In ‘The Roses,’ Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman play a couple at odds

Many movies that have been made detail the start of relationships.

Those dizzying first moments of love — flirtation and the spark of attraction, first kisses and the will-they-or-won’t-they tension of so many romantic comedies.

But what about a film centered on the other end of love, when things fall spectacularly apart? That’s what we see play out in the new dark comedy, The Roses, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman. They play husband and wife, Theo and Ivy, an architect and chef, respectively. They are a couple who were once very much in love, but now — two children and one transatlantic move later — are facing the possible demise of their marriage.

The movie, directed by Jay Roach, is a reimagining of the 1989 film The War of the Roses, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, based on a 1981 novel of the same name.

Cumberbatch and Colman are long time friends who were looking for a project to work on together when the opportunity to put their spin on the macabre comedy came about.

The two stopped by NPR’s New York studio to talk with All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly about playing a not-so-happily married couple.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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Interview highlights

Mary Louise Kelly: The thing that your characters — as the marriage is collapsing — end up fighting over, is the house.

This is the same [storyline] as the 1989 version where they end up fighting over a house. And to be fair, it is a pretty spectacular house…

Why is that? They don’t fight over the kids. There’s a million things they could fight over — it’s the house.

Benedict Cumberbatch: It’s because they’re both invested in it, you know, massively.

Olivia Colman: And I think for you [Cumberbatch], it’s your most precious thing. So, it’s the perfect weapon for Ivy [Colman’s character].

Cumberbatch: He’s suffered this massive collapse of confidence and ego and everything with his literal collapse of his building, which is why his career nosedives.

Kelly: Just to inject. Theo is an architect. He designs a building that literally collapses. It’s a giant. So, this is his redemption.

Cumberbatch: It’s exactly that.

And Ivy invested her time and trust to do that and gifted me back, in a way, what I gifted her with the loan to make the restaurant that then turns into this global success. And so this is a sort of payback for that. But she has to work extra hard and open other branches in order for us to afford it.

I get very overexcited, as often architects do, with various details, including expensive Irish moss as opposed to Californian moss, and the tension starts to escalate even in the build of it.

Kelly: Olivia Colman, your character — who’s a chef — manages to get one piece that’s exactly as she likes it. It is Julia Child’s original stove.

As this whole battle royale is playing out over the house, did you ever wish you could just take it? Just take it and just go?

Colman: Yes, I suppose Ivy, as she says, thinks Theo has stolen the children. And so she thinks, I’ll steal his big child — his house.

I would probably go — because when he says, “I’ll build you another house,” that’s perfectly reasonable. So you’d go, OK, great. Thank you. Then we’d have one each. Lovely.

I don’t know quite why she goes, “no,” digs her heels in and wants to take the house.

There are many moments, aren’t there, when you could go, everybody stop, pause count to 10, this could all be OK. But that wouldn’t be quite as fun.

Cumberbatch: They go beyond that point — they really do. I think they want to hurt each other by then. That’s the thing, that’s the terrain.

Kelly: You said you two came to this movie because you wanted to make a movie together. Are you still friends at the end of it?

Cumberbatch: Yes!

Colman: Yes!

Cumberbatch: Even more so. When you get to work with a friend as brilliant and fabulous as Olivia, but also the trust, the immediacy of how you can go further, faster, the shorthand. But also she’s so, so, so good that you up your game.

It was a sad day when we ended the film and it was like, “Oh God, we’ve got to find something else to do.”

Colman: Yeah! But we will.

Cumberbatch: We will.

Kelly: Both of you have done stage theater where there’s an audience and I imagine some sort of self-correcting mechanism. Like if things aren’t landing, you can tell, you can read the room of is this landing or I need to amp it up or down. In a movie, all you’ve got is each other, like did that land, do I need to ramp this up a little bit?

Cumberbatch: This is what I meant by supportive and trusting and trustable. Trustworthy even. You can immediately go to that person and go, is this too much, should I be doing more?

Kelly: Did you do that? Was there time here where you did that to each other?

Colman: There was one incredibly sweet moment when we were getting the character fighting more, and Ben went, “Are we OK?”

Colman: And I went, “Yes Ben, it’s pretending!”

Cumberbatch: Because we sort of did it chronologically. And there’s a lot of fun in that couple.

And you know, when we got to the house — because that was the big set build at the end of it all — we had to trash the house so we could only do that at the end of filming obviously.

And so it got spicy, that sort of gearchange in the language and the sort of love language of wit turning in on itself, becoming toxic was really quite punchy.

I had a little bit of a moment of going, I need to touch base with her because it was getting quite unpleasant. And I mean, it’s sort of weirdly enjoyable, but it is unpleasant what they start doing to each other.

Kelly: Serious real question. Anything else you could whisper to those characters that you have learned over what I hope is the course of long, successful, very happy relationships where you think, I wish I could just tell them this.

Colman: There was a documentary about couples with extraordinary longevity in their relationships. And one guy said that sometimes it’s about what you don’t say.

Initially when you hear that, you think, is that right? Is that good advice? And then yeah, it is actually.

So, if you piss each other off one day, sometimes just wait till the next day.

Just don’t say it straight away. Find a calm moment. And I think that was great advice.