Benedict Cumberbatch says he learned taxidermy for 'The Power of the Dog' even though it wasn't even in the script

• Benedict Cumberbatch says he learned taxidermy for his role in "The Power of the Dog."
• Despite the fact that it wasn't part of the script, he wanted to "authenticate" his performance.

Benedict Cumberbatch said on the Screen Actors Guild Awards red carpet on Sunday that he learned taxidermy for his role in "The Power of the Dog," despite the fact that the skill wasn't even required of him in the script.

"The weirdest [skill], and the one that didn't get used in the film, obviously, was taxidermy," Cumberbatch told actor Laverne Cox for E! News on the SAG Awards red carpet. "That's a very strange thing to enter into if you've never done it before."

Cumberbatch is nominated for outstanding performance by a male actor in a leading role at the 2022 Screen Actors Guild awards for his role in Jane Campion's "The Power of the Dog." The film, Campion's first in over a decade, stars Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank, a rancher in 1920s Montana.

"This man is incredibly skilled with his hands, he has a lot of time on his hands in 1925 Montana, so he whistles, he ropes, he braids, he makes gear for his horse, he's an ironmonger, he can do amazing things with dead animals that he shot as well," the actor told Cox of Phil on the red carpet Sunday.

Taxidermy, Cumberbatch said, was a skill that his character Phil had in the original novel by Thomas Savage that the film was based on. Even though it wasn't a part of the script, Cumberbatch said that he learned it in order to "authenticate" his version of the character.

"There's so much of him that's so beyond my lived experience, I wanted to at least have an experience, a small taste of what it was like to do that kind of work," Cumberbatch said.

Cumberbatch has spoken before about the other skills that he picked up for the film, including playing the banjo, which he said was the "most painful thing" about the experience.

"The most important stuff is what makes this person tick, not what he does on the outside," Cumberbatch said. "And understanding who this person is and why he behaves pretty abhorrently as he does in a lot of the film what the damage is and what the cause of it is, and to get there, we went very deep."