He’s played Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Strange, and even voiced The Grinch but acting opposite a seven-foot (2.1m) crow may be one of the strangest roles Benedict Cumberbatch has taken on. 

Speaking about his new film, The Thing With Feathers, he admits it’s “a very odd job, there’s no getting away from it”.

If the vision of Cumberbatch wrestling with a giant bird sounds like the sort of amusingly surreal movie you fancy taking a look at next week, it’s important to understand that this is no comedy.

While the film, based on Max Porter’s eclectic novella Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, the film is at times disturbingly funny, but mostly it is an incredibly emotional take on the heartbreaking way we all process grief.

Cumberbatch plays a man whose wife has died suddenly, leaving him with their two young boys. The story itself is split into three parts – dad, boys and crow.

Crow – voiced by David Thewlis – is a figment of dad’s imagination, a sort of “unhinged Freudian therapist” for him, according to Porter.

Cumberbatch, a father of three, said this certainly wasn’t a role he wanted to think about when he returned to his own family each night.

“I didn’t take it home, I didn’t talk about it…You have to work fast when you’re a father of three with a busy home life, you know, it’s very immediate the need they have of you, so you don’t go in and talk about your day crying your eyes out on a sofa with a crow punching you in the face.”

Since Porter’s award-winning work was first published in 2015 it has built a cult following.

Using text, dialogue and poetry to explore grief from various characters’ perspectives, the author says the subject matter is universal.

“Most of us are deeply eccentric in one way or another, like my father-in-law, apparently a very rational, blokey bloke, who’s like ‘when my mum died, a wren landed on the window and I knew it was my mum’.

“Grief puts us into these states where we are more attuned to the natural world and particularly more attuned to symbols and signs. So, imagining a crow moving in with the family actually makes a lot of sense to people, whereas, weirdly, five steps to getting better or get well soon or a hallmark card or whatever doesn’t make much sense to the people when you’re in that storm of pain.”

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While the film sees Cumberbatch portray a firestorm of emotions, he says he feels it’s important to tackle weighty issues on screen.

“It is a universal experience, in one way or another you’re ‘gonna lose someone that you love during your life.”

The film, he says, explores grief through a male prism.

“At a time when there’s a lot of very troubling influences on men without female presence in their lives, this thing of scapegoating and seeing the other as a threat, all of that comes into play within the allowance of grief to be a messy, scary, intimidating, chaotic, unruly and out of control place to exist as a man.

“This is a film that just leans into the idea that it’s alright to have feelings, you bury them or hide them at your peril.”

The Thing With Feathers is out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 21 November.

“I felt scared and I felt alone and I felt entirely limited at various points in my life”, actor Jonathan Bailey says of growing up gay in school.

While promoting Wicked: For Good, the actor donated one of his interview slots to talk about the charity he is a patron of: Just Like Us, which works with LGBT+ youth in schools.

“That’s something that I would have really benefited from when I was young,” he said, talking exclusively to Sky News about his charitable work.

In surveys of thousands of UK pupils, Just Like Us found that LGBT participants aged 11 to 18 were twice as likely to suffer anxiety, depression and to be bullied, and that only half felt safe at school on a daily basis.

“I experienced all of that,” he said. “It became clear quite early on that something that was very specific and clear to me about who I was, it wasn’t safe and it wasn’t celebrated.”

Whether as Lord Anthony in Bridgerton, being crowned sexiest man alive and as the Winkie Prince Fiyero in Wicked: For Good, Bailey has broken through an outdated stereotype.

Historically, it was considered a career risk to be out – a heterosexual romantic lead’s career was at risk if his sexuality was public.

For the Winkie prince actor, education can play a role in defying limitations.

“This is beyond sexuality,” he said, “it’s race, it’s class, it is where you’re from, we are all given limiting narratives that we have to break free of.

“I thought not only was I not going to be able to play these sorts of parts because of my sexuality, but that I wouldn’t be able to do Shakespeare because I didn’t go to drama school.

“They’re the sort of stories that we need to be reminded of is that actually standing up and being safe enough to be able to say who you really are, and to be vulnerable at that age… these formative years, is inspiring to everyone in the classroom.”

But classrooms in the UK are facing tightening budgets due to “spiralling costs” that threaten to outstrip the growth in school funding.

Citing budget and time pressures on teachers, Just Like Us has made its talks free in schools. Does the actor think the government should be doing more?

He said: “I’m a very proud brother of an incredible teacher who works in the state system, and I know how much she cares about her school, her pupils.

“The resources are being crunched, and the problem is that it will be the arts and it will be really important conversations that Just Like Us bring into the schools and these… things that are going to go, and that’s just really sad.

“But I’m not the person to come up with solutions other than I can do my bit.”

Bailey, Cynthia Erivo and Bowen Yang are among Wicked’s LGBT cast, and in Wicked: For Good, openly gay actor Colman Domingo joins them as the voice of the Cowardly Lion.

But not everyone is encouraging the onscreen representation: A “warning” by conservative group One Million Moms said that the Jon M Chu-directed films are “normalising the LGBTQ lifestyle” to children and takes aim at the cast.

The alert urges people to boycott the sequel “even if you have seen Wicked: Part One”.

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When asked about the pushback, Bailey is resolute: “I don’t even acknowledge… the thing that’s important to me is how do I chat to little Johnny in all this.

“I’m thrilled to be living in a time where I can play the Winkie Prince and where Just Like Us is doing the extraordinary work that they’re doing.”

Donald Trump has said he will sue the BBC for between $1bn and $5bn over the editing of his speech on Panorama.

The US president confirmed he would be taking legal action against the broadcaster while on Air Force One overnight on Saturday.

“We’ll sue them. We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion (£792m) and five billion dollars (£3.79bn), probably sometime next week,” he told reporters.

“We have to do it, they’ve even admitted that they cheated. Not that they couldn’t have not done that. They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth.”

Mr Trump then told reporters he would discuss the matter with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer over the weekend, and claimed “the people of the UK are very angry about what happened… because it shows the BBC is fake news”.

The Daily Telegraph reported earlier this month that an internal memo raised concerns about the BBC’s editing of a speech made by Mr Trump on 6 January 2021, just before a mob rioted at the US Capitol building, on the news programme.

The concerns regard clips spliced together from sections of the president’s speech to make it appear he told supporters he was going to walk to the US Capitol with them to “fight like hell” in the documentary Trump: A Second Chance?, which was broadcast by the BBC the week before last year’s US election.

Following a backlash, both BBC director-general Tim Davie and BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness resigned from their roles.

‘No basis for defamation claim’

On Thursday, the broadcaster officially apologised to the president and added that it was an “error of judgement” and the programme will “not be broadcast again in this form on any BBC platforms”.

A spokesperson said that “the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited,” but they also added that “we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim”.

Earlier this week, Mr Trump’s lawyers threatened to sue the BBC for $1bn unless it apologised, retracted the clip, and compensated him.

Legal challenges

But legal experts have said that Mr Trump would face challenges taking the case to court in the UK or the US.

The deadline to bring the case to UK courts, where defamation damages rarely exceed £100,000 ($132,000), has already expired because the documentary aired in October 2024, which is more than one year.

Also because the documentary was not shown in the US, it would be hard to show that Americans thought less of the president because of a programme they could not watch.

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Newsnight allegations

The BBC has said it was looking into fresh allegations, published in The Telegraph, that its Newsnight show also selectively edited footage of the same speech in a report broadcast in June 2022.

A BBC spokesperson said: “The BBC holds itself to the highest editorial standards. This matter has been brought to our attention and we are now looking into it.”