A Class Act: Olivia Colman’s Deceptive Performances

In her best roles, like The Roses, the Oscar-winning character actor uses her refined accent and demeanour to wrongfoot audiences. They serve as a front to conceal an inner chaos of filthy jokes, violent outbursts and withering putdowns, writes David Opie.   

Exactly 19 years after Olivia Colman debuted on screen in the BBC sketch show Bruiser, the Norwich-born star cemented her National Treasure™ status with an acceptance speech for the ages. ‘This is hilarious,’ she said upon receiving an Academy Award for her role in 2018’s The Favourite. ‘I got an Oscar!’ Tears and inspiring anecdotes followed along with promises to snog anyone who she’d forgotten to thank, all within less than a minute on stage. 

If you weren’t already familiar with Colman’s considerable body of work over the past 25 years, this somewhat erratic speech might have taken you by surprise. After all, she has a rather respectable air about her, a delightfully posh exterior that’s been used to magnificent effect in a number of royal parts. Aside from Queen Anne in The Favourite, Colman also played Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown (2019-2020) and The Queen Mother in 2012's Hyde Park on Hudson, making her the only actor to have portrayed both mother and daughter on screen.

But under all that etiquette lies something a lot more chaotic and even unhinged. We see it bursting out at inopportune moments in The Favourite, and we see it in Colman herself when she blew that raspberry after organisers at the Oscars tried to cut her speech short. It’s this juxtaposition of respectability and disarray, this teasing of something more just below the surface, that’s helped cement Colman as one of the most fascinating character actors working today.

Her latest project is no different. In The Roses she plays acclaimed chef Ivy, one half of a picture-perfect couple who seems to have it all: the perfect house, the perfect careers, the perfect kids. But behind all their enviable success lies a deep-rooted bitterness and resentment that boils over when Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) loses his job.

Jay Roach’s reimagining of The War of the Roses pits Colman and Cumberbatch against each other in the same way that Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner fought back in 1989. Except the difference here is that Ivy’s the one enjoying career success, and Theo stays at home to look after their family. The disparity between picking nits out of his kids’ hair while his wife enjoys champagne on a first-class flight gets to Theo far more than it should. Cue a series of very personal conflicts that start off small, but soon escalate in wild yet increasingly hilarious fashion. 

‘Sometimes Ivy’s mad at me and I can’t even tell,’ says Ncuti Gatwa's character at a fancy dinner hosted by the couple in their home. Ivy’s response? ‘Sometimes [Theo’s] got his cock in me and I can’t even tell.’ It’s not so much the cruelty of the joke as it is Colman’s casual use of the word ‘cock’ that shocks in this otherwise composed, civilised setting. Moments like this crack the well-mannered persona that audiences have come to expect from Colman as a performer. It therefore provides a unique space for her to craft these spit-take moments that no one else can deliver with quite so much impact.

That’s the entire basis of Colman’s role as Edith Swan in Wicked Little Letters (2023), for instance. Because who would suspect someone as sweet and demure as her to be capable of saying, ‘You stink of cum and shit, and the cakes you make look like they’ve fallen out of some fucking sheep’s fucking arsehole’? And who else but Colman could get away with lines like ‘You’re a fucking foxy-arse’ and still maintain a degree of class? 

The actor has been playing with audience presumptions like this as far back as Hot Fuzz (2007), and she clearly has a whale of a time doing it. ‘I could have given you the tour!’ her PC Doris Thatcher kindly offers at one point in the film, before adding, ‘I’ve been around the station a few times!’ with a hearty chuckle.

That foul-mouthed, smiley policewoman in the teeny-tiny village of Sandford, Gloucestershire, is an early example of the archetype that Colman’s since evolved into something darker. When Ivy tells Theo ‘You are a bottomless pit of need’ in The Roses, it’s not so far removed from the cruelty her godmother in Fleabag (2016-2019) delivered throughout the show, with backhanded compliments and brutal putdowns disguised under a fake veneer of naïveté. 

The wealthier the character in Colman’s filmography, the more unhinged they often are. Ivy, for example, goes to more and more extreme measures to spite Theo as her career progresses, be it by dumping live crabs into his bathtub or throwing cake at guests in their home. Theo and the others aren’t entirely innocent or undeserving of her wrath, but whichever side you come down on, there’s something uniquely fascinating about the way Colman unspools these kinds of characters. At times, that unravelling can even lead to violence, as seen towards the end of The Roses when Ivy shoots a gun in their home to threaten her husband.

In doing so, Ivy shares common ground with other notable characters that Colman has played, including Susan Edwards, who killed her own parents in the limited series Landscapers (2021), or even the Reverend Mother from Paddington in Peru (2024), who holds the Brown family at gunpoint. Clarissa Cabot, as the latter was really called, hid her true nature behind a different kind of etiquette, one attached to religious piety rather than wealth or class, but the effect remains the same. 

That’s not to say Colman always repeats the same tricks, however. Far from it, in fact. Empire of Light (2022) director Sam Mendes once described Colman as ‘a Ferrari dressed like a Mini’, but in The Favourite, the roar of that engine, the sheer ferocity of Queen Anne’s character, is barely contained by the royal shackles of expectation that fight to keep her down. There’s a rage there, exacerbated by mental illness, that frees Colman to unleash the inner chaos that’s held back to varying degrees in her work. 

Her role as another queen in The Crown goes to the opposite extreme, which is perhaps what makes it one of her least interesting (albeit award-winning) parts. Consider the Aberfan episode in season three, where Queen Elizabeth holds back tears in the face of 1966’s fatal mining disaster. While that’s true to what happened in real life, Colman has since revealed that she struggles to stifle sadness in moments like this.

‘I had to have an earpiece to play the shipping forecast in my ear. I was trying not to look at… sad faces, not to think about what was happening.’ This restrained Colman more than usual, arguably too much, and kept her from doing what she does best. No one is saying Colman did poorly in The Crown, not by any means, and she’s also very capable in projects where the sweet, posh exterior doesn’t hide much of anything, like Nick Nelson’s mother in Heartstopper (2022-2023).  

But where Colman excels most is in roles like Ivy or Queen Anne, where she’s given space to deconstruct the air of pretence that so readily comes with wealth or class. Whether she uses humour, obscenity or even violence to do so, Colman is never better than when she taps into the flawed people behind such artifice, often exposing the traits that helped them attain positions of power or status in the first place. 

Conversely, that ends up being what humanises them most, even if they’re an 18th-century queen with gout or a high-profile chef with a couple of crabs going spare. And going back to that Oscar speech, that’s even true of Colman herself. Because upon reaching the pinnacle of her industry, she quickly proved that she’s never going to be too fake or arrogant to forget those who helped her. That’s what makes Colman a favourite among fans and critics alike – a class act all the way.

WATCH THE ROSES IN CINEMAS