‘The Power Of The Dog’ Actor Kodi Smit-McPhee Had A Pretty Great Response To Sam Elliott Not Liking His Movie

The revisionist Western The Power of the Dog, from beloved New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion (The Piano), hasn’t only been an awards magnet. (It’s up for 12 Oscars, among them Best Picture.) It’s also been an unexpected streaming hit. It’s cracked the Netflix Top 10. It’s inspired lots of online discussion. But there’s been one fierce critic: legendary actor Sam Elliott, who called it a “piece of s*it.” But one actor is not letting that get him down.

That person is Kodi Smit-McPhee, the former child actor (you may remember him from Matt Reeves’ Let Me In or Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, as well as a couple X-Men films). He scored his first Oscar nomination for his work as Peter, the young son of Kirsten Dunst’s Rose whose relationship with Benedict Cumberbatch’s Phil is, shall we say, loaded.

The film’s muted-but-present queer angle is one of the issues that enraged Elliott. In an appearance of WTF with Marc Maron, the actor railed against, among other things, how the men “running around in chaps and no shirts,” and that there’s “these allusions of homosexuality throughout the f*cking movie.”

Cumberbatch gave a semi-cryptic response to Elliott’s comments. (As did, it seemed, Netflix.) But when asked about the flap, Smit-McPhee took a more Zen approach.

When Variety asked him what he had to say in response, Smit-McPhee said, simply, “Nothing. ‘Cause I’m a mature being and I’m passionate about what I do. And I don’t really give energy to anything outside of that.” He added, “Good luck to him.”

And that’s that! So Smit-McPhee is just going to go on living his life, not worried that another brilliant actor had some issues — some dodgy issues, even — with one of his movies. If only all of us could compartmentalize like him.

(Via Variety)