The one actor Olivia Colman always dreamed of emulating: “I want to do what he does”

Posted On September 3, 2025September 3, 2025

In Olivia Colman‘s latest role in The Roses, she transforms into a driven, ambitious up-and-coming restaurateur, not dissimilar to her cameo in The Bear.

Based on Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses, and following on from a 1989 adaptation starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, the film follows the therapised breakdown of a spectacularly toxic marriage between two highly successful people, played by Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch.

It’s the latest in a string of high-profile roles for Colman, who has become one of the British heavyweights in the industry, starring in fan favourites like The Crown, quirky indies like Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, which she siphoned to an Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’, and British classics like Broadchurch. Shaking off her early roles of anxious, highly-strung, slightly posh characters, best personified in Peep Show’s Sophie, the actor has since come into her own, breaking into Hollywood and cementing her position as a truly excellent master of her craft.

Colman did not come from an acting family: her father was a chartered surveyor and her mother was a nurse (although her interrupted career as a ballet dancer may have piqued Colman’s interest in pursuing acting). Hence, she didn’t feel like such a career was something she was allowed to do, and never imagined that she would become a successful actor, let alone get the opportunity to work with her favourite and inspiration Anthony Hopkins. Despite these initial doubts, she went on to study at Cambridge before studying at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, home to some of the most celebrated actors of our time, like Daniel Day-Lewis, Patrick Stewart and Josh O’Connor.

Colman and Hopkins ended up working together on the 2020 film, The Father, which follows an elderly man battling with dementia and his relationship with his daughter. An adaptation of director Florian Zeller’s stage play of the same name, The Father was a confronting and deeply emotional portrayal of life lost steadily in the plundering haze of a degenerative disease, and the resulting breakdown of the human spirit, embodied superbly by Hopkins, who, in a career-defining role at the age of 83, nabbed an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’.

Of the project, Colman expressed how being on set with the Welsh actor was utter joy and one of her loved working experiences. But her admiration for the actor came long before they worked together, with her watching him on TV when she was just a child in the 1980s. Hopkins even influenced her decision to become an actor when she was “too scared to admit” it. But after seeing him on TV, Colman realised, “I want to be him, I want to do what he does… I never imagined that I would become one [actor] and on top of that get an opportunity to work with Tony”.

At that time, Hopkins was already a well-established movie star, working on films like the 1981’s Bunker, where he played Hitler, as well as The Bounty and The Elephant Man. His later roles, such as Hannibal Lecter, the psychiatrist-cum-cannibal in The Silence of the Lambs and much later, as Pope Benedict in The Two Popes, have earned him one of the longest-spanning illustrious careers in acting.

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