NEW YORK — Rose Byrne likes the idea of walking on a tightrope. It’s a metaphor she brings up more than once when we discuss her bracing performance as an overextended mother caring for a severely ill child in the upcoming film “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.”
“Anything dealing with motherhood and shame around motherhood, whether it’s disappointment, failure — she’s got this line in the movie, ‘I wasn’t meant to do this’ — these are pretty radical things to say,” Byrne explains. “People aren’t comfortable with that. So performance-wise, that was the hardest part because it was like a tightrope, the tightrope of this woman.”
Over our iced beverages, an Arnold Palmer for her and a hibiscus iced tea for me, I ask her why that idea is so appealing to her, the notion of putting herself into roles where she has to teeter on the precipice of hysterical laughter and utter tragedy.
Byrne, who has a habit of clutching her long fingers to her face while she speaks, muses for a bit but ultimately comes back to her own favorite performances. The ones that are funny, unpredictable and spontaneous.
“A bit like life,” she says.
For Byrne, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” hitting theaters Oct. 10, is the ultimate example of this kind of balancing act. The challenge is paying off: Byrne, 46, earned rave reviews when the film debuted at Sundance with praise especially being heaped on her unvarnished, full-throttle work, perhaps her best ever. She later won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, that event’s highest acting honor.
“She turned herself inside out and upside down and every which way availed herself to me creatively in such an open, radical way that she deserves everything — all the trophies,” the movie’s director, Mary Bronstein, says in a video interview.
In the A24 release, Byrne plays Linda, a therapist in Montauk, N.Y., whose daughter has a severe eating disorder that requires a feeding tube. Linda not only has to mother her child but also serve as caretaker while her absent husband gets to play the role of fun parent via phone. Linda’s situation gets even more dire when water starts to pour through the ceiling of her home, forcing her and her daughter to move into a rundown motel. In a hilarious bit of irony, Linda is also dealing with a patient whose breakdown might be even worse than hers.
Bronstein makes the bold choice to leave Linda’s daughter almost completely off-screen, so the camera is trained on Byrne’s exhausted face for almost the entirety of a nearly two-hour running time. And Byrne does the delicate work of making you deeply empathize with Linda even as her choices make you cringe — choices like leaving her sleeping child alone in the room so she can flirt with a motel employee played by ASAP Rocky.
Bronstein needed an actor audiences immediately have a deep affection for to pull off her tricky tone. She knew she had picked the right person when people started to rave about how much they loved Byrne after Bronstein told them she was the star.
“[Rose] doesn’t like to hear it when I say it — it embarrasses her — but it’s true,” Bronstein says. “She’s beloved and she has worked for that. And that was also important for this because I’m asking the viewer to go places with this character that get quite dark, that get uncomfortable.”
Executive produced by Josh Safdie, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is relentless and anxiety-inducing. That’s not the vibe on a Tuesday afternoon when I meet Byrne in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., near where she lives with her partner, actor Bobby Cannavale, with whom she has two children. The original coffee shop Byrne suggested didn’t have any available tables, so she quickly pivots, leading me to a not-quite-as-trendy but less busy place a couple of blocks away, where a car alarm goes off as we speak. (The blaring sound is a good emulation of the intensity of the movie, but Byrne’s real-life calm persists.)
It’s an unusually hot September day and Byrne is dressed in a blue-and-white sundress with pink sandals. Though she’s been the star of everything from the “Insidious” movies to “X-Men: First Class,” she blends in with other chic Brooklynites. Heads don’t turn our way.
Byrne has played other mothers who make questionable decisions before, but “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” feels like a turning point for her. Though she’s always been versatile, comedy has become her calling card over the last 15 or so years, with deft turns in “Bridesmaids” as Kristen Wiig’s social-climbing nemesis and in the “Neighbors” movies opposite Seth Rogen, who also co-stars with her in the Apple TV+ show “Platonic.”
When Byrne got Bronstein’s script, she wasn’t looking at it as a way to alter the course of her career. The material just read “like fire,” she recalls, reflecting on her character’s deep crisis. “She can’t see anything, she can’t hear anything; she’s so underwater with her trauma and her anxiety.”
Byrne has never really thought about her career choices particularly strategically. She started working at 12 years old in the film “Dallas Doll” after studying at the Australian Theatre for Young People with other kids in her neighborhood.
“I was cast in a movie through my drama program and it was like an accidental series of events,” she says. “I just loved it. It was a natural fit. I think it’s good for any child, to be honest, for confidence. I was on the shier side.” (Although she is encouraging of young performers, she notes that as a “little actress in Sydney,” she was spared the pressure put on some other child actors.)
Early in her professional career, Byrne just wanted to work and wasn’t particularly discerning about the roles she would take, unlike some of her peers.
“I worked with Heath Ledger when we were really young and it was amazing because he would be offered these network TV shows and they were really after him and he was this gorgeous heartthrob who could act and, obviously it ended so tragically, but he made these decisions really early about what he wanted to do and what he didn’t want to do,” she remembers. “And that was not me. I didn’t have that until later in my years.”
Despite early parts in films like “Troy” and Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” Byrne first broke out in America opposite Glenn Close in the TV drama “Damages,” which ran from 2007 to 2012. It was, in her words, a lot of “black coats and high heels.” As that was ending, she was craving another path. She calls it having “itchy feet.”
Director Nicholas Stoller, whom she now works with on “Platonic,” changed her life, casting her as a cheeky pop star in “Get Him to the Greek.” Now she’s almost primarily known for her comedic work, even after her fierce turn as Gloria Steinem on the FX series “Mrs. America” and the fact that she played Medea at the Brooklyn Academy of Music opposite Cannavale.
Bronstein wanted to use Byrne’s innate ability to find comic moments in unlikely places in order to capture the mordantly humorous beats in the script. There’s a specific pointedness to the fact that Linda, who bares her soul to a colleague played by Conan O’Brien, is charged with managing other peoples’ issues as a mental health professional.
“I needed somebody that understands, intuitively, humor and comedy in a way that you cannot teach anybody, you cannot direct out of anybody if you try,” Bronstein says. “It also had to be somebody that has the chops of a serious technical actor. That is a very short list.”
Byrne admits the prospect of embarking on “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” was intimidating.
“I didn’t want to f— it up,” she says, laughing. “I’m as insecure as the next actress and I was like, good Lord, this is an opportunity.”
For more than a month before cameras rolled on the 27-day shoot — filmed in Montauk and New York City with a waiver during the 2023 actors’ strike — Byrne would go over to Bronstein’s Chelsea apartment multiple times a week. They would analyze the script and share anecdotes from their own experiences as mothers. Bronstein, who says the film is “emotionally autobiographical,” gave Byrne journals she wouldn’t even let her husband read. (Bronstein’s husband, Ronald, is a producer on the film.)
Together, Bronstein and Byrne spoke to women who have children with special needs. They did breath work. Byrne was obsessed with the idea of knowing who Linda was prior to the spiral we see on screen, evidence of which is present in her tattoos and her hair’s undercut, remnants of a wilder youth curtailed by parenting.
“You have to confront your own feelings about motherhood, my own feelings about becoming a parent and Linda’s dreadful choices,” she says, laughing, her wry tone slipping in as it often does. “I think the character’s so disassociated. What does it take for someone to get to that point?”
Byrne rode high on adrenaline throughout filming.
“It was a little kind of fever dream,” she says. “A little bit like the movie itself.”
Byrne likened the experience to doing a play, but, unlike in theater, in this case she had a 35-millimeter camera two inches from her face. Bronstein wanted every pore on Byrne’s face to be exposed.
“She’s the type of actor who I can say, ‘What’s in my head is one tear rolling down,’ and she can give it to me,” Bronstein says. “She’s an actor on that level, but at the same time she also can be so raw and lost inside of the character.”
Byrne’s own children, 7 and 9, helped her snap out of the whirlpool of emotion that was making “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.”
“They come home,” she says. “They don’t care if I have a hard day.”
Shortly after we speak, Byrne will head to Los Angeles to do more promotion for “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” trying to put everything she can behind Bronstein and the project. She knows it’s hard to get people out to movie theaters, especially for a film that asks these kinds of thorny questions.
“What do people go to the cinema to see?” she says. “When do I go to the cinema other than to see ‘The Bad Guys 2’?” (She means no disrespect: “Great movie, by the way,” she adds, noting she loves the books.)
But beyond the specter of an awards season run, she’s already finished an upcoming limited series, “The Good Daughter,” opposite “The White Lotus” breakout Meghann Fahy and Brendan Gleeson, whom she first worked with when she was 23 on “Troy.” In the spring, she’ll return to Broadway for “Fallen Angels,” a 1925 Noël Coward play, which was scandalous at the time for its depiction of women discussing premarital sex and affairs. That’s another tightrope, she says.
She has begun to choose her parts more carefully.
“Having children is such a line in the sand, before and after,” she says. “Immediately, your time is precious. Immediately, you have a whole different priority.”
In her downtime, she tries to think about what else, other than acting, she loved to do as a kid.
“What a great way to reset,” she says. “I go, ‘What did I enjoy? What do I like to do?’ It’s something I’ve been trying to tap into a little bit as I get older.”
I ask what she landed on. She lowers her voice, ready to hit a punchline: “Still working on it.”
It’s a crack that makes me think of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” itself — a woman’s ongoing quest to identify herself. You sense Byrne is eager to know.
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