatch said, referencing Elliott’s sharp take on comedian Marc Maron’s podcast. “Somebody really took offense to — I haven’t heard it so it’s unfair for me to comment in detail on it — the West being portrayed in this way. And beyond that reaction — that sort of denial that anybody could have any other than a hetero-normative existence because of what they do for a living or where they’re born, there’s also a massive intolerance within the world at large towards homosexuality still, towards an acceptance of the other, of any kind of difference, and no more so I guess than in this prism of conformity of what’s expected of a man in the Western archetype mold of masculinity.”
