Years ago, the filmmaker Mary Bronstein’s daughter, who was seven at the time, became extremely ill. Bronstein brought her to San Diego for treatment, leaving her husband home in New York. “We had to live as roommates in this really shitty hotel,” Bronstein recalled. “There was nowhere to go. I felt very trapped.” Every night, after her daughter went to sleep at eight o’clock, Bronstein would hole up in the bathroom with food and a cheap bottle of wine, working through what she now calls an existential crisis. It wasn’t just the stress and the isolation—she also dreaded what awaited her on the other side, once her daughter got better and Bronstein returned to her previously scheduled life. “What am I? Who am I? What am I doing?” she would ask herself. She was there for eight months.
Eventually, her daughter did get better, and Bronstein channelled the experience into a screenplay with the archly despondent title “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” Her first feature, the mumblecore comedy “Yeast” (2008), starred Bronstein and Greta Gerwig as twentysomething friends who go on a camping trip and meet a pair of guys played by Josh and Benny Safdie. “If I Had Legs” is about a very different stage of life. The main character, Linda, is a therapist on Long Island fighting through a Job-like litany of misfortunes. Her daughter is underweight and on a feeding tube. Her husband is off captaining a ship. Water bursts through her ceiling and floods her apartment, so she and the child move into a dingy motel. She keeps getting berated by a parking attendant at her daughter’s recovery center; one of her patients disappears during a therapy session and leaves Linda with a crying baby. “Time is a series of things to get through,” Linda laments. “Each goal is a cliff. There’s nothing at the end of it, but then it comes and there’s just another cliff.”
Bronstein wrote the screenplay without an actress in mind, only a blank face—but she knew that she’d want to shoot that face in unrelenting closeup, to heighten the feeling of claustrophobia. “I realized, by the time I was getting to the end of it, Wow, I’m writing a pretty big check that someone’s going to have to cash,” Bronstein told me. “Who is this person going to be?” She was considering the Australian actress Rose Byrne when she watched the pilot of “Physical,” the Apple TV+ show on which Byrne plays a self-loathing Reagan-era housewife with bulimia who finds empowerment through aerobics. Early on, we see her hiding in her bathroom during the dregs of a houseparty, staring with disgust at her own lovely, languid face. “Look at you,” she tells herself, in voice-over. “I mean, seriously. Do you really think you’re pulling this whole thing off? The disco-sex-kitten look, at your age?” Then she notices a zit. Bronstein was sold. “I just knew,” Bronstein told me. “It’s her. And it can’t be anyone else.”
Once Byrne signed on to “If I Had Legs,” the two women met regularly at Bronstein’s apartment, in Chelsea, after they’d dropped their kids off at school. They would talk through the script page by page at the kitchen table, “then we’d go back again, start from the beginning, stopping and having very deep, personal conversations about motherhood, about womanhood, about our childhoods,” Bronstein recalled. Byrne wanted to know who Linda had been before this avalanche of crises, before motherhood scrambled her life. They decided that Linda had been contrary and wild in her youth; she hadn’t yet realized that motherhood would be the most challenging thing she could possibly inflict on her personality.
At one point, Bronstein showed Byrne the journals that she’d kept during her daughter’s illness, which she hadn’t even shown to her husband or her therapist. The scrawled record-keeping of doses and calories and doctor’s appointments cracked open the character’s plight. “Something about seeing her handwriting and the written word just broke my heart,” Byrne told me recently. “It immediately plunged me into the amount of anxiety Mary would have had in that situation—and any parent would have. It weirdly translated, just from these simple journals about the schedule. I completely got it.”
I met Byrne at a café in Carroll Gardens, close to where she lives with her longtime partner, the actor Bobby Cannavale, and their two sons, Rocco and Rafa. Byrne, who is forty-six, wore a loose pin-striped oxford shirt over an earth-toned blouse, plus chunky Mr. Boho sunglasses, which she had recently lost and then rediscovered in a jacket pocket. (“It’s like when you find five dollars!”) She removed them, revealing eyes that slope slightly downward at the outer ends, giving her face a sleepy quality, and ordered an herbal tea.
In “If I Had Legs,” released by A24 this weekend, Byrne’s pellucid face is under almost hostile scrutiny—during filming, the camera often hovered so close that she could hear it whirring, recording every pore and crease. In one scene, we see her through the rearview mirror of a car, as her daughter’s querulous voice emanates from the back seat, and Byrne communicates her agony with a recurring twitch of the eye. Her hair is stringy, with an undercut in the back—a dated two-thousands style that Byrne chose to show that Linda was “stuck.”
The film premièred at Sundance, in January, and then played at the Berlin International Film Festival, where Byrne won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance. If it’s getting her early Oscar buzz, that’s not just because of the beautiful-actress-deglammed factor—see: Charlize Theron in “Monster”—it’s a confirmation of Byrne’s uncommon range and adventurousness. Since she broke out, around the time that that undercut was trendy, she’s done horror (“Insidious”), historical epic (“Troy”), sci-fi (“Sunshine”), legal drama (“Damages”), comic-book fare (the X-Men franchise), prestige miniseries (“Mrs. America,” as Gloria Steinem), and a musical (“Annie”), and she’s become a surprising staple in comedies, including “Get Him to the Greek,” “Spy,” “Neighbors,” and “Bridesmaids,” in which she plays the immaculate foil to Kristen Wiig’s basket case.
In the Apple TV+ sitcom “Platonic,” now in its second season, Byrne plays Sylvia, a stay-at-home mom who reconnects with an old hipster friend, Will (Seth Rogen). The series tracks Sylvia’s attempts to find fulfillment beyond her veneer of domestic contentment, whether by starting her own event business or getting goofy-drunk with Will. But Byrne’s funniest moments come from seeing Sylvia’s composure implode under pressure. In one recent episode, she erupts with frustration at her husband (Luke Macfarlane), who has quit his job as a lawyer in order to write detective novels. “You know what?” she tells him, in a tight-mouthed rant. “Since you’re free today, maybe you could drop the kids off at school and you could take Simon to the orthodontist, and then, after you do pickup, maybe you could take Frances to her SAT class, Simon to his bass lesson, and Maeve to Tae Kwon Do.” Nicholas Stoller, who created the show with his wife, Francesca Delbanco, told me, “It’s sad, but it’s also kind of funny. I think, for a purely dramatic actress, that speech could be a bummer, but with a purely comedic actress you wouldn’t necessarily believe it. She just plays it very real.”
Between “Platonic” and “If I Had Legs,” you could say that Byrne has created a diptych of stressed-out moms. “Platonic” is Apatovian comedy, while “If I Had Legs” imagines motherhood as a kind of horror movie, in which the bogeyman isn’t a killer with a chainsaw but, rather, the pressures of middle adulthood. (Its logline could be “ ‘Uncut Gems’ for Moms!”—which makes sense once you realize that Bronstein’s husband, Ronald Bronstein, wrote the screenplay for “Uncut Gems” with the Safdie brothers, and that he and Josh Safdie are producers of “If I Had Legs.”) But even my suggestion that there was a thematic through line gave Byrne pause. “People will quickly offer you the last thing you did, if they like how you did it, and you get every stressed-out mom under the sun,” she said. “That’s pretty boring. I’d like to play a put-together C.E.O.!”
Byrne’s own mother, by her description, raised four children without breaking a bead of sweat. “She had the most even-keeled disposition of absolute calm,” Byrne told me. This was in Balmain, a suburb of Sydney, where her mother was an administrator at a primary school that prioritized Aboriginal children. Her father was a statistician who worked with the cinema chain Village Roadshow; Rose, the youngest child, would help him by polling neighborhood shoppers about their moviegoing habits. (Her father is also an avid horse bettor who once won a superfecta, which is when you correctly predict the order of the first four finishers.)
Byrne was eight when she started acting, at Australian Theatre for Young People. At twelve, she booked her first movie role, in “Dallas Doll” (1994), starring Sandra Bernhard as a bisexual golf pro who seduces each member of an Australian family—save for the teen daughter, played by Byrne. Not long after, Byrne landed on the soap opera “Echo Point,” as a “wide-eyed teen-ager who had a shady past,” she recalled. The show sent her to malls to meet fans, fashioning her into a teenybopper starlet. Her parents encouraged her acting career (in a low-key, “very Australian way”), while keeping her focussed on school. At eighteen, she filmed “Two Hands,” an Aussie crime comedy, opposite Heath Ledger. She described him as “a generous spirit, kind of shy behind the eyes.” More than that, she was struck by his sense of actorly purpose, which she lacked. “I remember him turning down various soapy TV shows and holding out,” she said. “That’s a hard thing to do when you’re really young.”
Byrne, by contrast, was taking whatever jobs came her way. Even in Australia, the path to Hollywood was far from obscure in the nineties, paved by the likes of Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, Guy Pearce, and Toni Collette. After getting turned down by drama schools, Byrne enrolled at the University of Sydney, where she took classes in gender studies—reading Foucault planted the idea that “gender is a myth,” she said—but dropped out when the gigs kept coming. In “Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones,” which was shot in Australia, she played Natalie Portman’s handmaiden, delivering such eloquent lines as “It’s not me, milady. I worry about you.”
By 2004, she had a pair of substantial ingénue roles in Hollywood productions: the romantic thriller “Wicker Park,” opposite Josh Hartnett, and the swords-and-sandals extravaganza “Troy,” in which she played Briseis, a captured priestess who is gifted to Brad Pitt’s Achilles. Peter O’Toole, who played King Priam, surprised her by remarking that hers was the best character in the film—and amused her with his dry British wit. “I remember him climbing some stairs, and he was smoking and coughing,” Byrne said. “The A.D. was, like, ‘Peter, maybe you should give up the smokes.’ And he said, ‘Maybe I should give up the stairs.’ ” (Her impersonation was dead-on.)
By then, Byrne had become more intentional about her acting—she spent a summer studying with the Atlantic Theatre Company, in Manhattan—but didn’t consider herself funny until she was cast in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” (2006), as the dilettantish Duchess of Polignac. Coppola encouraged her to improvise, and she found that she had a flair for comedic invention. In one scene, bedecked in feathers and frippery, she gossips with Kirsten Dunst’s Marie Antoinette in an opera box: “Look how fat the Marquis’s gotten. I hope he doesn’t break the chair!” “That’s when I started knocking on the door of being able to do more comedy,” Byrne said. “I feel like comedy is harder. We can all collectively agree when something is sad, but when something is funny it’s a far more subjective thing.”
Her comedic pivot would have to wait, though. After a stint living in London, she moved to New York to co-star with Glenn Close in “Damages,” the FX legal drama, which débuted in 2007 and ran for five seasons. Byrne played a dewy but sharp junior associate drawn into Close’s power-hungry machinations. Like Elisabeth Moss in “Mad Men,” which arrived on cable the same year, Byrne played an acolyte who grew from diffident to dominant over the course of the show’s run. Her performance bolstered her reputation as a dramatic force and earned her two Emmy nominations.
It wasn’t until Stoller was casting “Get Him to the Greek” (2010), starring Russell Brand as the louche rocker Aldous Snow, that Byrne finally got to unleash her inner buffoon. She had made a conscious decision to pursue comedic roles, but Stoller was perplexed when she auditioned for the part of Jackie Q, Aldous’s wild-child pop-star girlfriend. “I knew Rose’s work from ‘Damages’ and ‘Sunshine,’ ” Stoller explained. “I saw that she was going to come in to read, and my initial thought was, Why is Rose Byrne reading for this? She’s so dramatic. Then she came in, and she just destroyed. It was just one of the funniest auditions I’ve ever seen.” (The audition tape is preserved online.) On set, Stoller said, Byrne was an “improv machine,” particularly during her “flirtatious conversations with the since fallen and disreputable Russell Brand.”
Soon enough, she was riding a wave of twenty-tens big-screen comedy, including “Bridesmaids” (2011), which may have had the best female comedic ensemble since “All About Eve.” (She reteamed with her co-star Melissa McCarthy in “Spy,” playing a haughty villainess.) In 2014, Stoller directed her again, in “Neighbors,” about a war between a yuppie couple with a baby and a frat house next door. Playing Seth Rogen’s wife might have landed her in Katherine Heigl territory, but, Stoller recalled, “Her main note on that movie, which was correct, was ‘I don’t want to be the nag.’ She was, like, ‘If I’m married to Seth, I’m his partner in crime.’ ” In one indelible scene, her lactating breasts get so backed up that her husband is forced to milk her—the kind of gross-out body humor that is usually applied to dicks and butts, not the sainted maternal form. (Stoller said that Byrne was iffy on the scene, until he assured her that this had actually happened to the wife of one of the screenwriters.)
Byrne’s chemistry with Rogen was so good that Stoller reassembled them for “Platonic.” “She has an amazing ability to play beta,” Stoller explained. “She’ll play low status, but you can see in her eyes she desperately wishes she was high status.” The press was delighted, and a little baffled, that such a genteel-looking leading lady seemed to possess the soul of Jonah Hill. Vanity Fair, in 2018, called her a “Comic Superstar Flying Surprisingly Under the Radar,” impressed that, after “Damages,” she had sidestepped the “obvious echelon: that of the dramatic actress who regularly appears in grim Oscar bait and moody indie-house fare.”
If you’re feeling ungenerous, you might call “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” grim Oscar bait and moody indie-house fare. But, after a decade and a half of comedic roles, it feels like more of a counterintuitive move for Byrne than an inevitable one. At times, it sinks into abject despair. At one point, Linda is talking to her own therapist (played, in a truly surprising bit of genre shock, by Conan O’Brien), who treats her with chilly reserve. “Just tell me what to do,” she pleads, sobbing and curling up on his couch. “I just want someone to tell me what to do.”
“When we shot that scene, it was so emotionally deep,” Bronstein told me. “Later, Rose came up to me and was, like, ‘You know, I feel like I didn’t nail that.’ I was, like, ‘Are you crazy? You did nail it. I would never move on if you didn’t.’ What I realized was that it wasn’t that she thought that she didn’t do a good job at acting—it’s that she was still in that feeling that she had gotten into. She was feeling bad as a person and wasn’t able to shake it off.”
But Byrne was also attuned to the script’s undercurrent of pitch-dark humor. In a moment of weakness, Linda caves to her daughter’s incessant demands for a pet hamster. On the car ride home with the rodent, it claws at its box—Bronstein envisioned Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”—and, amid all the frenzy, Linda’s car gets rear-ended. She gets out to confront the other driver, the hamster escapes, and then . . . let’s just say that no hamsters were harmed in the making of this film.
Byrne, whose sons with Cannavale are now seven and nine, didn’t need to look far to research the compounding chaos of parenthood. “My house is very loud,” she told me. “Loud music, loud talking. When I can get quiet, I don’t listen to anything or watch anything. I just enjoy the solitude. Everyone’s always turning it up in my house, and I’m trying to turn it down.” When I brought up the hamster subplot in “If I Had Legs,” Byrne said, “I relate to that so deeply, being a parent. Oh, my gosh, the pitfalls you fall into! And you feel like such a failure, because you’re, like, Why can’t my child cope without X, Y, or Z? That’s not their fault. That’s my fault that they’re not resilient enough or not capable enough. And you immediately feel guilty, and it’s relentless.”
Rafa, one of Byrne’s sons, desperately wants a pet chameleon, but so far she has held firm. Instead, he’s been summoning his mother’s powers of improv. “He’s always asking me, ‘Hey, Mom, what if we went outside and there was a chameleon on the road, and you had to pick it up, and you had to give it to me? What would you do? Act it out! Act it out!’ ” Sitting across from me, she pantomimed her part: noticing the imaginary chameleon, picking it up, bringing it home. Strange that her son wants a chameleon when he already has one. ♦
