LOS ANGELES — Benedict Cumberbatch knows you have questions about that "Power of the Dog" ending. He has questions too. Maybe they're the same ones. But before he dives in — and this is a man prone to picking apart and parsing, so settle in — Cumberbatch would like to make a statement. And before we hand him the floor, it should go without saying that if you haven't seen "The Power of the Dog," which has been available for months now, you should not be reading this story because we're going to be talking about the ending that everyone has been discussing and dissecting since the end of, ahem, last year.
Now that we have that out of the way, Cumberbatch would like to say that he very much hopes you felt bad when his character, the menacing, hyper-masculine cattle rancher Phil Burbank, dies at the end of the movie. He doesn't expect that you broke down weeping or anything. (Phil wouldn't want that.)
But Cumberbatch thinks people are taking juuuuust a bit too much pleasure in Phil's death.
