Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch went to war. Then the fun started

From the start, this interview is in grave danger of running completely out of control. Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch are here to talk about their roles as a disintegrating couple in Jay Roach’s The Roses which – just to put this right up front – is a comic tour-de-force for the both of them.

Our slot is short (although, since nobody is prepared to stop talking, we run over time) and supposed to be strictly “film-focused”, but somehow we jump from what Colman is seeing tonight at the theatre (Fiddler on the Roof) to TV shows they’re both watching, with some insider tips from Colman on the best episodes of The Bear. They interrupt and talk over each other. “I’m sorry,” says Colman, genuinely apologetic. “We haven’t seen each other today.”

They were already friends, but had never worked together before making this film. Of course, they are two of the brightest stars in the British film firmament: Colman won the Oscar as best actress in 2019 for playing a fabulously vulgar Queen Anne in The Favourite, while Cumberbatch is Sherlock, Dr Strange and a good many other dramatic characters. They are also, unusually for any kind of star, middle-aged: Colman is 51, while Cumberbatch is 49.

“Luckily, we’ve managed to stay friends,” Colman said in a similarly freewheeling interview in Vanity Fair. “That’s the fear: that you like each other, and what if you don’t get on when you’re actually on set? But it was lovely.”

The Roses is ostensibly a remake of the 1989 critical and commercial hit The War of the Roses, which was directed by Danny DeVito and starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. It was not lovely; watching it now, it barely feels like a comedy at all. At its centre was a wealthy couple whose marriage was rapidly souring into a permanent state of rage. Nobody in it was remotely likeable. Douglas plays Oliver, an ambitious lawyer with more than a whiff of Gordon Gekko about him. His trophy wife Barbara – a former gymnast – expends far too much creative energy on constructing the perfect home, learning to hate him along the way. Worst of all – spoiler alert – their dog is a casualty of their fighting. Once you kill off a canine character, you’re on different turf.

The source material for both films was a 1981 novel by prolific popular fiction writer Warren Adler. Cumberbatch read that too. “It’s really bleak,” he says. “It’s really a diminishing thing from what the story was named after, which was obviously a bloody civil war, to the book which was brilliant but incredibly dark.” He thinks he first saw the Douglas-Turner film in his teens; he watched it again before they started making The Roses. “I remembered it as much funnier,” he says. “But then I was young and I hadn’t had a relationship. I look at it now and go wow, that’s pretty … tough and awful.”

The Roses strikes such a different note that they don’t see it as a remake. Theo and Ivy are equal partners – he is an architect, she is a chef – whose equality is sundered when she opens a restaurant that becomes the buzziest of the year. As Ivy makes the leap into TV stardom, Theo’s career nosedives after an unfortunate accident with a misjudged roofing feature. With nothing to do, he sets about building his dream home on a clifftop block Ivy has been able to buy. Ivy, meanwhile, becomes the family provider and outsider, forlorn when she sees how marginal her parenting role has become but too over-committed to do anything about it.

The script is the work of Australian writer Tony McNamara, who wrote The Favourite along with the television series The Great and Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ wild follow-up to The Favourite, Poor Things. “What Tony has done is take it somewhere else,” says Colman. “There is more love in it.”

The central relationship is full of wit, fun and warmth; when it morphs into hostility, the smart dialogue gives way to a crazed mayhem that could have been devised by Buster Keaton. “When you’re watching it, you’re rooting for them,” she says. “I think people are thinking ‘ooh, I hope they get back together’. I hope they think that. Did you think that?” I did.

Several sideways shifts help make that happen. Given the opportunity, McNamara will always steer towards the edge of absurdity. The initial meet-cute between Theo and Ivy, for example, turns into a burlesque romp when, about two minutes after meeting in the kitchen of a restaurant where he is trying to escape a boring dinner, they briskly agree to have sex in the fridge. It is clear, both to them and us, that this is the start of the rest of their lives. You gasp, then laugh, at the impossible speed of these proceedings.

Not so impossible, says Colman. “I fell in love with my husband the second I saw him. Proper thunderbolts,” she says. She met Ed Sinclair when she was 20 and they were in the same play; they have been together ever since. Cumberbatch is married to Sophie Hunter, a director and playwright. “And I did with mine, but I took 17½ years to get round to doing something about it,” he says. “Awwww,” sighs Colman, sentimentally.

Wasn’t that a long wait? “I was a tongue-tied public schoolboy, I didn’t know what that was. What they were. You know. What is a woman? But I figured it out and put it to her that we could be more than friends and there we are.”

One specific twist, which slants the whole relationship between the Roses, is the fact of their Englishness. Theo and Ivy live in Northern California (actually filmed in Devon, England: it was cheaper and closer to home). Their snappy banter sets them apart from American friends like Amy (Kate McKinnon) who calls herself “an empath” without irony. “I thought that was a brilliant stroke, for us to remain English, like fish out of water,” says Colman. “And I’m eternally grateful, because my American accent is not that good. You haven’t heard it,” she adds, turning to Cumberbatch. “It’s awful.”

Barbed badinage is not an exclusively English commodity, as Cumberbatch points out. “Think of Howard Hawks films like His Girl Friday or the films of Billy Wilder. But we do get pigeonholed that way. The invective here is very sharp and cruel, but disguised with wit. In America you get the ‘roast’, which is just kind of ‘f--- you, you’re horrible, you motherf---er’. It’s unbelievable what they throw at each other. But it’s the same with us; we just think we get away with it by being clever around it.” Englishness is inherently amusing; Englishness is charming.

So he has found, indeed, in real life. “You’re feted for your accent and you’re like ‘come on, really? It’s just an accent, you know.’ But you can get away with speeding tickets and all sorts by just saying ‘Ew, I’m so sorry, I’m English!‘. Go a big Hugh Grant and they’re ‘oh, OK, don’t do it again’. Well, you know, I say ‘they’. That one cop. Better not write that. Don’t try this at home, English people!” Colman is giggling. “I do find myself going over-English when I’m there,” she admits.

Underlying the Roses’ verbal thrust and parry, however, is a relationship unravelling largely because nobody pays attention to it. However bizarre the battle becomes, their complacency is immediately recognisable and relatable. They think they will be fine because they always are. “In any long relationship, you need to work on it,” says Cumberbatch. “They are faced with huge challenges, but they bring the same fun-loving, let’s-give-it-a-go attitude to this huge shift in their dynamic.

“I think this schism, not talking, losing the dialogue between you so that you’re not able to find the funny and the glue and the sex and the sorries and the I-hear-you-and-understand-you, is where the separation and resentment comes in.” All that talk about having it all, he adds with feeling: that’s not possible. “You can’t have it all without a cost. And the cost is that you have to keep working at it, making decisions, investing in it. So you can have it all – a career, children, a love life, a partnership that lasts – but you have to accept the cost and find a balance within that.”

What The Roses is not about, as they both stress with fervour, is a home being wrecked because a wife is earning more than her husband; clearly, they both think Theo and Ivy are better than that.

“It pains me to think that people are still saying ‘oh, it all goes wrong when the woman is successful’. I sort of want to punch people in the nose when I hear that,” says Colman. “It’s about the couple having pressures on them as a couple.” The two actors swap examples of how their characters let each other down, then hasten to make allowances for each other. “He weaponises knowing more about the kids than she does,” Colman observes. “Oh, grossly!” agrees Cumberbatch at once.

Colman wondered in their Vanity Fair interview if they “mucked about too much” on set. “Poor Jay was probably saying ‘it’s like herding cats’.” On the contrary, said Roach; their energy fed the mood. “There is a little bit of a joyful keeping the ball in the air,” he said. “They trust each other so much that they’re willing to go a little off the script or a little into dangerous territory.” Which is not so surprising from Colman, who first came into modest prominence in sketch comedy on The Peep Show, then brought her unerring comic timing to the Lanthimos films. By contrast, there aren’t a lot of laughs in Cumberbatch’s CV, which I now find surprising. “That’s so true!” exclaims Colman. “How does that happen?”

Cumberbatch thanks her, looking slightly abashed. It’s true, he says, that he has done almost no comedy on screen, not that he’s done a musical or a horror, either. He hopes all these things will come to him. “But I’ve done stuff which has a lot of funny in it. Sherlock and Dr Strange are the two obvious big ones but even something like [Alan] Turing [in The Imitation Game]: there is humour scattered through everything I do that hopefully shows I can be funny.” And he has done comedies on stage, where an audience soon tells you whether you’re funny or not.

“But that can be bad,” he says, as Colman nods vigorously. “Because if you start chasing the laugh you got last night, it goes dead. And then you’re thinking ‘what went wrong?’” Over to Colman. “And then you start over-egging it.” He picks up the thread again. “Because with that fourth wall, you know what’s there. And it’s quite fun not knowing – or pretending not to know, because this script is laugh-out-loud. You’d have to be really bad not to make this funny.”

Whereas they, of course, are very good indeed.

The Roses opens in cinemas on September 4.

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