Benedict Cumberbatch Dreams of Losing His Keys; His 'The Power of the Dog' Director, Jane Campion, Dreams of Flowers Exploding Blood.
There really are some vastly different types of people in the world.
Recently, a group of this year's Oscar hopefuls gathered at the LA Times for an interview discussing what their most daunting experiences on set were - and also, of course, their latest films, all of which have been surrounded by buzz.
The actors all had very different experiences to share, highlighting the many, many types of work an actor can find in Hollywood if they're truly talented (and a little lucky.) While Andrew Garfield talked about what it was like to have Lin Manuel-Miranda throw a shoe at him ("in a nice way!") Benedict Cumberbatch (who also, incidentally, starred with him in Spider-Man: No Way Home) discussed his experiences doing dream analysis with director Jane Campion.
"We both did this thing with this wonderful acting coach and dream analyst called Kim Gillingham...I had pretty mundane dreams about leaving the keys inside a house, sort of threshold anxieties, really dull stuff. She was dreaming about orchids exploding with blood, typical Jane Campionesque brilliance to it."
Of course, in any acting exercise like that, what's really important is what each person gets out of it, and both felt pretty successful at that.
"We both found profound things, which gave us a great deal of confidence."
The actor was doing this work for his new film The Power of the Dog, a new western-style thriller in which Cumberbatch plays a surly rancher who becomes even more so when his brother marries a new woman (Kirsten Dunst) and brings her strange (read: probably gay) son to live with them.
The film has been met with mixed reviews - critics loved it overwhelmingly, garnering it a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, but if you look at the site, the audience score sits at a much more contentious 61%. Regardless, though, the film is on Oscar shortlists at the moment, and so is Cumberbatch.
That dream analysis wasn't Cumberbatch's most daunting moment, though, not by a long shot - in fact, he links that moment in his life to a cameo he did at a Pink Floyd concert, which you can read all about in the LA Times' full interview.
