Olivia Colman has a friend who’s going through a horrible divorce. “She has a little victory every day by putting wee in her husband’s tea,” she tells Vanity Fair. “She pees in his tea every day.”
It sounds like a detail out of the Oscar winner’s new film The Roses, a reimaging of the 1989 comedy directed by Danny DeVito. The original film starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as a wealthy couple whose seemingly perfect marriage falls apart, leading to an increasingly outrageous divorce battle. “I love that you can see the journey of two people who adore each other and slowly, slowly, bit by bit start to try and tear each other apart,” Colman says.
In this new take, Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch star as a couple living on the California coast. Though they start out very much in love, as tension grows between them, they begin to wreak havoc on each other in increasingly chaotic ways. Directed by Jay Roach, the movie, which Searchlight will release in theaters August 29, showcases two powerhouse actors joyously diving into smart, bold comedy. The central theme from the 1989 film—how a loving couple’s marriage can so intensely fall apart—remains intact while Colman and Cumberbatch introduce a more modern dynamic.
“The film is a parable of two people who loved each other intensely, then ended up hating each other intensely and missing the middle ground,” Cumberbatch says. “Much of it is shockingly recognizable: how we struggle to show love toward the people we love the most, and how this can all go wrong very quickly if we’re not careful about nurturing and nourishing the relationships at the center of our families.”
The War of the Roses was both a critical hit and box-office smash. It was the 13th highest grossing film of 1989; it also earned three Golden Globes nominations, including for best comedy.
Colman and Cumberbatch, who were fans of the original film, both signed on with their production companies early, eager to develop a new take on the story with Searchlight. But they wouldn’t call it a remake. “All art influences other art,” Colman says. “It’s very hard to find any story that hasn’t had beginnings in another story a year before or a thousand years before. And that’s part of the fun. Everything influences everything else.”
In this new version, Colman plays Ivy, a chef whose career begins to eclipse that of her husband Theo, an architect. What at first comes off as witty banter between two British expats living in California soon transforms into sharp barbs and physical one-upmanship as their competitive natures get the best of them.
Screenwriter Tony McNamara, who previously worked with Colman on The Favourite, was also a fan of the 1989 film. He agreed to write the script for The Roses, using the original and the book it’s based on—Warren Adler’s 1981 novel of the same name—as a jumping-off point. “I thought, Why don’t we make a movie that’s more focused on what we do to each other while we’re married, and still sort of pay homage to the original?” he says.
McNamara, who also wrote the script for 2023’s Poor Things and created the Hulu comedy series The Great, is known for his playful wit. “What Tony does so well is the element of comedy, absurdity, and excruciatingly well-observed humor. That’s really the key—the painfully acute observation of relationships,” Cumberbatch says. “What he really pins in this film is the emotional depth of the characters and the recognizability of their dynamics.”
The Roses traces the couple’s relationship over 20 years. It also changes the power dynamic from the original film, which centered on Douglas’s character as the family’s breadwinner. In The Roses, it’s Ivy’s career that is taking off and Theo who loses his job. “That’s what so many couples understand now, how the balance between two careers is such a trick to solve in a marriage,” McNamara says. “These two people who are very creative, very ambitious—how are they going to balance staying married and staying in love?”
Roach says McNamara is a master of tone, which allowed him to strike the right balance for this story. “There’s a reality to it and a groundedness to it and a very relatable predicament that I think this couple gets caught up in,” Roach says. “I just wanted to make sure it had that nice balance, and that we actually want to care about these people.”
While they knew each other socially, Colman and Cumberbatch had never worked together on a film before. “Luckily, we’ve managed to stay friends even though we’ve now done our first job together,” Colman jokes. “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. I think we both supported each other.”
Colman admits that they maybe “mucked about too much. Poor Jay was probably saying ‘It’s like herding cats!’” But Roach disagrees, saying that he felt the actors had an easy rapport from the beginning of the 40-day, UK-based shoot. “There is a little bit of a joyful keeping the ball in the air,” he says. “I can always tell, much like the characters in the story, when they trust each other so much that they’re willing to go a little off the script or a little into dangerous territory. I feel the audience senses that high-wire act a little bit.”
While both actors are known for dramatic work (Cumberbatch was nominated for an Oscar for 2014’s The Imitation Game and 2021’s The Power of the Dog, while Colman was nominated for 2020’s The Father and 2021’s The Lost Daughter), they’ve both also showcased their playfulness and strong comedic timing. Colman started out on the sitcom Peep Show, starred in Fleabag, and won an Oscar for her work in the dark comedy The Favourite. Cumberbatch has often played his characters with a delightful, whimsical intelligence, including in Sherlock and as Marvel’s Dr. Strange.
In The Roses, both actors get to embrace bold comedy and bring forth the sense of mischief that’s been central to much of their past work. “Olivia is as good on the first take as she would be on the 40th,” Cumberbatch says. “She’s great at taking direction and is such an acute instrument of joy and drama, as well as an immediate human mood enhancer. She has a lot of vulnerability for someone who’s the funniest person in the room.”
The film also features a strong lineup of talented comedic actors in supporting roles, including Andy Samberg, Kate McKinnon, Allison Janney, and Ncuti Gatwa. “I was working with such a fine company of comedy masters, so watching them improvise inspired me to do a little bit of my own as well,” Cumberbatch says. “The supportive nature of this group was incredible.”
Cumberbatch, Colman, and Roach all agree that viewers don’t have to be familiar with the 1989 classic to enjoy their new take. After all, its themes remain universal. “We’re idiots. Humans are so flawed. We want so much to be our high selves, especially with each other, and the illusion and the miracle of love is what sometimes gets us through,” Roach says. “But when it turns, when it goes in the opposite direction, it can be extremely painful. And one enjoyable way to acknowledge that is through humor.”
The post Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch Fight to the Finish in ‘The Roses’ appeared first on Vanity Fair.
