Benedict Cumberbatch doesn't like to overshare, but sometimes he just can't help himself.

Take the two hours we spend on a recent London afternoon discussing his new film, "The Thing With Feathers," a dark drama about a father struggling to hold his family together after his wife dies suddenly. While the film paints an unvarnished portrait of a man in crisis, Cumberbatch feels awkward talking about how he channeled that kind of soul-eviscerating grief on-screen. "The Brit in me is a bit embarrassed about diving too deeply into what I do," he admits.

There's a polite reserve to Cumberbatch, as well as a discomfort with the trappings of stardom. Still, there are moments when his guard drops and suddenly he's telling all. Cumberbatch is best known for playing Doctor Strange, the brilliant but arrogant Sorcerer Supreme in six Marvel movies. It's the role that gave the 48-year-old actor box office cred and made him globally popular, his likeness adorning T-shirts and toys. And it's a part he will continue to play as the Avengers keep battling existential threats. But Cumberbatch has just let something slip, and he seems momentarily horrified by his candor.

You see, he's just told me that Doctor Strange is taking a hiatus in the next Marvel sequel, 2026's "Avengers: Doomsday." "Is that a spoiler?" he asks. "Fuck it!"

Undeterred, he shares that things changed when Jonathan Majors -- whose character, Kang, was intended to serve as the main antagonist of the next phase of the comic book film franchise -- was fired in 2024 after being convicted of assaulting his ex-girlfriend.

Cumberbatch's absence from "Doomsday" has to do with "the character not aligning with this part of the story." And though he probably shouldn't be saying this, he also reveals that Doctor Strange is "in a lot" of "Avengers: Secret Wars," which will hit theaters in 2027.

"He's quite central to where things might go," Cumberbatch teases. And he hints that the character, last seen casting spells in 2022's "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," will appear in a third stand-alone film, but is hesitant to say too much beyond praising Marvel for being collaborative.

"They are very open to discussing where we go next," he says. "Who do you want to write and direct the next one? What part of the comic lore do you want to explore so that Strange can keep evolving? He's a very rich character to play. He's a complex, contradictory, troubled human who's got these extraordinary abilities, so there's potent stuff to mess about with."

Avengers movies consume much of Cumberbatch's time, but when he's not busy being a superhero, he's leveraging his stardom to finance smaller, riskier projects that allow him to keep growing as an actor. They include "Eric," a Netflix miniseries where he played an alcoholic puppeteer whose son disappears; "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain," a biopic about an eccentric painter obsessed with drawing cats; and the upcoming "Roses," a reimagining of "The War of the Roses" with Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman clashing as a couple whose marriage is fraying. Most of them, like "Roses" and "The Thing With Feathers," were developed and made through SunnyMarch, the production company Cumberbatch launched in 2013 with the goal of nurturing the kind of bespoke, offbeat fare that Hollywood doesn't support.

"These are urgent stories that we feel a need to tell," Cumberbatch says. "I tend to appear in many of them so we can finance something that's either about a difficult subject or is really a niche piece of art-house cinema that deserves to be seen."

When the actor meets with me in the stylishly dilapidated sitting room of a 300-year-old London home where he's just completed a photo shoot, it's two weeks before "The Thing With Feathers" will debut at Sundance. Cumberbatch's performance, one of his rawest and most emotional, is sure to break hearts and should help the film land a distribution deal. It required him to play a man who is collapsing under the weight of despair and becoming increasingly untethered. There are points when his character, who has begun to imagine that he and his children are being terrorized by a monstrous crow, looks so frightened and unhinged that he seems to have stepped out of Edvard Munch's "The Scream."

Cumberbatch says there aren't any shortcuts to accessing the intense emotions he channels in "The Thing With Feathers." There are techniques you can use, but no formula that's guaranteed to work every time. In 2023, Tom Holland, who has appeared opposite Cumberbatch as Spider-Man to his Doctor Strange in assorted Marvel movies, publicly credited his co-star with teaching him how to cry on command. Holland said Cumberbatch told him that if he needed to tear up, he should breathe through his diaphragm while manipulating the muscles he uses to laugh.

"There is that method," Cumberbatch says. "But it's a mistake to think you can force it. That's a dead end. You have to really put your mind somewhere so you can respond to the moment. And that can mean drawing from your own life story or just your imagination." He adds, "It's harder when you're very young. I'm 48, so I've lived a bit of life. I've experienced loss, I've experienced pain, I've experienced some of the very worst, as well as the best."

On set, it was difficult not to get swept up in what Cumberbatch was doing. "There's a scene where Benedict finally folds and puts away his wife's clothes, and at the end of the take, two of the crew members were crying," Dylan Southern, the film's writer and director, says. "We had to stop for a moment and make sure everyone was all right. It's really loaded, powerful stuff because so many people have lost someone."

Cumberbatch's great gift as an actor is his willingness to go there -- to push himself to the outer reaches of his emotional life. Getting to that place requires preparation and, in some cases, punishment. He lost 21 pounds to play an imprisoned spy in "The Courier," wore dental prosthetics to mimic the speech patterns of mathematician Alan Turing in "The Imitation Game" (which gave him his first Oscar nomination) and stopped bathing and learned how to castrate a bull to portray a rancher in "The Power of the Dog" (his second Oscar nomination).

"Everything he does is wholehearted," says Jane Campion, director of "The Power of the Dog." "He can be so vulnerable. He just opens himself up to you."

Campion thinks genetics are at play, noting that Cumberbatch's parents, Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton, both had long careers on stage and screen. "He's the next evolution in performing," she says. "He's kind of a 'super actor.'"

J.J. Abrams, who directed Cumberbatch in "Star Trek Into Darkness," praises him as "annoyingly limitless." But he adds that "for such an intense thespian, he's self-effacing and very funny."

And in person, Cumberbatch is indeed witty, even slightly silly, mixing self-deprecating anecdotes with spot-on impersonations of Michael Keaton as Batman and colleagues like James McAvoy and Benicio Del Toro. "He's a scarily good mimic," says Adam Ackland, his best friend and producing partner. "He can capture anyone."

There's a self-protectiveness to Cumberbatch too. He may allude to politics or to his home life with his wife, Sophie Hunter, and their three young sons, but he quickly steers the conversation to less complicated or personal subjects. "I long ago stopped treating interviews as therapy sessions," he says.

He knows how his comments can be taken out of context, then picked apart on social media (which he avoids, lacking any kind of presence on X and Instagram). He's grown more resigned to it all. "The older I get, the less of a shit I give," he says. "There's this whole other audience that have these expectations of you, feelings about you, judgments of you. That's theirs, and you can't change that or shape it. I'm still discovering who I am. So how the fuck are they supposed to know me?"

Incandescent stardom, which for Cumberbatch arrived in 2010 with the premiere of "Sherlock," the BBC series in which he reinterpreted the legendary detective as a strutting, slightly sociopathic brainiac, was hard to accept. Particularly when the classically trained performer became an unlikely sex symbol, billed by the British tabloids as "the thinking woman's crumpet." Looking back, Cumberbatch struggles to explain it.

"I'm not Brad, I'm not Leonardo, I'm not a typical movie star," he says. "People were scrambling for 'Why is he at all attractive to us?' But for me to guess and try to understand that is so fucking weirdly navel-gazing. I'm not sitting around thinking, 'Why am I sexy?' I worry about myself in the mirror as I age, like every other fucker does."

And don't get him started on the term "celebrity." "It's so derogatory, and just lumps anyone famous together," he says. "Am I a 'celebrated' person? Well, for what? For selling cheese? For being on a reality show? For doing something outrageous? For being an actor?"

But Cumberbatch gets it. He knows that his fame, despite the headaches, is the reason that "The Thing With Feathers" got made at all. Southern had labored for years to bring his adaptation of Max Porter's 2015 novella "Grief Is the Thing With Feathers" to the screen before he connected with Cumberbatch. It was, Southern admits, "an unfilmable book," one that spilled out in a jumble of poetry, drawings and dialogue. It's also surreal -- often terrifyingly so. As the crow enters the lives of the father and the boys, the story moves from a domestic drama to horror. Despite the fantastical elements, Cumberbatch believes the film tells a vital, deeply human story.

"It shines a light on male grief," Cumberbatch says. "I haven't seen many things that do that. You have a man facing up to his limitations as he deals with the pressure of work, life, raising kids, all while his sense of self is just brutalized by grief. There were a great many challenges there. And I love a challenge."

Cumberbatch leans back in a leather chair, delivering that last line with the kind of dramatic zest that makes him such a magnetic performer. Every consonant is crisp; every vowel is perfectly rounded. And then there's his supple baritone, once likened to a "jaguar hiding in a cello," which makes even casual asides seem Shakespearean. When we meet, Cumberbatch is wearing a long blue coat, his wool scarf hanging loosely around his neck. It's a brutally cold afternoon, and the insulation in the rambling house doesn't appear to have been updated since the 18th century.

Cumberbatch is proud of what "The Thing With Feathers" signals about his ambitions for SunnyMarch. Over the past decade and change, the company has backed and developed an impressive range of projects, from the Showtime series "Patrick Melrose" to "We Live in Time," a romantic drama that became a box office hit last fall for A24. Its upcoming slate includes "How to Stop Time," an adaptation of Matt Haig's novel about a man with a rare condition that allows him to live for centuries. Ackland, who launched the company with Cumberbatch, says the actor was partly motivated to move into producing to demonstrate there was a better way of working after some bad experiences on film sets.

"We want to make great TV and films but with a kindness that's often missing," Ackland says. "We want to make sure you look after actors and crews and have a workplace where there's not so much unpleasantness. In the past, the business tolerated a lot of brashness and shouting and throwing things. It didn't need to be like that."

Cumberbatch's model for SunnyMarch is Plan B, the Oscar-winning production company that Brad Pitt runs with Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, which has become synonymous with thoughtful, auteur-driven work. Like Plan B, SunnyMarch isn't in the volume business and is selective about the projects it brings to screens. "We want to do more with less," Cumberbatch says.

Producing has also made Cumberbatch more aware of the business part of the entertainment industry. In the case of "The Thing With Feathers," the film's investors decided to abbreviate the title of the book to make the movie sound less grim. Cumberbatch disagreed with the change.

"I wanted the name to stay the same," he says. "It's a marketing thing. You put 'grief' in a film's title, and it's off-putting for people. It's frustrating. I'm sure it was one of those titles where it was tested and people went, 'You can't call a film something like that!'"

Made for just $6 million, "The Thing With Feathers" marked a change of pace from the blockbusters that have dominated much of Cumberbatch's time since he joined the MCU with 2016's "Doctor Strange."

"'Feathers' offered a close-quarter, nuanced and nimble work that really appeals," he says. "I've been in some very brilliant but monolithic kind of tentpole films. They're great fun, but it can get stodgy. It can feel like you're waiting a lot of the time to get called to the set."

It was initially difficult, Cumberbatch says, to figure out how to stay relaxed while working inside the Marvel machine, with its green screens and set-pieces and rewrites and reshoots. He confesses that his turn as Doctor Strange in that first film was "a bit stiff."  Observing Robert Downey Jr. and Holland banter in "Spider-Man: Homecoming" made Cumberbatch realize he should take a looser approach to being a superhero. "I learned a lot by seeing how at ease and improvisatory they are," he says. "It's hard because you have this huge apparatus around you, but it's so important."

That's partly why he's excited that Downey, who appeared to have closed the comic book chapter of his career after Iron Man died at the end of "Avengers: Endgame," will rejoin the Marvel franchise. This time he's playing Doctor Doom. It was a secret so tightly guarded that Cumberbatch only found out about it while watching the live coverage of Marvel's 2024 Comic-Con presentation, where Downey's return was the fan event's final reveal. Cumberbatch immediately grabbed his phone and messaged Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige. "I texted, 'What the fuck?' and then quickly added, 'Good what-the-fuck. I mean, good what-the-fuck.'"

Cumberbatch says making these movies, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, comes with pressure, but Downey helped keep things light on set. He would rib Cumberbatch by referring to him as "Mr. Shakespeare," and allude to their shared history portraying Sherlock Holmes.

"We had a gas about being the two Sherlocks on set," Cumberbatch says. "But there was some line of dialogue where someone turns to us and says, 'No shit, Sherlock.' Well, we took out all that meta stuff. We just said, 'No, no, no. Better to leave that for the fan fiction.'"

Cumberbatch, who has performed in "Hedda Gabler" and "Hamlet" onstage, doesn't feel like he's slumming by being a member of Earth's mightiest heroes. He has a real passion for epic adventures that "transport" audiences to different worlds. And he's in awe of what Marvel has built over the course of 34 films.

"It's the modern myths of our times," Cumberbatch says. "Yes, it's huge and unwieldy, but Marvel is so committed to getting it right. Even when we make one of these Avengers films and it gets exponentially huger, we're still just kids playing in the sand pit. We're still just making shit up and having fun with it."

Cumberbatch clearly isn't ready to hang up Doctor Strange's cloak of levitation, but he seems less inclined to revisit "Sherlock." The detective series' last episodes aired in 2017, and most fans have given up hope for a return to Baker Street. So what would it take for Cumberbatch to reprise his role as Holmes?  "A lot of money," he says, joking, before adding, "It would take it to be better than it ever was. You leave them or yourselves wanting more. There's always that itch to scratch, but I think it would have to be the superlative version of what we've already achieved."

Back when "Sherlock" took off, Cumberbatch attended a fan event in, he thinks it was Australia, though he can't recall precisely, and issued a road map for where he hoped to take his career. "I went, 'Guys, I know you really like "Sherlock," but if you're with me, I'm not going to always do the same thing,'" he remembers saying. "'I'm not going to always be the Benedict that you expect. You might not like some of the stuff I do. I may be cute and cuddly to you at times, or ugly and untouchable. But I want to stretch myself and surprise myself and surprise you.'"

The film business, however, likes to put performers in a box, and right now Cumberbatch feels like he's not always being considered for a certain type of art-house fare because he's spent so much time saving the world as Doctor Strange.

"It's a hard ask for directors and casting directors to go, 'Oh yeah, the Marvel guy. He could be in this small film about, you know, French Foreign Legion service members returning to Paris or something,'" he says.

He's been trying to change that perception. "The flavor of work that I want to lean towards is a slightly European sort of world cinema, which I hadn't really been considered for before," he says.

"The Thing With Feathers" is part of that shift, as is his budding partnership with Wes Anderson. The two first worked together on the Oscar-winning 2023 short film "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar," with Cumberbatch staying at Anderson's house throughout the shoot as a pandemic protocol.

"We needed to be in a COVID bubble, and I had a choice between being in a hotel or staying with him," Cumberbatch says. "Being in someone else's home could be awkward, but he immediately made it relaxed, and there was amazing food, and it was like being at fucking film school."

After working all day, they'd have movie nights, with Anderson turning Cumberbatch on to "Lawrence of Arabia" and screening Truffaut films that had been left out of the actor's cinematic education. "For me, it felt more like we were doing our fifth movie together rather than our first," Anderson says of the experience. "[There was] the excitement of a new collaboration, but the fun and comfort of working with old friends."

The two will reteam on the director's next project, "The Phoenician Scheme," and it sounds as though Anderson's stock company -- which includes frequent collaborators Bill Murray and Owen Wilson -- has a new member.

"I feel like, 'Why hasn't this been happening for years and years?'" Cumberbatch says. "I just wish I could build a time machine and go back and work on all those other films with him."

The sky outside is fading to black as day shifts to night. "It's getting dark in here," Cumberbatch observes, tilting his head to the two naked light fixtures along one wall that are casting a soft glow across the room. Cumberbatch was in the middle of telling me that although he's never written a fan letter to a director he'd like to work with, he's thinking of breaking with tradition.

"It's all right to knock on some doors," he rationalizes. "There's nothing wrong with saying, 'I really want to try to craft something together.' It's all about perception. It's about becoming comfortable saying, 'I'm an artist rather than, you know, a bit of meat for hire.' After all, time is running out."

Time. It's a word that Cumberbatch keeps repeating, and a concept he returns to as we talk. It's how he thinks about the projects he decides to do -- is it something so irresistible he can justify spending months away from home? -- as well as how he weighs the opportunities he may still explore artistically. Directing, for instance, appeals to him, though he's not sure he can do something so all-consuming. It would take him away from producing and acting, and there's so much he wants to accomplish there. Becoming a father has only accelerated this intense desire to get it all in before the clock stops ticking.

"The minute you have kids this sense of time sinks in far more profoundly," Cumberbatch says. "My youngest is turning 6 tomorrow, and I'm like, 'I will be in my 60s when he's 21,' you know? It's crazy. It's gone so fast. So there's a huge shift in priorities, and it makes you value what you do with your life in a very different way."

He pauses, then starts up again. "It does weigh on me," he says. "When you become a parent, your thoughts turn more towards mortality."

Even before he got married and started a family, there were moments when the fragile nature of life came suddenly, violently into focus for Cumberbatch. In 2004, he was in his late 20s and shooting the BBC miniseries "To the Ends of the Earth" in South Africa when he went on a diving excursion with some friends. Driving home, their tire blew out. When they pulled over to the side of the road, they were robbed and abducted by six men. Cumberbatch and the others were forced into the car and driven around for hours. Eventually, the thieves let them out, tied them up and made them sit execution-style. Then the men fled. The experience changed Cumberbatch in fundamental ways.

"It gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one," he says, shifting in his seat. "It made me impatient to live a life less ordinary, and I'm still dealing with that impatience."

It also transformed him into an adrenaline junkie -- someone who once went skydiving and engaged in extreme sports as a way to unwind.

"The near-death stuff turbo-fueled all that," Cumberbatch says. "It made me go, 'Oh, right, yeah, I could die at any moment.' I was throwing myself out of planes, taking all sorts of risks. But apart from my parents, I didn't have any real dependents at that point. Now that's changed, and that sobers you. I've looked over the edge; it's made me comfortable with what lies beneath it. And I've accepted that that's the end of all our stories."