Sam Elliott Slams ‘Piece of Sh*t’ Oscar Nom ‘The Power of the Dog’ for ‘Allusions of Homosexuality’

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Sam Elliott really hated Jane Campion’s Western drama The Power of the Dog. 

The film, which leads the 2022 Academy Awards with a total of 12 nominations, is based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name and was mostly shot across rural Otago, New Zealand.

Elliott, best known for starring in Westerns throughout his career, largely took issue with the absence of the American west in Campion’s film, as well as with the “allusions of homosexuality.”

“You want to talk about that piece of shit?” Elliott said of the film when Marc Maron brought it up on Monday’s edition of his podcast. 

Elliott went on to list the several reasons why he took issue with Power of the Dog, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

“I looked at when I was down there in Texas doing 1883 and what really brought it home to me the other day when I said, ‘Do you want to fucking talk about it?’ There was a fucking 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.’ And I thought, ‘What the fuck? What the fuck?’ This is the guy that’s done Westerns forever. The evisceration of the American west?”

Elliott then compared the cowboys in the movie to Chippendales dancers, saying, “They made it look like — what are all those dancers that those guys in New York who wear bowties and not much else?”

“That’s what all these fucking cowboys in that movie look like,” Elliott added. “They’re all running around in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions to homosexuality throughout the fucking movie.”

Maron pushed back a bit, noting that he thinks “that’s what the movie’s about,” as the film very heavily implies that Cumberbatch’s character, Phil Burbank, is a closeted gay man.

“I mean, Cumberbatch never got out of his fucking chaps,” Elliott continued. “He had two pairs of chaps: a woolly pair and a leather pair. And every fucking time he would walk in from somewhere — he never was on a horse, maybe once — he’d walk into the fucking house, storm up the fucking stairs, go lay in his bed in his chaps, and play his banjo. It’s like, what the fuck?”

The actor also took issue with the fact that Campion, a native of New Zealand, attempted to take on the genre.

“What the fuck does this woman — she’s a brilliant director by the way, I love her work, previous work — but what the fuck does this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American west? And why in the fuck does she shoot this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana and say, ‘This is the way it was.’ That fucking rubbed me the wrong way, pal,” he said.

“The myth is that they were these macho men out there with the cattle. I just come from fucking Texas where I was hanging out with families, not men, families, big, long, extended, multiple-generation families that made their living and their lives were all about being cowboys. And boy, when I fucking saw that [movie], I thought, ‘What the fuck? Where are we in this world today?'”

Listen above, via WTF with Marc Maron.