Actress Olivia Colman and actor Benedict Cumberbatch wholeheartedly leaned into their most deranged tendencies during the shooting of The Roses, a dark comedy portrait of a marriage dissolving through continually ratcheted-up emotional and physical conflict. The movie, which is currently in theaters, gave both performers license to get at destruction—both literal and emotional—crazily theatrically.

What Happens When Olivia Colman And Benedict Cumberbatch Clash? The Roses' Jaw-Dropping Fight Scene Breakdown! 4

From Love to Loathing

The Roses focuses on Ivy (Colman) and Theo (Cumberbatch), formerly a deeply in-love pair whose marriage collapses under the pressure of individual failure, bitterness, and one-upmanship. Ivy’s professional life takes off while Theo’s plateaus, and the imbalance of power gives rise to a toxic competition that turns into full-blown sabotage. Theo plays polka music at ear-splitting decibels; Ivy leaves dead crabs in his bathtub.

“The crabs smelled,” Cumberbatch remembers. “Everybody was boasting at how clean they had them, and I said, ‘What did you clean them with? They’re rotten!'”

The Ultimate Struggle: Oranges, Crashes, and Bruises

The pair’s mutual antipathy is at its worst in the climactic fight scene that took three days to shoot. The sequence involves them hurling oranges, crashing furniture, and ripping through the house.

“It was very painful at times,” says Cumberbatch, who did a lot of his own stunt work. “Some padding was done, but not a lot.”

What Happens When Olivia Colman And Benedict Cumberbatch Clash? The Roses' Jaw-Dropping Fight Scene Breakdown! 5

Colman chimes in, “Ben gets overexcited. He’s launching himself at solid floors and wooden sofa arms.” One of the standout moments included a misjudged jump onto what Cumberbatch thought was a cushion—but proved to be a hard armrest. “It was like, ‘Ah, that’s not soft!'”

Even with the vigor, the actors took to the absurdity. The oranges, for instance, were prosthetics. “I got really enthusiastic about throwing the oranges,” claims Cumberbatch. “He did,” says Colman. “And excellent shot.”

Because the production couldn’t afford to reconstruct the complicated house set, the frantic battle scene was shot last. “We couldn’t mess up the house before the end,” Colman says. Every destructive blow was carefully thought out since it could only be achieved once.

Benedict Cumberbatch Pic Courtesy Searchlight Pictures

“We had to make our way through the house, breaking things in sequence,” adds Cumberbatch. “It was us saying goodbye to those characters, goodbye to working with one another in that world.”

A Final Curtain Call

The Roses concludes on a destructive note—both physical and emotional—but for Colman and Cumberbatch, it was also goodbye to one of their most creatively anarchic and cathartic collaborations.