Warning: This article contains spoilers about The Roses.
Being an actor means sometimes getting to live out fantasy scenarios on screen — for Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, The Roses let them fulfill their most destructive tendencies.
The film, now playing in theaters, follows married couple Ivy (Colman) and Theo Rose (Cumberbatch). Initially madly in love, their marriage declines under increasing outside pressures and the tension between Ivy’s career success and Theo’s failures. Their mutual loathing reaches a fever pitch with them escalating their attempts to torture each other — he plays polka music at excruciatingly loud volumes, she drops live crabs in his bath.
The crabs, by the way, were real (though not alive). “They stank,” Cumberbatch tells Entertainment Weekly. “Everyone was very proud about how much they cleaned them, and I said, ‘What did you clean them with because they’re rancid?'”
Jaap Buitendijk/Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Things finally come to a head one night when Theo feeds Ivy food containing raspberries, which she is deathly allergic to. From there, they descend into a knock-down, drag-out fight, in which they throw oranges at each other, plunge into couches, knock artwork off the walls, and more.
“It was quite painful at times,” Cumberbatch says of shooting the fight, which required three long days of filming. “Throwing myself on the floor. Some padding was involved, but not much.”
Though Colman explains that some of that was Cumberbatch’s own fault due to his vigorous approach to the performance. “Ben gets enthusiastic,” she says. “He’s hurling himself toward solid floors or wooden sofa arms.”
Cumberbatch says that he also made a critical error in his assessment of the couch. “The arm has got the same covering as the cushion, so I thought it was going to be soft,” he explains. “I hadn’t sat in that corner of the sofa. So, it was like, ‘Ah, no, that’s not a cushion. That’s a solid bit of joint underneath that cover. But it was a lot of fun. Apart from me being a bit enthusiastic sometimes.”
One thing that was softer than it looks — the oranges, which were made out of foam. “I got really excited about throwing the oranges,” Cumberbatch notes, to which Colman adds, glibly, “He did. And it was very good aim.”
Jaap Buitendijk/Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
“It was,” Cumberbatch agrees. “But they were fake!”
The sequence was the final part of the film shoot, given that they could not afford to destroy the house and rebuild it. In fact, many of the moments in the fight could only be done once because of the destruction of the set.
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“We couldn’t muck up the house before the end,” Colman notes. “It was sad having to make that set a mess.”
Adds Cumberbatch: “We had to go through the house, destroying the bits that we destroyed in order. It was us saying goodbye to those characters, goodbye to working with each other as those characters, and that amazing set.”
The Roses is in theaters now.
