The Roses stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman talk gender-flipped remake and marital war
Cumberbatch and Colman team up for a darkly comic remake of The War of the Roses – with chaos, slapstick and a very British twist.

In Hollywood, nothing is safe from a remake. Including, it seems, The War of the Roses. The 1989 black comedy, directed by Danny DeVito, was a major hit the winter it was released, grossing $160 million worldwide.
Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner – who had already starred with DeVito in the swashbuckling Romancing the Stone and its sequel – pitched up as a long-term married couple who head for the divorce courts, a battle that gets more vicious by the day.
Becoming a water cooler moment, the film was so popular in Germany, the German title Der Rosenkrieg sunk into popular culture, becoming synonymous with high-conflict divorces.
And it's not just overseas. Statistics claim that in 2025 in the UK, two out of every five marriages end in divorce, so DeVito's movie feels ripe for a reinterpretation. Which brings us to The Roses, starring British stalwarts Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game) and Olivia Colman (Broadchurch) as fractured couple Theo and Ivy.
The two actors are not only joining forces on the screen for the first time but also producing with their respective companies – Cumberbatch's Sunny March and South of the River Pictures, which Colman runs with her husband Ed Sinclair.
"We came up collectively with the idea," explains Cumberbatch when we meet in London’s Corinthia Hotel. "First of all it was the idea that Olivia and I should work together." At the time, Colman was working on The Favourite – the period romp that ultimately won her an Oscar for her increasingly unhinged Queen Anne.
Floating the idea of a remake of The War of the Roses (which came from the 1981 novel by Warren Adler), Cumberbatch and co. took it to The Favourite’s Tony McNamara, the Australian writer also behind the sweary TV show The Great with Elle Fanning.
"With love for it and honouring it, we’ve taken it in a slightly different direction," says Colman. "It’s a different tone. And with Tony McNamara writing it, you’re in safe hands. He does dark-funny better than anyone. And then it didn’t seem so much of a risk."

If that wasn’t enough, Jay Roach – the filmmaker behind the Austin Powers and Meet The Parents movies – signed on to direct. Inevitably, Roach fleshed out the cast with some of the world’s top comedy performers.
Saturday Night Live stars Kate McKinnon and Andy Samberg co-star as Amy and Barry, friends of the Roses. Stath Lets Flats' three-time BAFTA-winner Jamie Demetriou pops up as Rory, a near neighbour. And then Sex Education and Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa is Jeffrey, a waiter in the restaurant run by Ivy.
The result is a sharply-scripted update of DeVito’s movie that sees Cumberbatch’s architect Theo and Colman’s chef Ivy – both ex-pat Brits living in an impossibly beautiful town on the American West Coast – witness their marriage crumble after events come between them, descending into a tit-for-tat battle that is only going to end one way.
If the original was an absurdist black comedy, this ups the ante, with more vitriol and more slapstick.
"Tonally, it’s so different," suggests McKinnon. "The premise is the same, but everything about the execution is completely different. Even though they’re both black comedies, the humour, the sensibilities…I would not liken them."
Certainly, her lusty character feels pure McKinnon. "In the grand tradition of lesbian comediennes being overly sexual with men on screen, I wanted to add myself to that," she says. "It’s something that has always made me laugh a lot, and I wanted to see what I could do."
Broadening the comedy wasn’t the only switch, with the gender roles flipped. In the original, Douglas's Oliver was a corporate lawyer while Turner's Barbara is the dissatisfied homemaker who decides to open a catering company.
In The Roses, Theo's reputation is in tatters after a building he designs crumbles in a storm – an embarrassing disaster that soon goes viral. Ivy, meanwhile, goes from strength to strength after she opens a popular crab restaurant (amusingly called 'We’ve Got Crabs').

To compensate, Theo spends all his time training their two college-age kids to become super-athletes. "Once you lose part of your self-worth, you try to validate it through other means," reasons Cumberbatch. "And he’s continually reminded [about his architectural disaster]. His friends go, 'Yeah, but you are a bit of a failure, and that sucks.'
"And that’s a very American thing, that honesty and that openness and the idea of failing and succeeding. I think what really fuels the discontent is how within the process of her rise and his fall... they lose sight of each other. They become too busy in their worlds."
As resentments grow, the violence starts. Colman admits there was one moment in the script that she was troubled by, where Ivy pretends that "she’s been beaten" by Theo. After all, domestic violence is no laughing matter, whatever the tone.
"I found that very uncomfortable. But then it’s not mocking anyone who is a victim. It is definitely saying, 'I want the world to know that he’s the worst kind of guy.' Which is cruel of her to have done that, because he would never have done that. I had to be talked around a bit…this is what she’s trying to suggest."
Clearly, it was not a subject that either she nor Cumberbatch took lightly. "We’ve been very, very sensitive to that because we do sadly live in a world where these things play out not in a comedic way," says Cumberbatch.
"It’s very important to get the tone right and not suggest for a second that we think it’s funny when things are very physically wrong between a couple…it’s anything but. But we also live in a world of expressing things through physical comedy, which I think still exists without [the need to say] 'Don’t try this at home.'"
However different The Roses is from the DeVito movie, it will surely resonate with audiences familiar with the everyday struggles of making a marriage harmonious. "I don’t think I took any relationship tips," says Gatwa, before proceeding to unpack some.
"Communication is key. Be nice to each other. Try not to kill each other. It’s interesting… how you can be your own worst enemy, as life hits you hard when you’re going through it. In a marriage, you’re a unit. Two people, you have to be in that together and grow. It certainly made me think of how hard marriage could be."
Cumberbatch, who has been married to English theatre and opera director Sophie Hunter for the past decade, adds that it's often human nature that scuppers marriages.
"It’s a huge mistake in human behaviour to find the thing that you found attractive unattractive just because you’ve got bored. But unfortunately, we do have this constant need to be entertained, have new things, to be distracted, and it’s a lot to do with conditioning and environment and all the other things that go into psychology."
McKinnon concurs, noting that The Roses taps into the most age-old of dilemmas. "There is something primal about our need to connect and to stay connected over time," she says. Perhaps where it departs from the 1989 movie is how The Roses is as much British – with Cumberbatch, Colman, Gatwa and Demetriou – as it is American.
"I really do think it’s a merging of two sensibilities: the protagonists are British, but the Americans are not cartoonish," adds McKinnon (although the scene where Amy and Barry take Ivy and Theo to a gun range does rather play up the stereotype that all Americans are gun-crazy).

According to Cumberbatch, Theo and Ivy are "quintessentially British" characters, strangers in a strange land. "Except they go to America to escape the confines of what is quintessentially British, which slightly counters [the idea]," he nods.
He then bursts into a verse from Sting’s 1987 number Englishman In New York, with its line "I don’t drink coffee, I take tea, my dear" somewhat summing up the cultural divide between Brits and Yanks. "Sorry…Sting," he chuckles. "It popped into my head."
Of course, you probably couldn’t get more English than Cumberbatch – still best known for playing Sherlock Holmes in the BBC show – and Colman, who played Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown. Which makes their transposing to American shores all the more intriguing.
"I suppose, probably, you go to another country and you end up being a little bit more British than you would be otherwise," the actress adds. "I think I probably hoik up the English when I’m in America."
With this in mind, the cast don’t see an issue with remaking a beloved classic like The War of the Roses. "Art does influence art," says Colman. "It always has done. I challenge you – and I’m still going to regret saying this – to come up with a painting [where] the artist hasn’t seen something which has inspired them to do that painting.
"You take inspiration even without noticing. I think it’s great that we have this wonderful film as our inspiration." All we can hope is that divorce rates don’t skyrocket after couples head to the cinema to watch it.
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The Roses is in cinemas on 29th August.
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Authors
James Mottram is a London-based film critic, journalist, and author.
