Benedict Cumberbatch left feeling 'pathetic' after on-screen 'toxic' row with co-star

The over-earnest American marriage therapist peers at warring couple Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman with obvious displeasure. "This is verbal cruelty," she scolds them.

"I think," responds Benedict with crushing British politeness, "we call that repartee."

And so the tone is set for the start of Jay Roach's pitch-black new comedy The Roses, based on the now-iconic 1989 classic The War of the Roses, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.

In the words of Roach himself, the new film is more a "re-imagining" of the original than a straightforward re-make, with Douglas's wealthy lawyer Oliver Rose and his bored wife Barbara now transformed into Theo and Ivy Rose, an architect and a chef, whose affectionate habit of teasing each other with mock insults devolves slowly as their marriage begins to disintegrate into active - albeit hugely entertaining for the viewer - viciousness.

The Roses of 2025 are a very different variety from those of the earlier film. For one thing, they both have careers, not just one of them. For another, their friends include a range of races and sexual orientations that simply would not have been countenanced back in the 1980s.

Possibly most significantly of all, the new Roses, although they both live and work in let-it-all-hang-out Northern California, are - and will remain to their souls - British.

"I'm so much a fan of so many British comedians like the Monty Pythons, Douglas Adams and Sacha Baron Cohen," says Jay Roach, who, as veteran director of the Austin Powers film series, is hardly a newcomer to the genre.

"British people sound way smarter and funnier than Americans do. I personally come from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and when I go to Los Angeles or New York it's intimidating for me because I'm always aware I'm never going to sound like the people there.

"And then you go to London and it gets even more so. So the idea of this couple coming to America to escape some of their own sense of being oppressed a little bit in England, but then being bonded by their fish out of water feeling in America, while meanwhile a lot of the Americans are also envying them because they seem so sophisticated, was a dynamic I loved."

The project is something of a love child for both Benedict and Olivia, longtime friends off the screen, who for some years had been looking for a way to work together and agree firmly that they have finally struck gold with The Roses.

It's written by renowned Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara, with whom Olivia had previously worked on the 2018 multi-award-winning The Favourite.

When I meet the two actors by Zoom from New York, where they have flown to attend the premiere held earlier this week, the affection between them is palpable, with lots of affectionate grasping of arms, chuckling at one another's jokes and finishing each other's sentences.

Which Benedict admits made it more than a little unnerving when - only following the script, he hastens to add, and purely in on-screen character - his talented scene-mate turned on him with malice in her eyes.

"She's a very good actress," he says fondly of his pal, "and there was one moment where I wobbled, because there was a lot of fun we had as a fictional couple at the beginning of the film, and there were some delightful moments of funniness without the meanness.

The dialogue had been so much fun until then, and then gradually as the story developed, it dipped into the toxicity, and I remember in the first couple of days of that part of the shooting when she started to turn the heat up on the meanness, thinking, "Uh ... OK, this is getting quite spicy now, I think I just want to touch base with my friend and check we are OK. As in, "Are Olivia and Ben OK?" which is so pathetic."

Olivia smiles affectionately. "It was sweet," she says. "He just said..." at which she drops her voice and mouths concernedly: "Are we OK?"

"It was feeble," contradicts Benedict firmly. "But once I knew we were both all right, it was a feeling of, "OK, let's have fun slinging horribleness at each other."'

Olivia laughs. "My favorite comedies are quite dark," she observes. "Am I terrible for finding my beloved husband funny when he falls over?"

"We British come from a rich vein of humor," agrees Benedict. "The English tradition of comedy - except for the Oscar Wildean thing - is not generally one of epigrammatic rapier-sharp wittiness; it's more a comedy - not of cruelty, so much as a comedy of failure. When you think about British male comedic characters, like Alan Partridge, Basil Fawlty, David Brent, you see that these are men who are failures - you want them to have some kind of validation or success, and when they're denied that, that can be where the comedy comes in."

Both actors agree that the challenge as it was to step into the giant - and firmly all-American - shoes of the stars of the first film, they also felt strongly that the new Anglo-Australian triumvirate of themselves and Tony McNamara brought something different to the project.

"This film is not so much a re-make of the first as..." begins Olivia before Benedict finishes, "...inspired by it".

He adds with a smile: "It was a taking off point that these two characters are two Brits living in America, which was a different strand from the original film. They're very different characters from the characters in the first, and I think in our film there's more of an investment in why things go wrong rather than a delight in how things go wrong. This is about people in a relationship moving apart because of a new dynamic that comes in. And it was very interesting for me to map out my own character's emotional trajectory, because...." He stops, and frowns. "Did I just say trajectory?" he asks. "Very good word," notes Olivia.

"Well, in my mouth right now with my jet lag, it sounded just awful." An actor to his bones, he brightens, seeing an excuse for some mild hamming up. "Maybe I should try to say it like Ian McKellen would."

Expertly, he rearranges his mouth and vocal chords, and, for an instant, transforms himself into the quintessential theatrical knight. "Trajectory!" he booms, majestically. "Yes, that's better.

Anyway. Hopefully the two films can co-exist and not be overly compared with each other. Because they are very different species of the same ... uh ..." He stops again, the brain fog of jetlag abruptly settling in as he loses his train of thought. More hamming up is on its way.

"The same..." he repeats in comically ponderous tones. "Duh... different.. duh... now, what shall we call this animal metaphor? Different..."

"Breeds of dog?" suggests Olivia brightly.

"Very good!" applauds Benedict. "They're different breeds of dog!" He nods at Olivia. "We like dogs," he footnotes helpfully.

Both are famously happily married in real life - Olivia to actor-producer-writer Ed Sinclair, who is also credited along with Olivia and Benedict as one of the producers on the film, and with whom, she announces proudly, she will celebrate her 25th anniversary next year, and Benedict to theatre director Sophie Hunter, whom he wed in 2015. Yet they agree that there have nevertheless been elements in the film's script that have caused them to reflect on their own marriages.

"There are always those moments, aren't there," says Olivia, "when you've been together for a long time - and maybe even with couples who haven't been together that long too - when you forget to listen to each other or you just think that what you're doing is so much more important than what they're doing."

"Or," puts in Benedict thoughtfully, "when you begin to think there's actually such a thing as 'right' and 'wrong'."

"Ooh, that's true," says Olivia, wincing.

"There's a lot in the film," says Benedict, "that hopefully as an audience you'll walk away from going, "Phew, there but for the grace of God go my partner and I. We're not that bad and, lest we forget, let's never be that bad."

In the end, he adds, the secret to marital communication is all about listening. "It's central to the relationship, isn't it, and that's what the Roses have stopped doing. There's a coldness, a sadness, something closes off, and you wish they could remember what had opened their hearts in the first place, what had opened their minds to each other, just so that they could dare to do that again. You wish they could dare to be hurt again - which is what love is anyway, isn't it? Opening yourself up with that risk of being hurt."

He stops, re-runs those words in his head, and nods mock-proudly. "That was quite a profound thing to say," he announces, striking an attitude. "I might have that on my gravestone."

And Benedict and Olivia, good friends to the end, double over laughing at their own unique - and very British - brand of silliness.

Ends