She fell in love with Dolly Parton at 5. Now she's the next best thing

Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back

Sydney Morning Herald

3 days ago

Sydney Morning Herald

Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back

This story is part of the August 17 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories. There is something deliciously subversive about Uma Thurman. We are talking over Zoom, Thurman in the top-floor bedroom of her rural retreat just outside New York, wearing what looks like a gamekeeper's gilet, with no make-up and her hair unruly; gorgeous even when off-duty. 'You don't want to make a girl be obedient; it's not in her best interests,' she is saying, her voice patrician but her smile somehow naughty; it's in her eyes, too. We are talking about our daughters, both 13 and liable to barge in at any moment despite being told not to. 'It's kind of wonderful that they know the rules and don't always listen.' She could be talking about herself. Thurman – famous for her totemic performances in the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Volume 2, as well as for movies like the Oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons, the sci-fi Gattaca and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac – likes to confound expectations. After Pulp Fiction, for which she was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, she did not make a big-budget film for three years. And since making Kill Bill, in which she plays a vengeful assassin expertly schooled in martial arts, she has not wielded a sword on screen. Instead, she has spent the past two decades turning down action roles, doing rom-coms and contemporary drama and appearing on Broadway. 'I did anything but, many times,' she says. 'I didn't grind out a whole bunch of follow-up action movies because I felt I had done something significant in the field. And it was fun to not overplay it,' she says with a smile. 'But at the same time I can't stay out of it forever.' And so we now have two opportunities to see Thurman kick butt once again. In fact, towards the end of the new Netflix film The Old Guard 2, there is a scene that will have a certain sort of cineaste very excited indeed. Thurman, who plays a jaded 5000-year-old immortal called Discord, has an epic sword fight in front of a secret nuclear facility with her fellow immortal, Andromache, played by Charlize Theron – also a co-producer of the film and its predecessor. 'Andy' is a Scythian warrior whose preferred weapon is a hefty axe. It's Kill Bill' s bloody Bride versus Mad Max' s Imperator Furiosa, two icons of female vengeance and power, a fever dream of steel on steel. And even though it has been more than 20 years, Thurman, now 55, hasn't forgotten all her moves. 'Thank God for that, because I signed on quite late for this project so I didn't have time to do proper training,' she says. 'Fortunately I had put in hundreds of hours learning how to hold a sword.' For the two Kill Bill films, Thurman trained for eight hours a day for three months. 'You may not be limber and strong,' she continues, 'but if your brain has learnt how to memorise sequences of movements, you can get back in that zone.' The film, which is based on a comic book, is essentially about a band of age-old warriors using their supernatural powers to assist their less-gifted fellow humans. Theron's Andy is their leader, and both the original and the sequel were directed by women, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Victoria Mahoney respectively. 'With The Old Guard, I thought that first movie was really unusual, a superb female-led action film that had depth, drama and really beautiful, naturalistic acting,' Thurman says. Another draw was the opportunity to work with Theron. 'Charlize is a miraculous performer, a very powerful individual and as charismatic in person as on screen. And I liked the idea of playing a supporting role to another actress who I thought had done really significant work in the drama/action field.' Likewise, Theron had long wanted to cross swords with Thurman. 'I have always admired Uma from afar,' she reveals via email. 'From Dangerous Liaisons to Kill Bill, her work is a masterclass in finding the micro in characters. She knows exactly how to change her cadence in a second to convey something so intimate, so subtle, just out of nowhere. In moments I got so lost watching her in scenes we had together that I had to remind myself I was in the scene with her. She's that captivating! I love her curiosity. Her willingness to switch things on the spot. And her truly good nature. She is kind to the bone.' Thurman's other big project this year is Dexter: Resurrection, a reboot of the celebrated mid-noughties TV series Dexter about a serial killer with a moral compass. In this new season, Michael C. Hall returns in the titular role, while Thurman plays the head of security to a billionaire, played by Peter Dinklage, who is so obsessed with serial killers that he hosts a sort of psychopaths' convention in his fancy mansion. In the second episode we see Thurman's character about to do away with an errant serial killer with a nail-studded baseball bat. 'It has a real black humour to it, but it takes itself seriously enough that it doesn't take the bite out of the blackness,' she says. Thurman was 24 when she appeared in Pulp Fiction. She played Mia Wallace, the wife of a crime boss. She danced barefoot with John Travolta's character, Vincent Vega, overdosed on heroin, was brought around by a shot of adrenaline to the heart and became a cultural icon: her black-fringed bob and monochrome wardrobe a defining 1990s aesthetic. Thurman says she didn't realise the film would have such an impact while she was making it. 'I knew it was special, you could tell from the writing, the uniqueness, but it was a relatively small film.' And by this point she had been working as an actress for nearly a decade. Thurman's childhood defied conventions. Her father, Robert Thurman, is one of the world's foremost professors of Tibetan Buddhism, having been ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama in 1965. In 1967 he married the German-Swedish model turned psychotherapist Nena von Schlebrügge, who had been previously married to the LSD guru Timothy Leary. The pair bought some land in Massachusetts, built a house and raised their four children, three boys and Uma, although there were occasional stints in India. 'I didn't really understand that I was an American until I was about 13,' Thurman says. 'I was raised by a very European woman, so it was kind of late news to me that I wasn't really a Swedish girl.' Both of her parents were extraordinary in their own ways. 'My mother had a very eventful life. She was discovered by [British photographer] Norman Parkinson in a schoolyard in Stockholm when she was 13. He took a test photo of her and gave her his card. Two years later, when she was 15 or 16, she took off, rang him up and became a model.' So when Thurman, aged 15, her parents on sabbatical in Japan, decided to leave her boarding school to go to New York, by herself, to pursue an acting career, her parents did not try to stop her. 'I knew very clearly that I was going to be an actress and I very much wanted to go out on my own,' she says. 'Both my parents did the same sort of thing when they were young. They were very independent. So I think there was a certain amount of being raised to be independent.' Today Thurman has her own family. There are her children from her second marriage to her Gattaca co-star Ethan Hawke: Maya Hawke, 27, and Levon Hawke, 23, both in the family business. (Thurman's first marriage, to Gary Oldman, was brief and tempestuous; she was 19 and he was 31, and they divorced in 1992.) The father of Thurman's 13-year-old, Luna, is the financier Arpad 'Arki' Busson, with whom Thurman had a relationship between 2007 and 2014. As a mother she finds the freedoms she was given as a teenage girl 'mind-boggling. I mean, it's unimaginable. Those were different times.' Aged 15, she was making her own money, finding her way around the city, going to auditions, 'with just a Filofax and a quarter in case I got lost and needed to call someone'. She did some modelling to help pay for acting classes, appearing on the cover of British Vogue in 1985, travelling to Europe for work. Thurman says this period was both scary and exciting. 'It was very much navigating an adult world, so there was a lot of pretending to be older.' Aged 17, she was cast in Terry Gilliam's film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as the goddess Venus, emerging naked from an enormous clamshell, her husband, the uxorious Vulcan, played by Oliver Reed. 'That really turned the dial for me,' she says. 'Before that, a part of me didn't know whether it would all be a dead end, as a good Swede is likely to tell you. It was at that moment I realised that I wasn't going back to school. Seeing a great director on a mad project, it was the moment I saw that I was truly on my path.' The path was never direct. Thurman's approach has always been to jump between genres, to take on odd projects, like Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, rather than obvious ones, like The Lord of the Rings. This was in part because she did not have formal training as an actor and so saw each project as an opportunity to learn. 'I kept finding different, unique projects that would really require me to stretch. And from that kind of elasticity, that's how I helped myself grow.' Loading I ask what advice she has given to her daughter Maya. 'Oh, she knows what she's doing. She went to [the acting school] Juilliard, thank god. She actually finished high school. And what I did learn [about mothering] is that nobody listens. So it's really about being there for them rather than telling them what to do.' She has let Maya have free range in her wardrobe, ransacking it for the Nineties classics; Thurman was famously the first person to wear Prada to the Oscars. 'There's very little left of it; she's done a good job,' she says, not seeming to mind. 'I don't spend a lot of my everyday life dressing up.' After almost three decades of parenting, with her youngest now a teenager, Thurman is reaching what she calls her 'sunset period' of mothering. 'It's beautiful and there's not that much time left in the day,' she says. She is starting to think about what comes next, when she doesn't have to invest so much energy in 'shopping and driving and emailing teachers and all the things we do'. She has always had an ambition to direct, but that is for when she has more time. For now she's still just trying to fit it all in: work, parenting, looking after herself. To relax she does yoga and Pilates, goes for walks, cooks. She used to be a big reader of non-fiction but no more. 'Now non-fiction is just too brutal,' she says. I ask what she does read. 'Oh, the world has driven me to romantasy. Really, really teenage stuff. It's a great alternative to the newspapers right now.' Does she have any recommendations? 'I can't tell you. It will make me blush,' she says, smiling, delighted, it seems, to continue to defy expectations. The Sunday Times/The Times UK

The Age

3 days ago

The Age

Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back

This story is part of the August 17 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories. There is something deliciously subversive about Uma Thurman. We are talking over Zoom, Thurman in the top-floor bedroom of her rural retreat just outside New York, wearing what looks like a gamekeeper's gilet, with no make-up and her hair unruly; gorgeous even when off-duty. 'You don't want to make a girl be obedient; it's not in her best interests,' she is saying, her voice patrician but her smile somehow naughty; it's in her eyes, too. We are talking about our daughters, both 13 and liable to barge in at any moment despite being told not to. 'It's kind of wonderful that they know the rules and don't always listen.' She could be talking about herself. Thurman – famous for her totemic performances in the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Volume 2, as well as for movies like the Oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons, the sci-fi Gattaca and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac – likes to confound expectations. After Pulp Fiction, for which she was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, she did not make a big-budget film for three years. And since making Kill Bill, in which she plays a vengeful assassin expertly schooled in martial arts, she has not wielded a sword on screen. Instead, she has spent the past two decades turning down action roles, doing rom-coms and contemporary drama and appearing on Broadway. 'I did anything but, many times,' she says. 'I didn't grind out a whole bunch of follow-up action movies because I felt I had done something significant in the field. And it was fun to not overplay it,' she says with a smile. 'But at the same time I can't stay out of it forever.' And so we now have two opportunities to see Thurman kick butt once again. In fact, towards the end of the new Netflix film The Old Guard 2, there is a scene that will have a certain sort of cineaste very excited indeed. Thurman, who plays a jaded 5000-year-old immortal called Discord, has an epic sword fight in front of a secret nuclear facility with her fellow immortal, Andromache, played by Charlize Theron – also a co-producer of the film and its predecessor. 'Andy' is a Scythian warrior whose preferred weapon is a hefty axe. It's Kill Bill' s bloody Bride versus Mad Max' s Imperator Furiosa, two icons of female vengeance and power, a fever dream of steel on steel. And even though it has been more than 20 years, Thurman, now 55, hasn't forgotten all her moves. 'Thank God for that, because I signed on quite late for this project so I didn't have time to do proper training,' she says. 'Fortunately I had put in hundreds of hours learning how to hold a sword.' For the two Kill Bill films, Thurman trained for eight hours a day for three months. 'You may not be limber and strong,' she continues, 'but if your brain has learnt how to memorise sequences of movements, you can get back in that zone.' The film, which is based on a comic book, is essentially about a band of age-old warriors using their supernatural powers to assist their less-gifted fellow humans. Theron's Andy is their leader, and both the original and the sequel were directed by women, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Victoria Mahoney respectively. 'With The Old Guard, I thought that first movie was really unusual, a superb female-led action film that had depth, drama and really beautiful, naturalistic acting,' Thurman says. Another draw was the opportunity to work with Theron. 'Charlize is a miraculous performer, a very powerful individual and as charismatic in person as on screen. And I liked the idea of playing a supporting role to another actress who I thought had done really significant work in the drama/action field.' Likewise, Theron had long wanted to cross swords with Thurman. 'I have always admired Uma from afar,' she reveals via email. 'From Dangerous Liaisons to Kill Bill, her work is a masterclass in finding the micro in characters. She knows exactly how to change her cadence in a second to convey something so intimate, so subtle, just out of nowhere. In moments I got so lost watching her in scenes we had together that I had to remind myself I was in the scene with her. She's that captivating! I love her curiosity. Her willingness to switch things on the spot. And her truly good nature. She is kind to the bone.' Thurman's other big project this year is Dexter: Resurrection, a reboot of the celebrated mid-noughties TV series Dexter about a serial killer with a moral compass. In this new season, Michael C. Hall returns in the titular role, while Thurman plays the head of security to a billionaire, played by Peter Dinklage, who is so obsessed with serial killers that he hosts a sort of psychopaths' convention in his fancy mansion. In the second episode we see Thurman's character about to do away with an errant serial killer with a nail-studded baseball bat. 'It has a real black humour to it, but it takes itself seriously enough that it doesn't take the bite out of the blackness,' she says. Thurman was 24 when she appeared in Pulp Fiction. She played Mia Wallace, the wife of a crime boss. She danced barefoot with John Travolta's character, Vincent Vega, overdosed on heroin, was brought around by a shot of adrenaline to the heart and became a cultural icon: her black-fringed bob and monochrome wardrobe a defining 1990s aesthetic. Thurman says she didn't realise the film would have such an impact while she was making it. 'I knew it was special, you could tell from the writing, the uniqueness, but it was a relatively small film.' And by this point she had been working as an actress for nearly a decade. Thurman's childhood defied conventions. Her father, Robert Thurman, is one of the world's foremost professors of Tibetan Buddhism, having been ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama in 1965. In 1967 he married the German-Swedish model turned psychotherapist Nena von Schlebrügge, who had been previously married to the LSD guru Timothy Leary. The pair bought some land in Massachusetts, built a house and raised their four children, three boys and Uma, although there were occasional stints in India. 'I didn't really understand that I was an American until I was about 13,' Thurman says. 'I was raised by a very European woman, so it was kind of late news to me that I wasn't really a Swedish girl.' Both of her parents were extraordinary in their own ways. 'My mother had a very eventful life. She was discovered by [British photographer] Norman Parkinson in a schoolyard in Stockholm when she was 13. He took a test photo of her and gave her his card. Two years later, when she was 15 or 16, she took off, rang him up and became a model.' So when Thurman, aged 15, her parents on sabbatical in Japan, decided to leave her boarding school to go to New York, by herself, to pursue an acting career, her parents did not try to stop her. 'I knew very clearly that I was going to be an actress and I very much wanted to go out on my own,' she says. 'Both my parents did the same sort of thing when they were young. They were very independent. So I think there was a certain amount of being raised to be independent.' Today Thurman has her own family. There are her children from her second marriage to her Gattaca co-star Ethan Hawke: Maya Hawke, 27, and Levon Hawke, 23, both in the family business. (Thurman's first marriage, to Gary Oldman, was brief and tempestuous; she was 19 and he was 31, and they divorced in 1992.) The father of Thurman's 13-year-old, Luna, is the financier Arpad 'Arki' Busson, with whom Thurman had a relationship between 2007 and 2014. As a mother she finds the freedoms she was given as a teenage girl 'mind-boggling. I mean, it's unimaginable. Those were different times.' Aged 15, she was making her own money, finding her way around the city, going to auditions, 'with just a Filofax and a quarter in case I got lost and needed to call someone'. She did some modelling to help pay for acting classes, appearing on the cover of British Vogue in 1985, travelling to Europe for work. Thurman says this period was both scary and exciting. 'It was very much navigating an adult world, so there was a lot of pretending to be older.' Aged 17, she was cast in Terry Gilliam's film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as the goddess Venus, emerging naked from an enormous clamshell, her husband, the uxorious Vulcan, played by Oliver Reed. 'That really turned the dial for me,' she says. 'Before that, a part of me didn't know whether it would all be a dead end, as a good Swede is likely to tell you. It was at that moment I realised that I wasn't going back to school. Seeing a great director on a mad project, it was the moment I saw that I was truly on my path.' The path was never direct. Thurman's approach has always been to jump between genres, to take on odd projects, like Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, rather than obvious ones, like The Lord of the Rings. This was in part because she did not have formal training as an actor and so saw each project as an opportunity to learn. 'I kept finding different, unique projects that would really require me to stretch. And from that kind of elasticity, that's how I helped myself grow.' Loading I ask what advice she has given to her daughter Maya. 'Oh, she knows what she's doing. She went to [the acting school] Juilliard, thank god. She actually finished high school. And what I did learn [about mothering] is that nobody listens. So it's really about being there for them rather than telling them what to do.' She has let Maya have free range in her wardrobe, ransacking it for the Nineties classics; Thurman was famously the first person to wear Prada to the Oscars. 'There's very little left of it; she's done a good job,' she says, not seeming to mind. 'I don't spend a lot of my everyday life dressing up.' After almost three decades of parenting, with her youngest now a teenager, Thurman is reaching what she calls her 'sunset period' of mothering. 'It's beautiful and there's not that much time left in the day,' she says. She is starting to think about what comes next, when she doesn't have to invest so much energy in 'shopping and driving and emailing teachers and all the things we do'. She has always had an ambition to direct, but that is for when she has more time. For now she's still just trying to fit it all in: work, parenting, looking after herself. To relax she does yoga and Pilates, goes for walks, cooks. She used to be a big reader of non-fiction but no more. 'Now non-fiction is just too brutal,' she says. I ask what she does read. 'Oh, the world has driven me to romantasy. Really, really teenage stuff. It's a great alternative to the newspapers right now.' Does she have any recommendations? 'I can't tell you. It will make me blush,' she says, smiling, delighted, it seems, to continue to defy expectations. The Sunday Times/The Times UK

Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch went to war. Then the fun started

Sydney Morning Herald

6 days ago

Sydney Morning Herald

Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch went to war. Then the fun started

From the start, this interview is in grave danger of running completely out of control. Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch are here to talk about their roles as a disintegrating couple in Jay Roach's The Roses which – just to put this right up front – is a comic tour-de-force for the both of them. Our slot is short (although, since nobody is prepared to stop talking, we run over time) and supposed to be strictly 'film-focused', but somehow we jump from what Colman is seeing tonight at the theatre (Fiddler on the Roof) to TV shows they're both watching, with some insider tips from Colman on the best episodes of The Bear. They interrupt and talk over each other. 'I'm sorry,' says Colman, genuinely apologetic. 'We haven't seen each other today.' They were friends, but had never worked together before making this film. Of course, they are two of the brightest stars in the British film firmament: Colman won the Oscar as best actress in 2019 for playing a fabulously vulgar Queen Anne in The Favourite, while Cumberbatch is Sherlock, Dr Strange and a good many other dramatic characters. They are also, unusually for any kind of star, middle-aged: Colman is 51, while Cumberbatch is 49. 'Luckily, we've managed to stay friends,' Colman said in a similarly freewheeling interview in Vanity Fair. 'That's the fear: that you like each other, and what if you don't get on when you're actually on set? But it was lovely.' The Roses is ostensibly a remake of the 1989 critical and commercial hit The War of the Roses. It was directed by Danny DeVito and starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. It was not lovely; watching it now, it barely feels like a comedy at all. At its centre was a wealthy couple whose marriage was rapidly souring into a permanent state of rage. Nobody in it was remotely likeable. Douglas plays Oliver, an ambitious lawyer with more than a whiff of Gordon Gekko about him. His trophy wife Barbara – a former gymnast – expends far too much creative energy on constructing the perfect home, learning to hate him along the way. Worst of all – spoiler alert – their dog is a casualty of their fighting. Once you kill off a canine character, you're on different turf. The source material for both films was a 1981 novel by prolific popular fiction writer Warren Adler. Cumberbatch read that too. 'It's really bleak,' he says. 'It's really a diminishing thing from what the story was named after, which was obviously a bloody civil war, to the book which was brilliant but incredibly dark.' He thinks he first saw the Douglas-Turner film in his teens; he watched it again before they started making The Roses. 'I remembered it as much funnier,' he says. 'But then I was young and I hadn't had a relationship. I look at it now and go wow, that's pretty … tough and awful.' The Roses strikes such a different note that they don't see it as a remake. Theo and Ivy are equal partners – he is an architect, she is a chef – whose equality is sundered when she opens a restaurant that becomes the buzziest of the year. As Ivy makes the leap into TV stardom, Theo's career nosedives after an unfortunate accident with a misjudged roofing feature. With nothing to do, he sets about building his dream home on a clifftop block Ivy has been able to buy. Ivy, meanwhile, becomes the family provider and outsider, forlorn when she sees how marginal her parenting role has become but too over-committed to do anything about it. Loading The script is the work of Australian writer Tony McNamara, who wrote The Favourite along with the television series The Great and Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos' wild follow-up to The Favourite, Poor Things. 'What Tony has done is take it somewhere else,' says Colman. 'There is more love in it.' The central relationship is full of wit, fun and warmth; when it morphs into hostility, the smart dialogue gives way to a crazed mayhem that could have been devised by Buster Keaton. 'When you're watching it, you're rooting for them,' she says. 'I think people are thinking 'ooh, I hope they get back together'. I hope they think that. Did you think that?' I did. Several sideways shifts help make that happen. Given the opportunity, McNamara will always steer towards the edge of absurdity. The initial meet-cute between Theo and Ivy, for example, turns into a burlesque romp when, about two minutes after meeting in the kitchen of a restaurant where he is trying to escape a boring dinner, they briskly agree to have sex in the fridge. It is clear, both to them and us, that this is the start of the rest of their lives. You gasp, then laugh, at the impossible speed of these proceedings. Not so impossible, says Colman. 'I fell in love with my husband the second I saw him. Proper thunderbolts,' she says. She met Ed Sinclair when she was 20 and they were in the same play; they have been together ever since. Cumberbatch is married to Sophie Hunter, a director and playwright. 'And I did with mine, but I took 17½ years to get round to doing something about it,' he says. 'Awwww,' sighs Colman, sentimentally. Wasn't that a long wait? 'I was a tongue-tied public schoolboy, I didn't know what that was. What they were. You know. What is a woman? But I figured it out and put it to her that we could be more than friends and there we are.' One specific twist, which slants the whole relationship between the Roses, is the fact of their Englishness. Theo and Ivy live in Northern California (actually filmed in Devon, England: it was cheaper and closer to home). Their snappy banter sets them apart from American friends like Amy (Kate McKinnon) who calls herself 'an empath' without irony. 'I thought that was a brilliant stroke, for us to remain English, like fish out of water,' says Colman. 'And I'm eternally grateful, because my American accent is not that good. You haven't heard it,' she adds, turning to Cumberbatch. 'It's awful.' Barbed badinage is not an exclusively English commodity, as Cumberbatch points out. 'Think of Howard Hawks films like His Girl Friday or the films of Billy Wilder. But we do get pigeonholed that way. The invective here is very sharp and cruel, but disguised with wit. In America you get the 'roast', which is just kind of 'f--- you, you're horrible, you motherf---er'. It's unbelievable what they throw at each other. But it's the same with us; we just think we get away with it by being clever around it.' Englishness is inherently amusing; Englishness is charming. So he has found, indeed, in real life. 'You're feted for your accent and you're like 'come on, really? It's just an accent, you know.' But you can get away with speeding tickets and all sorts by just saying 'Ew, I'm so sorry, I'm English!'. Go a big Hugh Grant and they're 'oh, OK, don't do it again'. Well, you know, I say 'they'. That one cop. Better not write that. Don't try this at home, English people!' Colman is giggling. 'I do find myself going over-English when I'm there,' she admits. Underlying the Roses' verbal thrust and parry, however, is a relationship unravelling largely because nobody pays attention to it. However bizarre the battle becomes, their complacency is immediately recognisable and relatable. They think they will be fine because they always are. 'In any long relationship, you need to work on it,' says Cumberbatch. 'They are faced with huge challenges, but they bring the same fun-loving, let's-give-it-a-go attitude to this huge shift in their dynamic. 'I think this schism, not talking, losing the dialogue between you so that you're not able to find the funny and the glue and the sex and the sorries and the I-hear-you-and-understand-you, is where the separation and resentment comes in.' All that talk about having it all, he adds with feeling: that's not possible. 'You can't have it all without a cost. And the cost is that you have to keep working at it, making decisions, investing in it. So you can have it all – a career, children, a love life, a partnership that lasts – but you have to accept the cost and find a balance within that.' What The Roses is not about, as they both stress with fervour, is a home being wrecked because a wife is earning more than her husband; clearly, they both think Theo and Ivy are better than that. 'It pains me to think that people are still saying 'oh, it all goes wrong when the woman is successful'. I sort of want to punch people in the nose when I hear that,' says Colman. 'It's about the couple having pressures on them as a couple.' The two actors swap examples of how their characters let each other down, then hasten to make allowances for each other. 'He weaponises knowing more about the kids than she does,' Colman observes. 'Oh, grossly!' agrees Cumberbatch at once. Colman wondered in their Vanity Fair interview if they 'mucked about too much' on set. 'Poor Jay was probably saying 'it's like herding cats'.' On the contrary, said Roach; their energy fed the mood. 'There is a little bit of a joyful keeping the ball in the air,' he said. 'They trust each other so much that they're willing to go a little off the script or a little into dangerous territory.' Which is not so surprising from Colman, who first came into modest prominence in sketch comedy on The Peep Show, then brought her unerring comic timing to the Lanthimos films. By contrast, there aren't a lot of laughs in Cumberbatch's CV, which I now find surprising. 'That's so true!' exclaims Colman. 'How does that happen?' Cumberbatch thanks her, looking slightly abashed. It's true, he says, that he has done almost no comedy on screen, not that he's done a musical or a horror, either. He hopes all these things will come to him. 'But I've done stuff which has a lot of funny in it. Sherlock and Dr Strange are the two obvious big ones but even something like [Alan] Turing [in The Imitation Game ]: there is humour scattered through everything I do that hopefully shows I can be funny.' And he has done comedies on stage, where an audience soon tells you whether you're funny or not. 'But that can be bad,' he says, as Colman nods vigorously. 'Because if you start chasing the laugh you got last night, it goes dead. And then you're thinking 'what went wrong?'' Over to Colman. 'And then you start over-egging it.' He picks up the thread again. 'Because with that fourth wall, you know what's there. And it's quite fun not knowing – or pretending not to know, because this script is laugh-out-loud. You'd have to be really bad not to make this funny.'

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Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back

Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back

Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch went to war. Then the fun started

She fell in love with Dolly Parton at 5. Now she's the next best thing

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Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back

Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back

Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch went to war. Then the fun started

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