Benedict Cumberbatch likes America: ‘You don’t have to stay in your lane over there’

Here are some photos from this week’s New York premiere of The Roses, a remake (not really) of The War of the Roses, the 1989 film starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. The two films are based on the same source material (a book by Warren Adler). This new film stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as a British-transplant couple living in Malibu and having an extremely contentious divorce. Olivia and Bendy have been paired together for all of the film’s promotion, and they have an easy chemistry together – a chemistry of old friends, nothing more, really. I enjoyed this piece in the Guardian, where Olivia and Bendy talk about love, marriage and the difference between American humor and British humor. Some highlights:

Benedict is a bigger fan of America: “You don’t have to stay in your lane over there. You can keep evolving.” He talks about how “history speaks to a more nefarious version” of the idea that Britons are refined and Yanks brutes. He also questions the charge levelled by the film: that Americans don’t get irony. “It taps into that cliche: that Brits say to each other things that are really quite cruel, cold and barbed – and Americans just think it’s funny. But maybe that’s changed. Look at the roasting thing … Barbarically cruel. Not at all epigrammatic.”

Olivia on swearing: “Oh I go much worse [internationally]. My first time in America, my lovely team went: [nervous American accent] ‘Um, I know you like the c-word. We can’t do the c-word here.’ And then the LA Times asked me about David Tennant and I said: ‘Oh, total c–t!’ and you could see everyone’s colour just draining. It’s because I was told not to.”

Benedict on romanticizing love: “By its very nature, yes. And I think that’s fine. Classicism has given us this sort of romantic ideal of love, which is impossible to live up to. Those two things wrestle: it’s great to fall in love, but eventually one of you will be dog-tired and doing the bins….There has to be this cool thing beyond the idealism of vows.” He talks mistily about his wedding. “It’s such a powerful thing to express love and then have it reflected back with your friends and family. But to find something beyond that heightened moment, you have to think a bit more deeply than just the party of love.”

His character confesses to feeling “great waves of dizzying hatred” for his wife. Is that incompatible with love? Cumberbatch gulps. “God, this is like a Trojan horse to our [private] lives. When you’re living closely with someone, you go through all the extremes of life. That’s really what love is: getting through them.” A pause. “I’m not sure I’ve felt massive hatred,” says Colman. “I didn’t mean that,” he says, quickly. “But moments when you’re not massively in love.”

[From The Guardian]

For the record, I don’t think Benedict is confessing that there’s trouble in Hunterbatch paradise – whenever we see Sophie and Benedict out together, they seem happy enough, and she IS the mother of his three kids. I think he’s just being realistic, that you’re not achingly and romantically in love with your spouse 24-7. As for the differences between British humor and American humor…I think that, more than any other two nationalities, Americans and Brits understand each other and “get” each other’s humor. If that makes sense? I also think British humor relies too heavily on irony.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.