The misfortunes endured by Linda, the frayed nerve portrayed by Rose Byrne in last year’s unhinged comic drama “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” include but are not limited to: a mysteriously ill child, a surly absentee husband, a malevolent hamster and a cosmic black hole in her bedroom ceiling. Even watching the film feels harrowing, a sort of two-hour panic attack by proxy.
So you can understand why Byrne sought out a project in a lighter register this spring, even as “If I Had Legs” continues to earn her some of the biggest accolades of her career, including a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination.
While many of her fellow Oscar nominees lean into the private screenings and ritual glad-handing of Hollywood’s peak campaign season, she’ll be at home in New York rehearsing for her role in a Broadway revival of a rarely seen 1925 Noël Coward play called “Fallen Angels” alongside Kelli O’Hara, Tracee Chimo and Mark Consuelos at the Roundabout Theater Company. Performances, at the Todd Haimes Theater, are scheduled to begin March 27 and run through early June.
“The delight of trying to bring a farcical comedy to the stage felt like such an opportunity and a lovely antidote creatively, and that’s something I’ve really been craving,” said Byrne, who last performed onstage six years ago, in “Medea.”
Comedy, as fans who are familiar with her three-decade career know, is hardly foreign territory. Her turns in box-office hits like “Bridesmaids,” “Neighbors” and “Get Him to the Greek” helped to establish the Australian actress as a low-key force in films in which her symmetrical, almost doll-like beauty proved a compelling stealth vehicle for cracked and giddily profane humor.
Arriving at the Midtown Manhattan headquarters of the production company A24 on a frigid February morning, Byrne, who lives in Brooklyn with her longtime partner, Bobby Cannavale, and their two young sons, apologized in advance for her jet lag. She had just returned from a restorative trip home to Sydney, where it is currently midsummer.
“I do still feel the magic with this city, but it is so grim right now,” Byrne acknowledged, gesturing to several feet of grubby, potato-colored snow pressed against the windows. We were in a large white space one could mistake for any upscale open-plan office, were it not for the life-size cardboard cutout of the actor Dwayne Johnson wearing little more than body oil and a smattering of film posters, including one featuring an almost spiritual close-up of Byrne’s anguished face in “If I Had Legs.”
Conan O’Brien, who plays her combative therapist in the movie, has watched her attempts to deflect the attention that came with it. “Rose is a beloved, established actress and yet she is completely allergic to praise,” he said in an email. “Throughout the run of ‘Legs’ she has been getting so much deserved acclaim, but I can tell that it makes her squirm. I can relate because to the Irish, a compliment is a prelude to disaster.”
Since the film’s release, her portrayal of a character she described as “a woman completely internally collapsing and unraveling” has brought a pile of new scripts to her door, though many of them seem to be pitching more of the same.
“That’s why it feels so fresh to do this play and be in New York,” Byrne, 46, said. “It’s such a different skill being onstage. It’s so rigorous, particularly high comedy. There’s a different sort of energy required. It’s cardio and it is” — she clapped rhythmically, like a conductor or a dance instructor — “pace-pace-pace-pace-pace-pace.”
“Fallen Angels” is a semi-lost early work by Coward (there hasn’t been a Broadway production of it since 1956) about two married women who find, to their dizzy panic and delight, that a man they were once both romantically involved with will be in town while their husbands are away on a golf trip. Its release provoked censors on both sides of the Atlantic, who objected to the play’s risqué banter and frank female sexuality.
The social mores of a century ago mostly no longer apply, but the appeal of the piece felt timeless to Scott Ellis, the Roundabout’s interim artistic director. He already knew and admired Byrne, having helmed the 2014 revival of “You Can’t Take It With You” in which she made her Broadway debut opposite James Earl Jones.
“It’s champagne. It’s just bubbly, you know?” Ellis said of the play in a telephone interview. “Coward wrote it with a French farce in mind. And it’s a work of his that no one knows, so you’re not coming in with any preconceived ideas.” After bringing in Byrne and O’Hara to do a reading of the work at a fund-raiser gala about two years ago, he realized that something clicked in the room.
So did Byrne. “It is one of the lesser-known Cowards, and I wasn’t familiar with it,” she said. “But all the great plays, it’s when you start to read them in person that you realize how nuanced and beautifully formed they are. And once we got up on our feet and actually performed it, it just revealed itself to me in the way that brilliant plays do.”
The job will also be somewhat of a homecoming for Byrne, who was 8 when she started taking classes at the Australian Theater for Young People. That’s where a casting agent took notice and put her in line for screen roles, including a six-month stint on a nighttime soap opera at age 15 that Byrne called “the most incredible boot-camp training in acting for the camera.” (Soaps as a career springboard are kind of an Antipodean tradition; other members of that fellowship include Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts, Chris Hemsworth and Margot Robbie.)
At 18, Byrne landed a spot in the summer program for Atlantic Theater Company in New York, and spent three heady months living in an N.Y.U. dorm and studying the Practical Aesthetics technique. Following an attempt at university back home, she got involved in the Sydney Theater Company under Benedict Andrews, a director known for, among other things, putting Cate Blanchett in gender-neutral drag to play Shakespeare’s Richard II.
“I really cut my teeth with Benedict,” Byrne said. “He was very influenced by a lot of German theater and very experimental stuff, and I was a young kid. I hadn’t gone to the traditional Australian acting schools. I didn’t get into any of them! The theater to me felt out of my reach. So when I did actually get a play, it was a bigger deal to me than getting a TV or film job. I could not believe I’d snuck in.”
She did some Chekhov and an 18th-century French comedy there, then started booking more screen roles in the late 1990s, including a crime caper opposite a young Heath Ledger and the unconventional road-trip drama “The Goddess of 1967.” Her performance in that film as a sexually abused blind girl won her the Volpi Cup, the Venice Film Festival’s top acting prize, at age 20. “That was a shock,” she said. “My parents still have the cup.”
A string of Hollywood productions followed, including “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones” (in which she played a handmaiden to Natalie Portman’s exiled intergalactic queen); the camp swords-and-sandals epic “Troy” (as royal chattel to Brad Pitt’s aggressively blond warrior Achilles); and Sofia Coppola’s dreamy, anachronistic “Marie Antoinette” (again, as a consort to a queen, though this time with a little more substantive pizazz.)
A main role on the television legal drama “Damages” opposite Glenn Close, on which she appeared for five seasons and twice garnered nominations for both an Emmy and a Golden Globe, was, Byrne said, “very much a turning point.” And roles in films such as “Bridesmaids,” “Insidious” and “X-Men: First Class” proved she could pivot gracefully between comedy, horror and big-tent franchises. Though curiously, she has mostly evaded the kind of period costume dramas that tend to fall to non-American actors, particularly those who can do a decent plummy accent. “No, I know!” she said, mock offended. “And I love a corset.”
Byrne’s raw performance in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” marks another transformative moment in her career. In the film, which Jeannette Catsoulis, a critic for The New York Times, called “a howl of maternal desperation spiked with jagged humor,” Byrne’s Linda is a woman so on the verge of a nervous breakdown that you fear she may spin off the actual edge of the world. Running through it is a thread of metaphysical dread, glimpsed via aural and visual hallucinations that may or may not be manifestations of her mental state.
“I liked the idea of being like, ‘Here’s this person who we all know and love, let me reintroduce you to her,’” the movie’s writer and director, Mary Bronstein, said in a video interview, of casting Byrne. “You know that she can do this and that and that. Well, did you know she can do this, and she can do it better than anybody?”
Byrne is aware that Linda, with her free-form fury and anxiety, her late-night weed runs and questionable parenting choices, remains an outlier in an industry where, dishearteningly, it is still mostly men who reap the rewards of being outrageous onscreen. “It’s such a corny thing to say, but it does feel kind of radical,” she said of the awards recognition her performance has received. “It’s a little bit punk.”
Bronstein agreed. Their film, she said, “is everything that Hollywood tells us that it doesn’t want in a movie — a very-hard-to-empathize-with middle-aged woman where there’s no male gaze, there’s no sexuality, it’s just really dealing with a female experience.
“For it to make it to the Oscars is a feat that is not lost on me,” she continued before adding, “And another cast member is hosting the show! Which is wild.”
That would be O’Brien, who noted that if Byrne does win while he’s onstage, he will not be maintaining his professional host demeanor. “Forget it. Not happening,” he said. “I have been practicing back-flips and, with the help of my surgical team, I am ready to go should the occasion arise.”
O’Brien was one of several collaborators that Byrne, “totally out of my depth and inarticulate,” forgot to thank when she won the Golden Globe for best actress in a musical or comedy last month. “I was texting so many people later, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I forgot to say thank you to this person and that person,’” she said. “And Conan was like, ‘Shut up, it was great. No one wants to hear someone bang on for hours.’ He’s become an unofficial life coach. He’s lovely.”
Byrne’s speech that night, in which she seemed genuinely, charmingly flustered by the win, might be best remembered for whom she did single out — namely Cannavale, who wasn’t in the room, she noted while clutching her trophy, because “we’re getting a bearded dragon, and he went to a reptile expo in New Jersey.”
That moment proved a memorable and sweetly absurd sound bite in an evening of often canned sincerity. Unfortunately, it also accidentally cast Cannavale, an Emmy-winning actor who shares Byrne’s stage-to-screen versatility — he most recently appeared on Broadway in “Art,” and will soon star opposite Nicole Kidman in the Prime Video series “Scarpetta” — as some kind of fanatical lizard king.
“Never in my life will I announce something like that on a major awards show again,” Byrne said ruefully. “Everyone was thinking it’s for Bobby. It’s not! It’s for our children. The children.”
Next month, Cannavale will go with her to Los Angeles for the Oscars ceremony. After that they will return home to the boys and the bearded dragon, with or without a little gold man in Byrne’s carry-on. And then for the next 10 weeks, she will give herself over to the champagne fizz and pace-pace-pace of a lost-and-found Noël Coward, until she’s ready for whatever comes next.
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