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**Benedict Cumberbatch Wants to Sell You a Boyfriend Pillow**
The method actor’s method of choice for the sales pitch? This year’s installment of Amazon’s Five Star Theater campaign, in which serious thespians read the most impassioned and heartfelt five-star Amazon reviews.
For the task at hand, the Emmy-winner is ready to get vulnerable: giving a dramatic recitation of a real customer’s review of penguin pajamas, among other gems, this time pronouncing every part of that two-syllable animal name with accuracy and conviction.
The Amazon project isn’t just any kind of promotion for the mega retailer’s holiday selections across more than 35 categories or early Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. It’s a Cannes Lion winner and has previously starred Adam Driver, after whose performance Amazon shoppers petitioned for Cumberbatch to be the next narrator of five-star reviews.
And though this role didn’t require as intense an emotional transfiguration as his upcoming release, *The Thing With Feathers*—in which the actor plays a dad who lost his wife and starts being tormented by an omnipresent, grief-symbolizing crow—it nevertheless succeeded at flexing Cumberbatch’s creative muscles.
“I’ve worked with Mike Diva, the director, before. We did SNL together, a couple of skits, some pre-records on that show,” Benedict tells Rolling Stone. “I felt very trusting of the direction he was taking things in. All of [the reviews] made me laugh. Some of them contained emotional potency, were odd, or had that wonderful mix of tone that [Tony] McNamara managed to get into the *Roses* script so artfully, as he does with all of his work.”
Here he’s talking about his satirical comedy *The Roses*, of course, which hit theaters this summer and revolves around a perfect-on-paper couple whose relationship soon turns fraught and downright delirious (a gun is fired at one point).
Many of the film’s scenes are out of pocket and nothing short of memorable—adjectives that also describe most of the Amazon reviews featured in this year’s Five Star Theater.
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**Editor’s Picks**
“I live with my family of eight, including very young children. Guess what happens when everybody comes down with the stomach flu after a potluck?” Cumberbatch recites in an ad for none other than the Bissell Little Green Mini Portable Carpet & Upholstery Deep Cleaner.
“There was blueberry pie at that potluck. My white couch was now bright purple and smelled like something had died in a cheese factory. But lo and behold, this little machine did the job. My couch is white again. Five stars.”
As for that boyfriend pillow? “It’s like having your real boyfriend in bed with you, minus the annoying snoring and constant farts,” Cumberbatch shares on behalf of a satisfied pillow owner, while soft piano music plays in the background of the ad, and a brightly lit Christmas tree behind him is encircled by Amazon packages.
Amidst the sun hats, penguin pajamas, coffins (yes), heaters, bidets, and power tools that were written about in almost-poetic terms online and highlighted by Cumberbatch, he developed a particular interest in Mane ‘n Tail Shampoo & Conditioner—something he’s used before.
But ultimately, the campaign star tried not to be swayed by the ultra-convincing messaging.
“I think a lot of it is about other people’s enjoyment of those products rather than necessarily what I’d want to take away. I have a very full house,” Cumberbatch reports.
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As for the house he inhabited not so long ago—not Cumberbatch’s own but the one his *The Roses* character, Theo, lives in—its set design (and the clothes he was constantly surrounded by) managed to scratch a kind of shopping itch.
“I’m quite time-poor, and I’m not a very good shopper. I think I get slightly anxious after a while. ‘Do I really need this? Is this too much money? I’ve got something like this, but I can’t remember,’” Cumberbatch shares, giving us a glimpse into his shopping-related thought process.
“It just becomes too much of everything in my head rather than a pleasurable experience. So I’m very happy to ask a customer if I can buy something. Or do I have to pay for this?”
“Mark [Ricker] created a house that everybody wants to live in,” Cumberbatch adds, alluding to the movie’s production designer and the Scandi-inspired cliffside paradise he created on a soundstage. “Which is kind of helpful when you’re shooting. No one was late to set.”
Regarding his own Amazon order history, there are no bidets or upholstery cleaners in sight. Instead, Cumberbatch is a fan of purchasing “domestic stuff like toothpaste or sunscreen or wet wipes” on the site, alongside crafts (he’s a father to three boys):
“I like things made from natural materials that I can craft into something with the children.”
The last thing Cumberbatch bought at Amazon? A Suri Toothbrush, which he appreciates for the fact that it’s a recyclable alternative to a lot of counterparts on the market.
And because no such purchase is complete without, well, toothpaste, Cumberbatch is quick to reveal his go-to brand: Kingfisher, a leader in natural dental care from his native UK.
An Amazon find he can’t stop raving about? Milliways chewing gum.
“All natural, non-plastic. Brilliant chewing gum,” Cumberbatch offers without an ounce of hesitation.
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**Suddenly, the Conversation Turns Serious**
Benedict Cumberbatch agrees to talk about grief. It’s the central theme of *The Thing With Feathers*, after all, which releases in the U.S. on November 28 and focuses on “the absence of maternal instinct and matriarchy and what happens when they aren’t there,” in his own words.
Rolling Stone is curious to find out how the actor prepared himself for such on-screen intensity and if the experience of grief in his own life helped shape the performance.
Cumberbatch doesn’t miss a beat. Though he’s quick to recognize that grief is the common denominator of lives that are “complex and sometimes contradictory,” he wanted to honor the script itself versus bring any one personal encounter with grief into the picture.
“Grief throws you around in very unexpected ways. It’s a scar or a knot in the line of your life that you will always carry, and it can sometimes come back with as much full force as the initial moment that you were introduced to it,” Cumberbatch tells us.
While filming *The Thing With Feathers*, he had to interact with the emotion and all of its nightmarish qualities constantly (“with different camera setups for one scene, you might be crying or losing your mind eight different times”), but at the end of each day, it was important to shed the feelings and embody his own life again—to quite literally take the makeup and costumes off and drive back to his family.
To make an Amazon-bought craft kit come to life with the kids, perhaps, and to end dinner by chewing some delectable gum from Milliways.
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**Trending Stories**
You know, the simple, familiar things.
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