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00:00And Benedict, what appealed to you about this project?
00:03I was a huge fan of the book, like Dylan.
00:05And when I read his screenplay, I
00:08thought it was such a beautiful, delicate, finely
00:11wrought, but also very imaginative retelling.
00:14And then just meeting in person with him and the friendship
00:18we struck up, the trust that built,
00:19and I could already see on the page his kind
00:23of visual ambition for the project.
00:25For me, it was more about interrogating, OK, well,
00:27how do we bring that off day to day?
00:29And what am I going to need to be held in that space
00:32to get to where I need to get to?
00:33And immediately, I felt I had a real brother
00:37in arms as a collaborator.
00:40And so, yeah, the book in itself, early on, like Dylan,
00:46made a massive impact on me.
00:49It also came out at the same time
00:51as Megan Hunt and my sister-in-law's novella,
00:53and Max and her were very tight.
00:54And I was like, you're meeting Max Porter?
00:56I was very supportive of her novel, which did very well.
00:59And so, yeah, and I'd seen the stage adaptation,
01:03and I enjoyed it.
01:04And Killing Murphy's performance at the center of it
01:06was phenomenal.
01:09But I thought there's more to a dramatic turn of this
01:12that I think cinema could really examine.
01:14And Dylan's script certainly gave the promise of alluding to.
01:18So, yeah, that was it for me.
01:20And then I guess just as a role, to occupy that space,
01:25we're really fucking weird creatures, actors.
01:28You know, we want to be in these really extreme situations
01:30sometimes, which nobody else necessarily
01:33would to tell a story.
01:34But it does touch on something universal.
01:37And I think that that character is as near as me
01:41as any other I've played, to be honest.
01:44And the middle class, the middle life, the father,
01:50even the milieu of Susie Davis is brilliantly realized.
01:54Northwest London flat, it all felt very real.
01:57And I had an immediate access to it.
02:01And then the extremes, like I said,
02:04that's kind of meat and drink to us.
02:06I knew I had to go on quite a journey emotionally.
02:09And it turned out physically as well,
02:11because of how this grief manifests
02:13from an internal state into a real thing imagined.
02:16Menuhensis, faux, Mary Poppins, enabler,
02:19irritating best friend, therapist,
02:22everything that Crow is.
02:25Bad stand-up comic, I mean, all of it.
02:28It's just my writing.
02:29It's just your writing, yeah, bad comedy.
02:31And so there's a lot of meat on the bone for an actor.
02:35And then as a producer, just how to square
02:37the whole of realizing this ambition in a small budget,
02:40in an indie budget.
02:41You have to access so many difficult emotions.
02:45Was it hard to leave the part behind?
02:47Did it take a little while to?
02:49No, because it was all there.
02:50I felt like I was exhausted at the end of the day.
02:53All I needed was a bit of self-care, sleep and nourishment.
02:57I needed my home.
02:58I needed my family in my bed.
02:59That was really what I got from doing the job.
03:04There was no way it was gonna leak into my life.
03:07There was too much to give on the day
03:08for that to happen, really.
03:11And vice versa, I think, very much,
03:15very intimate set, very close set
03:17for a lot of it on one location.
03:19And then the studio, it always feels a bit naked
03:22when you're suddenly out in the open on location,
03:27but we didn't have too many, some extraordinary locations.
03:29We ended where the film ends as well,
03:30which felt like a great coda for the entire experience,
03:33that vastness of an ocean meeting a skyline of the sea,
03:37that kind of signaling of the eternal, as he says,
03:40goodbye to his wife's ashes
03:41and him and the children play on the beach.
03:43And it was a beautiful sort of sending off for the project
03:46and for everyone involved, really.
03:49I forgot what your question was.
03:51I've just gone down memory lane.
03:52You answer it.
03:53Okay.