The Power of the Dog, a hotly anticipated western movie that came out last year, received high praise from numerous critics but fell short of Sam Elliott’s expectations. The Ghost Rider actor has made a name for himself in the western cinema industry by appearing in a number of them, but in a recent interview with Marc Maron for his WTF Podcast, which ET Canada carried, he called Benedict Cumberbatch’s picture “a piece of s***.”
Maron asked the senior actor about his thoughts on the Oscar-nominated film, to which Sam Elliott replied, “F***, no. Why? I’ll tell you why I didn’t like it anyway,” Sam Elliott continued and talked about a time when he was in Texas shooting for his western series 1883, “what really brought it home to me the other day when I said, ‘Do you want to f***ing talk about it?’ There was a f***ing full-page ad out in the LA Times and there was a review, not a review, but a clip, and it talked about the ‘evisceration of the American myth.’
Sam Elliott
He then went on and shared, “And I thought, ‘What the f***? What the f***? This is the guy that’s done westerns forever. The evisceration of the American West? ” Sam Elliott commented on the film’s costume design and compared it to Chippendales dancers from New York. He added, “They’re all running around in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions to homosexuality throughout the f***ing movie.”
Sam Elliott, however, pointed out that the film was actually shot in New Zealand, the country of director Jane Campion, and that this was not the only discrepancy he could not understand. What the f*** does this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American West? She’s a fantastic director, by the way, and I adore her work and past work. And why the hell would she film this in New Zealand, call it Montana, and claim that “this is how it was”? Elliott continued to express his dislike for the film.
