At the start of The Roses, a counsellor asks a couple to list what they love about each other. It’s a struggle. “He has arms,” is about as good as it gets. The actors who play them are less reticent. Highlights are itemised before I’ve even asked. “I love your hair,” Olivia Colman tells Benedict Cumberbatch. “Short at the sides! Brilliant!” It’s their first time together in ages. They compare half-terms and weeding. She coos over his dislocated shoulder. He admires her suit.
OK, enough mush. What do they hate about one another?
“Tricky,” says Cumberbatch, ruminatively. “I hate how …”
Colman moans. “Oh God, he’s gonna do ‘I hate, but a nice way.’”
“Fuuuck,” he says. “I hate how she thinks five steps ahead of me. I hate how predictable I am around Olivia, and I hate what a grumpy arsehole I feel in the face of her unmitigated joy.”
He’s been her “proud friend” for ages, he continues; leapt out of bed in his pyjamas to party with her when Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite swept the Baftas. Her intuition is “extraordinary. It’s all just there, not overcooked, a very raw talent.”
“That’s one of the things I love about Ben,” Colman chips in.
“I do the heavy talking?”
“It means I can have a cup of tea. Probably do some emails. But also I want to hold your hand and go: ‘Don’t be hard on yourself.’” She pats him. “Because you do that.”
“Yeah,” he nods, sheepish. “I do do that.”
“But you are amazing. Very good and wonderful. I wish you could simply go: ‘I’m great!’ I’m going to enrol you in a workshop. No! Let’s go on a walking holiday together! I’ll hold your hand all the time and you’ll end up so happy.” A manic cackle.
He joins in. “I’ll walk off a cliff because I won’t be scared of death any more.”
“We won’t go anywhere with hills or cliffs,” says Colman. “Just back to my house every evening for loads of pasta. We’ll go on big round walks. You can’t get lost if you always go left.”
He laughs, she beams. “When Ben’s face lights up, it’s a whole-body shake. It’s properly joyful working with him. Oh, this is sickly, isn’t it.” The door opens and something green and livid in a glass is ushered in. “Oh fuck, here comes my wanky matcha,” says Cumberbatch bashfully. “What colour is your wee after that?” asks Colman. He grins. “I’ll show you.”
The Roses is less of an acid brew than its source material: Warren Adler’s 1981 novel, The War of the Roses, and the 1989 adaptation by Danny DeVito, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. Gone is the quasi-rape, the almost-murder and the moment Douglas’s lawyer urinates on the fish that Turner’s aspiring caterer has prepped for a tasting.
In the 2025 film, she has been upgraded to a chef while he becomes an architect. The pair escape London for California with their young twins, where her career rockets as his nosedives. She’s on magazine covers. He handles nits.
Yet relations only crumble so far: Ivy and Theo do sort of want to stay together. But if they can’t, they each definitely want to stay sole owners of the swanky beach villa he’s designed and she’s bankrolled.
Capitalism is the problem, reckons screenwriter Tony McNamara, an Australian best known for his work with Yorgos Lanthimos (including The Favourite). “It’s become an element of marriage,” he says, earlier that morning. “Both partners have to work. In the 1960s and 70s we might have been less emotionally articulate but it’s tougher today because of the idea you have to get fulfilment from your career and be special.” Balancing that with a partner, children and a mortgage is “ridiculous”, he says.
Theo pours his thwarted ambition into his children, drilling them into athletic prodigies. “It’s really hard for men,” says McNamara, “because they’re brought up for a sort of ego success; that’s the way to define himself. When that’s taken away, he makes his kids the success.”
Ivy enjoys her acclaim but comes to covet Theo’s bond with the twins. “When she got the chance,” says McNamara, “her ego was as big as his. And she couldn’t balance it, either.”
It would be possible to do a bracingly traditionalist reading of The Roses. To see the film as a cautionary tale about the perils of swapping gender roles – or even of progress full stop.
“Steady on, Tony,” says Colman, when I recount his theories. “I mean, in the 60s and 70s, women weren’t really encouraged to …” She pauses, then assumes a fond Aussie accent. “Oh yeah! I didn’t mean that … I’m gonna get in so much trouble.”
Cumberbatch attempts a defence. “Look, there was an idealism in the 60s, the fledgling of equality ….”
“Women always thought about equality,” counters Colman.
“But then there were open relationships and changing gender roles,” continues Cumberbatch. “I think we are in an era where we are trying to have it all.”
Yes, says Colman, firmly. “What I like about this is it’s not about genders, it’s about roles at home. It could be a same-sex couple.” She pauses. “I mean, it could have all been solved with a nanny.”
Cumberbatch perks up. “I did think that at one point. Because though they hate each other, there’s no trust issue. They’re not unfaithful. The nanny thing could have played with that.”
“You could have had a fling with a nanny!” says Colman, excited. “Or I could. Dammit!”
“Missed opportunity,” says Cumberbatch, with the hint of a grimace.
Jay Roach, the director of The Roses, has the calm smile and open gaze of a couples therapist – which is what he wanted to be, if his movies (including Meet the Parents and Austin Powers) hadn’t taken off. “I take on projects to work my own shit out,” he says. “I really am fascinated by what makes a relationship work or what dooms it.”
The Roses also betrays his interest in the special relationship between the US and UK. “I’ve always had an inferiority complex,” he says. “But especially around British people. They are so much wittier and more articulate. Olivia and Benedict are hilariously dark and insulting, even off camera.”
In the film, Ivy and Theo’s brittle banter contrasts with the sometimes spectacular frankness of their American friends, two couples played by Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon, Jamie Demetriou and Zoë Chao. “When Ivy and Theo are really harsh with each other, they’re sort of speaking in their love language,” says Roach. “When Americans try, they suck at it.”
Both Cumberbatch and Colman are popular across the Atlantic. Both are also perceived as quintessentially British – a sense cemented by Colman’s best actress Oscar acceptance speech. (“Brilliant!” says Cumberbatch, who raises it unprompted. “Like Olivia mach 11.”)
He’s perhaps more of a fan of the US than she. “You don’t have to stay in your lane over there,” he says. “You can keep evolving.” He talks about how “history speaks to a more nefarious version” of the idea that Britons are refined and Yanks brutes.
He also questions the charge levelled by the film: that Americans don’t get irony. “It taps into that cliche: that Brits say to each other things that are really quite cruel, cold and barbed – and Americans just think it’s funny. But maybe that’s changed. Look at the roasting thing … ”
“They’ve taken it so far,” says Colman.
“Barbarically cruel. Not at all epigrammatic.”
Do they soften their own swearing outside England? “Oh I go much worse,” says Colman. “My first time in America, my lovely team went: [nervous American accent] ‘Um, I know you like the c-word. We can’t do the c-word here.’ And then the LA Times asked me about David Tennant and I said: ‘Oh, total cunt!’ and you could see everyone’s colour just draining. It’s because I was told not to.”
“It’s that school thing, isn’t it,” says Cumberbatch.
“Yeah,” she says, “everybody wants to say ‘cunt’. It’s a great word.”
There are limits though, even for Colman. Some years back, she was bathing her train-mad young son and spelling out words for him in foam letters on the tiles. He requested “Fat Controller”, per Thomas the Tank Engine. She’d got as far as “fat c” when her husband appeared, alarmed. “Idiot! I’m not gonna write ‘fat cunt’ on the bath!”
The pair potter off on a tangent, rhapsodising over Brio (Colman: “The bridges!”; Cumberbatch: “So satisfying”) and comparing notes on classics of children’s literature that seem less palatable when you’re a parent.
“I had a little squiz at the Mr Men books,” says Cumberbatch. “And oh my God! Mr Chatterbox is basically gagged and laughed at by the postman. Can you imagine teaching a child that’s acceptable? Just shut someone up with a mask.”
“And Mr Nosey!” says Colman. “You shouldn’t be nosy, but they sort of hurt him.”
“A lot of consent issues with Mr Tickle.”
The series should be repurposed as teaching aids, thinks Colman. “Everyone gets a red flag and waves it when they spot inappropriate behaviour.”
Both Colman and Cumberbatch are in notoriously happy marriages. She’s been with the writer Ed Sinclair since university. They have three children, as do Cumberbatch and his wife, theatre director Sophie Hunter. Do they think we romanticise love?
“By its very nature, yes,” says Cumberbatch. “And I think that’s fine.”
“I love love,” says Colman, cheerily. “I like to romanticise love. I think it’s ace.”
Cumberbatch leans back. It’s a bit of a format, this: she says something chirpy and succinct, he expands on it thoughtfully, prodding the other side of the coin.
“Classicism has given us this sort of romantic ideal of love,” he says, “which is impossible to live up to. Those two things wrestle: it’s great to fall in love, but eventually one of you will be dog-tired and doing the bins.”
“And then you take turns,” says Colman briskly, “and step up to the plate.”
“But that’s the thing. There has to be this cool thing beyond the idealism of vows.” He talks mistily about his wedding. “It’s such a powerful thing to express love and then have it reflected back with your friends and family. But to find something beyond that heightened moment, you have to think a bit more deeply than just the party of love.”
“Three more matchas!” says Colman, impressed.
In the film, Theo says he feels “great waves of dizzying hatred” for his wife. Is that incompatible with love? Cumberbatch gulps. “God, this is like a Trojan horse to our [private] lives. When you’re living closely with someone, you go through all the extremes of life. That’s really what love is: getting through them.”
A pause. “I’m not sure I’ve felt massive hatred,” says Colman.
“I didn’t mean that,” he says, quickly. “But moments when you’re not massively in love.”
“I’m quite in love.”
“I am too! It’s all great. It’s, y’know, life. And I know Ed annoys you sometimes.”
“Only a bit, and it’s been 30 years. It’s not bad to be a bit annoyed with each other.”
“Hate is a very strong word.”
“Not a good word,” says Colman. “Unless it’s thrown at certain political leaders. Then ‘cunt’ is fine.”
In The Roses, just as the American friends offer a counterpoint to Theo and Ivy’s robust irony (and blasphemy), so two servers in Ivy’s restaurant represent a different approach to courtship. Jane (Sunita Mani) shags a co-worker in the big fridge. Jeffrey (Ncuti Gatwa, who played the last iteration of Doctor Who) blows truckers in the car park. A younger generation, says McNamara, are less wedded to the idea that love lasts for ever.
The actors who play them share this take, as well as the screenwriter’s theory that being told you’re special is fatal for relationships. “In America, individuality is such a currency,” says Mani. “It’s bait: ‘Be you!’ It becomes commodified so quickly.”
Gatwa hums in agreement. “There’s this narrative on socials, a line I see all the time: ‘I’m the prize!’” He shakes his head sadly. “Dating apps have done something to our brains.”
“[The] feeling that you need to be ‘special’ is really exploited,” says Mani. Gatwa nods. “The void has been capitalised.”
Ask these two if we romanticise love and you get a rather different response to Colman and Cumberbatch. “Yes!” yells Gatwa. “Oh. My. God. Nineties films have done a number on us! Disney, too. We’ve all been trained to think that someone’s coming to save us.”
Mani concurs. Fairytales are catnip, she says, “in this age of technology and loneliness”.
At 32 and 38, Gatwa and Mani are a good decade younger than the film’s leads (Cumberbatch is 49, Colman 51). So too, in fact, are the actors who play their friends. Down the hall of the hotel sit Demetriou, 37, McKinnon, 41, and Chao, 39, in a room set up for TV interviews. The three of them (sans Samberg) duly engage in the kind of comedy business (ear nuzzling, etc) perfect for social media reels. Unfortunately, this is print – and they soon get pretty glum, anyway.
“I think our expectations of what a marriage is supposed to deliver are disproportionate and silly,” says McKinnon. “What it’s really for is comfort and solace as we move through time.”
If you want to procreate, she says, other methods are available. Take bees: “Twenty-five female embryos are selected at random and overfed, and then they fight to the death. The queen emerges, then flies to a predetermined location to which all of the men in the colony fly, ejaculate upon her and then die.”
“So that’s another way,” McKinnon concludes, caveating that I should check the science.
Demetriou says he’s better for being in a relationship, but still doesn’t seem entirely sold on the concept. “Were they intended or just a sort of habit we all got into?” he asks. “There’s no official organic document that says: this is the way.” Movies are indeed to blame: “Commitment porn. Even for those of us who can be like, ‘It’s just a film!’, those messages will have seeped in way before we were able to conjure that distinction.”
“I feel as if I’ve been spending my whole adult life unraveling the stories that were fed to me at a very young age,” adds Chao, sadly. “I’ve been trying to do that math for a long time.”
Such cynicism cannot be chalked up only to youth. For all their California sunniness and Aussie bonhomie, Roach, 68, and McNamara, 58, also sing from the same bleak hymn sheet.
“We’re all lonely and dysfunctional and scared,” says the director. “When you find that other person that feels the same way you do, it’s an amazing, magical thing. It feels like we’re tapping into our higher angels. When you lose that, it’s so painful.”
An actor recently told McNamara that, though he wanted to stay with his wife, the way she ate made him want to kill her. “Most of the people I know are in the creative world,” he says. At root, he concedes, The Roses is a Hollywood fable: “It’s hard for two creative people to carry a life together.”
Yet Colman and Cumberbatch, snuggled in their suite, seem to manage it. Presumably they’re plagued by people seeking relationship advice? Both look nonplussed: neither has ever been asked for any. “I feel a bit disappointed now,” says Colman. “Maybe people look at [me and Ed] and go: ‘God no! Not that way.’ I might text all my friends after [this]. “What’s wrong with us? It’s been 30 years and we’ve worked together. We’ve done really well!”
So how do they sustain marriages in which one party is publicly adored? They don’t entirely answer. Every profession needs public approbation, says Colman, “not just the obvious showoff actors”. Totally essential, agrees Cumberbatch. “It’s part of how you see the reflection of who you are. It can’t just be about the grounding your children and your partner give you.”
Though yes, he says, gesturing round the room, all this is “certainly something that can warp your sense of self and give you entitlement”.
“It’s slightly off the scale, isn’t it?” says Colman. “You need to try to remember that it’s silly.”
“Have fun with it and then just go home.”
“And clear up some dog vomit or something, just to remind you.”
And if there is none?
“Find some,” says Cumberbatch. “Just go Olivia’s house.”
