When Rose Byrne won a Golden Globe last month for her starring role as a mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Mary Bronstein's"If I Had Legs I'dKick You,"her acceptance speech briefly threatened to overshadow the actual honor. In it, she explained that her longtime partner, Bobby Cannavale, was absent from the ceremony because he was at a reptile convention in New Jersey, where he hoped to fulfill their children's dreams by purchasing a bearded dragon.
It was a charming and funny aside that some users of social media naturally used to criticize Cannavale and try togin up a controversy.(Insert eye-roll emoji here.) Byrne, now an Oscar nominee for the same role, found herself having to explain that parenthood almost always comes with scheduling conflicts and answerfollow-up questionsabout the reptilian addition to her family.
Including, I regret to report, from me. Since Conan O'Brien, who co-stars in "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You," will behosting this year's Oscars, it seems natural that Byrne will get some sort of comedic shout-out during the telecast. Has he asked her to bring the bearded lizard with her to the ceremony?
"I think he knows better than to ask that," she says, laughing. "I really regret that," she adds, referring to her acceptance speech revelation. "I'm an essentially pretty private person, and it's a tough line you have to straddle with the press. I definitely learned a lesson."
Fortunately, Byrne's professional life is rich enough to require no offscreen embroidery.
Nineteen years ago, she burst onto the cultural landscape in high drama-queen style: Wild-eyed, half-naked and covered in blood. The 2007 opening of FX's groundbreaking legal drama"Damages,"in which Byrne's young lawyer, Ellen Parsons, flees an uptown New York apartment building in which something terrible has clearly happened, sparked all manner of conversation. As the series unfurled, proving to a skeptical entertainment industry that women can be compelling antiheroes too, much of that talk revolved around Byrne.
Who was this young actor going toe-to-toe with Glenn Close as "Damages'" deliciously Machiavellian attorney Patty Hewes?
Byrne has been answering that question ever since. By now you could fill in the blank of "Wait, is that the woman from... ?" with "Damages," or "Get Him to the Greek," or "Insidious," or "Bridesmaids," or "X-Men" movies or "Spy," or "Instant Family," or "Neighbors," or "Mrs. America," or the ongoing Apple TV series "Platonic," whose third season is currently in the works. (And that list is far from exhaustive.) Post-Oscars, she'll add a Broadway production of Noël Coward's "Fallen Angels," coming just after the film "Tow," in which she plays a homeless woman who fights the system after her car is towed, premieres in March; "The Good Daughter," a Peacock miniseries in which Bryne co-stars with Meghann Fahy and Brendan Gleeson, is in postproduction.
Not to belabor the reptile references, but Byrne is something of a creative chameleon, moving easily from drama to comedy to horror, film to television to stage and back again. In many ways, her gut-wrenching, darkly funny performance as a woman pushed beyond all endurance in "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" is a culmination of all the characters she brought to life before it.
Beginning with "Damages." Though she had done plenty of work previously, including roles in "Troy" and "I Capture the Castle," it was her role as Ellen Parsons, who becomes determined to beat Patty at her own game, that brought Byrne to fame — and all the pressures and decisions that come with it.
"I still remember filming that [opening] scene," Byrne says in an interview in the A24 offices the day afterthe film academy's nominees luncheon. "That show was tricky, getting used to how TV worked, with writers writing until the very last minute. It was still unusual for a big movie star to be doing TV, and it was daunting. Glenn, well, she's Glenn, iconoclastic; she brings all of her roles with her. But she's also eccentric Glenn and she's funny and she works so hard. Up close, seeing a great actor raises the bar. I was spoiled [getting] to watch her work every day for five years."
Byrne received two Emmy nominations and a lot of attention for "Damages," but, as is so often the case, she found herself being offered roles that were alarmingly similar to Ellen.
"You can get pigeonholed really quickly," she says. "I made the very conscious decision to do something comedic."
It's tough to imagine anything more comedic than "Get Him to the Greek," which came out in 2010, and "Bridesmaids," which premiered in 2011.
It was a bit of a leap. Having never trained in improv, Byrne had to adapt to being fed multiple alternative lines during filming while working with actors who might float off into comedic rants at any minute. "I really did learn on my feet. When I first started to do it, I found it terrifying and thrilling at the same time, trying to keep up."
She also had to learn not to break. "I was useless," she says of"Bridesmaids,"in which she plays a relatively straight role. "I was laughing all the time. But how could I not?"
By the time she starred opposite Melissa McCarthy in Paul Feig'scriminally underrated "Spy,"she had a few more experiences under her belt. "Though still it is hard not to break when you're facedwith Melissa McCarthy," she says. "I defy anyone to do it."
(When I tell her that "Spy," in which she plays a highly bewigged and over-the-top Russian mobster, is one of my favorite movies, her face lights up. "You've made my day," she says. "Isn't it great? It kind of went under the radar. But if you know you know.")
Though her roles in the first two"Insidious" movies, and more recently in the heartwarming"Instant Family,"featured the mother-in-crisis tension that fuels "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You," it was, she says, her comedic roles that stretched her as an actor.
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"When I had the opportunity to do broader characters in comedy, it was a game-changer," she says. "There was so much more color I can discover here."
Though classified as a comedy for purposes of the Golden Globes — Byrne won lead female actor in a movie musical or comedy — "If I Had Legs," like Byrne's career, defies categorization.
Based on writer-director Mary Bronstein'spersonal experience, the film follows Linda (Byrne), a therapist and mother. With her husband literally (and figuratively) at sea, Linda tries to cope with the needs of her patients while caring for a child whose inability to eat has become life-threatening.
When, on top of everything else, the ceiling of their apartment collapses, the two take refuge in a rather squalid motel, where Linda often leaves the child (who the audience hears but does not see) in their room while she smokes, drinks and contemplates the pulsating abyss she feels her life has become.
Where some see a black comedy, others see horror and/or a bleak exploration of the pressures of motherhood — an increasingly popular subgenre referred to by some as "mum noir."
Although much of her previous work involved strong co-stars or ensembles, Byrne carries this film almost single-handedly, often through close-ups shot so tightly that she felt like her eyelashes might brush the camera.
She wasn't thinking of that, however, when she got the script from her agent. Instead, she was instantly captivated by the story and what she has characterized as Bronstein's willingness to buck so many cinematic traditions, beginning with the decision not to show Linda's child: "By not showing the daughter, she forces you to reckon with the woman, a woman who is behaving really questionably in the role of a mother, something that is not particularly approved of."
Linda is hostile, defensive and quite unlikable in many ways. She apparently has no friends and seeks help where it clearly cannot be found — from her absent husband and O'Brien's narcissistic fellow therapist — while rudely rejecting it when it is kindly offered, mainly by the motel's superintendent, played by ASAP Rocky. Even for those who understand the sometimes brutal nature of motherhood, Linda is a tough sell for empathy. Only Byrne's flashes of humor and desperately flailing humanity keep her on this side of monstrous.
Byrne understands why some people might not consider "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" a comedy — "It's a very dark story about a very serious thing" — but when she first read it, she says, "I was laughing and gasping at the same time."
The film breaks all the traditional movie rules, Byrne says. "The character is the ultimate antihero and she's a mother" — something that is rarely allowed. It's also an unforgiving portrait of the daughter, who is far from sympathetic as she whines, throws tantrums and makes endless demands.
For Byrne, the child's portrayal is also a way of keeping the film focused on Linda.
"You do have to wonder if this is how she is, or how her mother sees and hears her," she explains. "[Linda] doesn't see her as a little girl, as a child, which can happen when you're so frustrated. We've all been there. [Children] show a mirror to all of our limitations."
Linda's hostility was tough for Byrne at first, she admits. "That's not a natural space for myself. If I'm under stress, I'm not naturally hostile; I'm really spaced out. But there's a reason she doesn't have any friends. I don't think she wants anyone in her life reflecting her behavior and her choices."
The nonchronological nature of filming posed its own challenges. Byrne often had to shoot scenes from different points of Linda's progressive breakdown on the same day. Byrne and Bronstein had spent weeks combing through the script before production and met daily about each scene as production progressed.
"I tracked it as best I could," Byrne says. "I didn't want it to be one note. That was the most important thing. There always has to be nuance."
The climactic scene, which involves Linda battling the ocean, had to be shot fairly early on before the water off Montauk, where the film is set and was shot, became too cold. It was, she says, an ambitious sequence. "Fortunately," she says, "I'm an Aussie, so I grew up very aware of the ocean. But I'm sensible. I did about 75% of it, but I also had a brilliant stunt double. Our cinematographer did float off at one time," she adds with a laugh, "but Mary was always safety first."
When asked if echoes from previous works — the ailing child in "Insidious," scenes in "Physical," during which her character binges and purges in a seedy motel room — helped inform her portrayal of Linda, Byrne first expresses surprise: "I hadn't thought of that. They do like to get me in hotel rooms." But though she wasn't drawing specifically on any previous performance, she acknowledges that "Everything informs everything. All that you've done before informs where you are right now."
Which means there's a through line in the diverse work of this creative chameleon, subtle but identifiable: Byrne's own fascination with "the tension of someone trying to cover for themselves constantly, a lack of acknowledgment of reality. To see how far they go."
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This story originally appeared inLos Angeles Times.