.png){kind=logo}
Rose Byrne’s win at the Golden Globes on Sunday night was a victory for more than just her, writer-director Mary Bronstein, and the film they made together, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. In a year dominated by films in which women largely took a supporting role while the men got on with the important stuff, Bronstein’s film looked at the life of an ordinary suburban mom whose life is falling — no, flying — apart. The director doesn’t waste any time with niceties; Linda (Byrne) is at the end of her tether when we first meet her, carer to a demanding daughter with a mysterious illness whose face we almost never see, a black hole of want that brings to mind discomfiting images of Henry Spencer’s baby in David Lynch’s Eraserhead, another darkly comic film about the horrors of parenting.
Although she balks at the comparison, Byrne’s performance is a reminder of what used to be almost taken for granted in American cinema over half a century ago, when Barbara Loden could write, direct and star in a film as challenging and provocative as Wanda (1970). There’s also a direct line to Gena Rowlands, who, as well as being his wife and muse, took John Cassavetes’ work far out of his comfort zone — try to find an actress who doesn’t want to make their own A Woman Under the Influence (1974), or Opening Night (1977), or Gloria (1980). Or even The Notebook (2004), for that matter.
Here, speaking the day before her win, Byrne reflects on her journey with the film, almost a year on from its Sundance premiere.
DEADLINE: So, what did you think when you got a script entitled If I Had Legs I’d Kick You? Did you know Mary beforehand?
ROSE BYRNE: [Laughs.] No, I didn’t know Mary. The title was very intriguing, and I went in with an open mind. I was like, ‘OK, this is somehow going to make sense once I read it.’ It gives you the idea that there’s a fury in the movie. There’s a fury behind the character, but she has no ability. She’s isolated. She’s cut off from everybody. She doesn’t have a leg to stand on with her behavior, or her choices she’s making. But if she did, I think she’d kick you. So, there’s this inherent feminine fury, I think, that’s boiling underneath.
DEADLINE: How did it come to you? Through your agent, or did Mary reach out to you personally?
BYRNE: It came to my agent with a letter from Mary and a letter from [producer] Josh Safdie. My agent is a very discerning woman, and she said, “I think you better take a look at this.” [Mary’s writing] lit the page on fire. The script is very much what the film is. It’s full of tension. It’s explicit about not seeing the daughter’s face. There’s great humor — dark humor, obviously. For example, the hamster is described as being like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, trying to break through the wall, when it’s scratching through the box. There’s a sense of foreboding and dread. I had to put it down several times.
And the reveals. Like when it’s revealed that Linda is a therapist. I was like, “Wait, what?” The structure of the script is very tight and unexpected at every turn too. It was very unpredictable, a bit like the movie, and it goes from one genre to the next. The tension is masterfully held, but then it lets out for a bit, and you get some release. Then it comes back in… It’s all in her head, but there’s an encroaching, existential nausea and fear that is slowly drowning her. Mary speaks about David Lynch a lot — the great, late and extraordinary legend David Lynch — and it is Lynchian. So yes, it was really like nothing I’d read before.
DEADLINE: How do you prepare for a role like this?
BYRNE: Well, Mary is a force of nature. Don’t be fooled. She’s this diminutive, very pretty, lovely girl, and she’s just an absolute force of nature. She said, “We’re going to rehearse. Can you make yourself available to me?” I was thrilled. In films, or TV, it’s very rare that you even get to have a conversation, and we managed to do it through a confluence of a bit of luck as well. But for about five weeks I went over to her apartment, three days a week, and we went through the script, page by page by page, going over every line of dialogue. We went over Linda’s backstory — I was obsessed with who this person was before we meet her, because there’s very little given to us, to the audience. Now, this is just homework, as an actor’s homework. It’s not particularly interesting. You don’t want the audience to be aware of that [effort]. But for me, I was like, ‘I know everyone responds differently to a crisis, but why is she responding like this? What happened? Who was she before this? Who was she before she had a kid, before she got married, before she went to college? I was trying to reverse engineer the story, because I’m far more interested in how this character is responding than how I, Rose, would respond.
And then we did a lot of prep as well. We spoke to mothers who have kids with special needs, and that was fascinating — and very moving, obviously, just seeing the variety of experiences they’d had, what that was like and how it played out for them, the toll on them personally, on their marriages, on their relationships with their other children. I spoke to a therapist. [Laughs.] She was pretty cagey! She didn’t give much away. And I did breath work with the woman in the film who’s actually doing the breath work. I went over to her place and did that psychotropic breath work, I think it’s called. So, we delved in.
DEADLINE: Am I right to think that Mary’s in the film?
BYRNE: Yeah, she plays Dr. Spring.
DEADLINE: Should we read anything into that?
BYRNE: [Laughs.] I’ll leave that to the audience. She’s very clever with her casting. It’s also clever that Conan O’Brien plays Linda’s therapist. This is a man that’s so beloved here in the America, who listened to people talk about themselves for 30 years in a chair and was warm and gregarious and funny and indulgent. And then, in this film, he has nothing but contempt for this woman. He couldn’t care less. He doesn’t want to talk to her.
We saw the story with Conan, with the therapist, as, really, kind of the love story of the film. Obviously, it’s never transgressive, but it’s the bitter end of this love story. And he’s her last guardrail, really, because she has nobody else reflecting back her behavior — she’s chosen to cut everybody out, which is what people do in times of trauma. They just isolate and isolate and isolate, because they cannot deal with any sort of reality reflected back to them by somebody who really knows them. Having seen people in my own life go through that, [I know] how that can end.
DEADLINE: I was very interested in your relationship with Danielle’s character.
BYRNE: Oh, isn’t she brilliant? I’ve had so many people go to me, “Was she real?” [Laughs] People thought the baby wasn’t real. People thought A$AP. Rocky wasn’t real. It’s so funny. Because it’s so tense. That character is having a kind of psychotic break, really. And Danielle was brilliant. But there’s also great humor in those scenes, I think, too, because Linda is so disassociated and doing such a bad job.
DEADLINE: I also love the reveal of your husband…
BYRNE: Oh, yeah. Isn’t that great? It’s great. Christian Slater, who’s playing my husband, he’s always on the phone, so he’s this disembodied voice for, like, 90% of the movie. But he’s got such an iconic voice, Christian. You’re like, “I know that person. Who is it?” Again, that’s just a nod to Mary’s great intuition with casting and knowing just the quality somebody will bring and what she wants.
DEADLINE: And also, A$AP Rocky’s playing against type…
BYRNE: Isn’t he wonderful? He has such outrageous charisma. That’s a quality you have or you don’t. The camera comes on him, and you cannot take your eyes off him. He has such warmth, and Linda is so spiky, like a porcupine. He lets the audience breathe a little bit because he’s so relaxed. He has this mischievous quality about him. And he was just a delight. He worked so hard. This wasn’t his comfort zone. He’s used to being in his world, with all the various things he does, and being in charge. He really trusted Mary and me. We would run lines constantly, which I love.
DEADLINE: Did Mary show you anything? I mean, some directors have a mood book, or they make their actors watch other movies for homework.
BYRNE: That’s a good question. Yeah. No one’s asked me that before. She didn’t. No, she didn’t. She was just determined to work on the material. She comes from an acting background. She went to NYU for acting. She was an actress herself, and so she’s really driven by performance. Really, really driven by performance.
Many people told her to make this character more likable. Like, “Maybe she could do this,” or “Maybe at the end she could do that,” or “Maybe I think you should take scene out.” And she constantly held on, saying, “No, this is the character, this is the person who’s going to fill the frame, these are the choices she’s making, and this is the end of the movie.” It’s still a risk to put a middle-aged, challenging, compromising woman at the center of a film. And also, to have her at the end… I think the film ends with hope. I don’t want to ruin it, but it’s not by any means a huge resolve. And that’s hard for people to deal with, particularly with women, it’s just inherent. There’s just a far more critical eye on how they behave.
DEADLINE: I’m so glad your performance is getting acknowledgement, because Julia Roberts’ work in After the Hunt seemed to go unnoticed. Whatever you may think of the film, it’s a terrific performance — but it’s also very unlikeable character.
BYRNE: Thank you. It is. It’s fascinating. This year, there’s been some wonderful, complex, incredible performances out there, in films about women who are “unlikable”. But Mary’s really asking us to sit with a situation that’s uncomfortable, and that’s the point. And I challenge anyone to not walk away from the film reeling with a feeling. It truly is an experience watching this movie, and that’s just been brilliant to be a part of.
DEADLINE: Comparisons have been made with Gena Rowlands, notably A Woman Under the Influence. Is that the kind of actress you think of when you think of great acting?
BYRNE: Oh, of course. She’s a titan. We stand on her shoulders. There’s a tradition in film of the woman breaking down, whether it’s Gena Rowlands or Carrie Snodgrass in Diary of a Mad Housewife. Gena Rowlands is extraordinary — she’s playing a woman being pushed to her limit and being pushed over the edge. It was groundbreaking. It came at a time when you didn’t see that kind of stuff. It’s so raw, what she does.
I think, where there are parallels with my character is that sense of isolation. There’s also a sense of expectation around what a housewife is or will be, or what a woman who’s struggling with a crisis should look like and how they should be able to manage it. And what’s also exciting about Legs is that it’s seen through a female lens, and that’s a far rarer thing to see. More and more, we’re seeing that, and I love it.
DEADLINE: in terms of your roles, you have very good taste. There’s nothing bland about your CV.
BYRNE: A lot of comedy, a lot of jokes. A lot of jokes.
DEADLINE: There’s comedy, serious drama, horror, all sorts. Why did you want to become an actor?
BYRNE: Well, I started really young. I started when I was taking little acting classes or whatever at the local theater group when I was eight. And then I got a job when I was 13 because a casting agent came to this class I was doing looking for kids. I just loved it.
I was the youngest of four kids. I grew up in a neighborhood called Balmain and a bunch of us would go over to ATYP, the Australian Theater for Young People. I was a shy kid, but I was also a ham, being the youngest, I think. My parents are not in the business, so I was like, ‘How do you make this a career?’ And so, it was just a case of slowly piecing it together and getting more and more work.
I went to university in Australia, but never ultimately finished, and I continued to go and audition in America, and eventually I started to get work over there. It’s so much more interesting trying to be somebody else. It’s far harder to be yourself. Isn’t that the great Sylvia Plath quote? [“It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”] It’s so much more fun to do that, to observe. And for me, doing comedy was a really big release, in terms of being able to access different parts of what I wanted to do. I put comedic performances on a pedestal. That’s something I still strive to do.
DEADLINE: You carried on working from a very young age, which is quite unusual because many young actors often have a sort of crisis and give it up or take a break. But you seem to have been very consistent about wanting to act.
BYRNE: [Laughs] Oh, I have had some crises! We can talk about those as well. Oh no, there were plenty of crises, plenty of times driving around LA, trying to get auditions and working various jobs. Oh God, no, there was plenty of that going on. This business is littered with every type of talent, people who were discarded or whose careers never found footing, all those things. And yet, the more you do, the further you have to fall. I’d never take it for granted. Obviously, once you have kids and a family, your priorities hugely shift.
But there’s nothing guaranteed in this business, I’m always wildly aware of that. And to get this role in Mary’s movie, this was extraordinary. This has stretched me, changed me. It demanded every aspect of performance from me and in a way that I hadn’t been asked before. I’ve had really rich roles on television as well. But to do it in the format of a movie was really special, and something really unique. These movies are very hard to get made. It took her eight years for her to give me this opportunity. And I’ve said this before, but I just didn’t want to mess it up. I did not want to mess up what was being asked of me.
DEADLINE: A lot of people say that comedy is harder.
BYRNE: And I’ve said this too. I was chatting with Seth Rogen about that, and he put it in a way that I thought was quite succinct: We can all collectively agree on what is sad, obviously, but we can’t really collectively agree on what is funny. So, it’s a different challenge in that sense. Obviously, I think drama’s very hard too, but there is something about that subjectivity that’s really true. A performance like the one in Legs could so easily be one note, she could be just a hysterical kind of woman who’s hit fever pitch. And when I saw the finished film, I saw how tightly Mary had reined in some things I wanted to do, just to the brink, and then, at other times, let me go. Whenever I wanted to push the humor, I gave her a range of options. Just the way she carved through all that to create this character, and this performance, was really just so compelling and extraordinary. When I saw it, I was like, “Oh my God, what has she done? Wow, this is amazing.”
DEADLINE: Do you have any gems that you’d like people to check out from your back catalog? Like, your own Criterion Closet…
BYRNE: [Laughs.] The Criterion Closet of Rose Byrne! I’m trying to think… You know what’s been lovely is people discovering the movie Spy. It’s such a wonderful comedy with Melissa McCarthy and Jason Statham and myself and Jude Law. It’s so funny. And Melissa is so funny in this movie. And it actually did pretty well, but it’s just not one of those comedies that’s as known as Bridesmaids. Paul Feig directed it. [Pauses] I also did a film with Snoop Dogg called The Tenants. That was pretty fun.
DEADLINE: So, should people watch these movies to chill out after watching If I Had Legs I’d Kick You?
BYRNE: Yes. That’s a great way to sell it. They should. They should absolutely watch it to decompress, yeah. Particularly Spy. That’s the perfect film to decompress with!
English (US) ·